Volts

In this episode, David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council explains what the Chevron doctrine is, why the federal judiciary has traditionally been deferential to agencies’ regulatory reasoning, and the potential fallout in the very real chance that the current Supreme Court does away with the doctrine entirely. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Chairman Marisa Gillett of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) talks about her aim to reform the cozy regulatory environment enjoyed by the state’s big utilities, PURA’s new Equitable Modern Grid Initiative, and how ratepayers benefit from a shakeup of the status quo. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

As Chief of Energy, Sustainability, and Transportation at the Chancellor’s Office of California State University, Lindsey Rowell is charged with developing and implementing a plan to decarbonize every aspect of the school system, on all 23 campuses, with minimal use of offsets, by 2045. In this episode, she lays out what it will take to tackle this ambitious goal.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsContemplate, if you will, the California State University system. It is the largest public-university system in the country — by some accounts, the largest in the world — with more than a half-million students and some 55,000 faculty and staff, spread across a sprawling network of 23 campuses, from the top of the state to the bottom.What if I told you that it was your job to decarbonize that entire system — the buildings, the energy infrastructure, the transportation, the food, the construction materials, all of it — and you had just over 20 years to do it. Would you panic? Possibly short circuit? I'm pretty sure I would.As it happens, though, that is someone's job. Her name is Lindsey Rowell and she is the Chief of Energy, Sustainability, and Transportation at the Chancellor’s Office. She is on the hook for developing and implementing a plan to make the entire CSU system carbon neutral by 2045, with minimal use of offsets.You might think, to accomplish something so vast, she would have a team of dozens and a budget of billions. But this is a public university system, so of course she doesn't — instead it's duct tape, baling wire, and ingenuity. I had a great time talking with her about how to approach this unwieldy project. I think you will find her pragmatism and good humor refreshing.Every policy or regulation ultimately must be implemented by someone on the ground. This is what that looks like. All right then. Lindsey Rowell, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Lindsey RowellThank you so much for having me.David RobertsThis is really interesting, a lot of really interesting stuff here — I have a million questions to get through to ask you. But for starters, why don't you just tell us a little bit about the California State University system, which is different than the University of California system. Just getting that right up front.Lindsey RowellLet's get that out of the way. We are so different. Sure thing. So, California State University system, whether you realize it or not, you probably know it. We are the largest public university system in the country, by some metrics in the world, depending on who you ask on which day. So we have 23 campuses in the system spread across the state, from the very tippy top up in Humboldt and down to the very, very bottom of the state in San Diego. So we cover the entire space in California, and we've been educating students for about 150 years.So we have really old universities. We also have a few satellite locations that offer specialty coursework in nursing or business. And we educate about half a million students with about 55,000 faculty and staff. So we are a huge, hug organization, and the schools, probably people are most familiar with without realizing that they are CSU schools, are the California Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo — it's one that a lot of folks don't realize as part of our system. And we have three Cal Polys now, Humboldt is a Cal Poly and Cal Poly Pomona, and then, of course, San Diego State is one of our biggest.San Diego, Fullerton, and Long Beach are three of our biggest institutions in Southern California. Reason?David RobertsAre they all four-year undergrad colleges, or are there some vocational stuff or community colleges?Lindsey RowellSo no community colleges. The community college system is a separate but friendly sister organization, complete state organization. And the CSU is a four-year institution and graduate program. So we have masters, and we do have educational doctorate programs at a few of the campuses. So four-plus years.David RobertsSo 23 campuses?Lindsey RowellYes.David RobertsAcross the state. That's a lot. So tell us, then, what laws you are like — what are your mandated goals here? And are they mandated by the state of California, or does CSU have its own separate goals, or are these all just sort of state goals that you're implementing?Lindsey RowellSo, without getting too boring into the legislative dynamic of the CSU, we're sort of a quasi-state agency. So what that usually means is that most regulatory and legislative mandates are applicable to us where we're mentioned specifically. Part of that is due to the fact that we are called out specifically in the government code. So we are our own authority having jurisdiction, if you want a technical term, and then we are self support — a portion of our work is self support through student tuition and endowments and so forth. So what that means is the CSU often sets more ambitious goals.I cannot think of anything off the top o

In this episode, Will Toor of the Colorado Energy Office shares about the state’s ambitious climate agenda and the array of energy policies they’ve been passing under a Democratic political trifecta.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Washington, DC, is a slow-motion nightmare right now, but out in the states — at least the states that Democrats control — climate and clean energy policy is still happening. A few weeks ago, I covered the fantastic policies recently passed in my home state of Washington (see also my podcast with Washington legislator Joe Fitzgibbon). Today, we turn our gaze to Colorado.In 2018, Democrats gained a trifecta in the state — the governorship and both houses of the legislature — for the first time since 2013. They promptly got busy passing a vast array of clean energy policies: reform of electric utilities, support for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, new restrictions on oil and gas production. During this year’s legislative session, Gov. Jared Polis released a comprehensive roadmap to 90 percent statewide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the state legislature tackled clean buildings, industry, environmental justice, reform of state transportation agencies, reform of natural gas utilities, and on and on. To discuss this flurry of activity, I turned to a man who has been involved in Colorado politics since the previous century: Will Toor.Toor was mayor of Boulder from 1998 to 2004. From 2005 to 2012, he was Boulder County Commissioner. During all that time he was also board chair at the Denver Regional Council of Governments, where he led efforts on climate policy. He then became director of the transportation program at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, until 2019, when the newly elected Polis appointed him to run the Colorado Energy Office.Toor has had a hand in shaping Polis’s energy agenda from the beginning, and he has been closely involved in negotiating bills through the legislature. He helped walk me through Colorado's sector-by-sector approach to emissions, what the state has accomplished so far, and what might be next for it.Listen, enjoy, and if you appreciate work like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Volts.As a bonus, here’s a picture of Toor in 2003, as mayor of Boulder, hosting visiting scholar Noam Chomsky.Text transcript:David RobertsAll right, with no further ado, Will, welcome to Volts.Will ToorThank you.David RobertsSo I've been following states and climate policy for a long time, and it seemed like a few years ago, Colorado just kind of burst out of the gate at a full gallop and has been going really strong now for two sessions of the legislature. So maybe just by way of starting, tell us some about the political developments of Colorado over the last five years that put all the pieces in place that allowed this burst of activity.Will ToorYeah, really, I think what happened was that in 2018, we both elected a new governor, Jared Polis got elected governor on a platform of, among other things, 100% renewable electricity by 2040 and bold climate action, and we elected a Democratic Senate. We had had a Democratic House, but had not had a Democratic Senate since 2014. And so the combination of having a governor who was committed to climate action and a House and a Senate that were aligned and the fact that there was just kind of a pent-up demand for action on climate and clean energy really set the stage for a kind of monumental legislative session in 2019.So that year we had, depending exactly how you count it, something like 15 major bills on setting climate targets, modernizing our utility regulation to set our utilities on a pathway to at least 80% greenhouse gas reductions by 2030. A bunch of bills on electric vehicles, a bunch of bills on energy efficiency. We had a major oil and gas reform bill. One of the things that's a little unusual is that Colorado is a major oil and gas producer that is actually acting on climate and clean energy. And Senate Bill 181 completely rewrote the regulatory structure for oil and gas in Colorado.Then last year was a little bit quieter because of the pandemic that kind of shut down our legislative session partway through, although there was still lots of action at the Public Utilities Commission and the Air Quality Control Commission. But then this year has really shaped up to be another year where that kind of pent-up demand for action really came out at the legislature.David RobertsWell, I want to get into some of the specifics of the legislation, but just as a background political question, because I'm curious. Do you have a supermajority of Democrats or does Colorado — do you need a supermajority to sort of override Republican objections or sort of like, what's the disposition of the state Republican Party on all of this? Are they just irrelevantly sitting on the sidelines, or is there some engagement? What's the degree of Democratic domination, I guess, is what I'm as

The cement industry, responsible for roughly 8 percent of total global carbon emissions, is notoriously difficult to decarbonize. But a new startup, Sublime Systems, aims to manufacture zero-carbon cement that can easily be substituted for the traditional version. In this episode, Sublime CEO Leah Ellis talks through the company’s vision and process.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David Roberts:Of all the so-called “difficult to decarbonize” sectors, cement is among the most vexing. Making cement produces CO2 not merely through fuel combustion (in kilns that reach temperatures of up to 1400 C), but also through chemical processes that split CO2 off from other molecules. It is responsible for roughly 8 percent of total global carbon emissions.Most gestures at decarbonizing cement to date are fairly desultory — things like adding special additives or injecting a little CO2 when the cement is mixed into concrete. The only widely available method that could theoretically produce no- or low-carbon cement is post-combustion carbon capture and sequestration. And there are plenty of people who would question whether that's actually viable at all, much less widely available, given that it would roughly double operational costs for a cement plant.There are lots of startups out there attempting to solve this problem (as reported by Canary last month). Perhaps the most intriguing is Sublime Systems, a team that has developed something truly new and exciting: a system for manufacturing cement that requires no high heat (thus no combustion emissions) and uses inputs that contain no carbon (thus no chemical emissions). That makes the cement, at least potentially, not just low-carbon but zero-carbon. What’s more, the company says that, in form and performance, its product is a perfect drop-in substitute for traditional Portland cement, so it wouldn't even require any changes in the construction industry.A carbon-free drop-in cement substitute — at scale and at competitive cost — would be genuinely transformative. I contacted Sublime CEO Leah Ellis to talk about cement chemistry, the company’s process, and the plan for reaching megaton scale. This one was truly fascinating and educational for me; I think you will really like it.All right then. Leah Ellis, CEO of Sublime Systems, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Leah EllisThank you so much for having me.David RobertsI'm excited today to talk about concrete, everybody's favorite subject. But first I wanted to ask you, I know you and your partner originally were trained as and educated as battery scientists. I'm just curious how you ended up here. What drew you into this area, this problem?Leah EllisYeah, my co-founder is a professor at MIT, Yet-Ming Chiang, and he's in the material science department, and I'm a chemist by training. I like to think of chemistry as the central science that combines everything from physics to biology. All of the good stuff you can sort of spread into anything from a foundation in chemistry. So I did my PhD in lithium-ion batteries. I worked with a prolific inventor, Jeff Dahn, and after that I wanted to continue working with an inventor. As you may know, in academia, there are so many different styles of research.I mean, some people like microscopy and mechanisms, but I really like the creative aspect, like discovering something that could be useful or to solve problems. And not many academics and professors think through that lens. So I've always been very lucky to work with prolific inventors, both in my master's and my PhD. So for my postdoc, I sought to work with people who thought like that. So my co-founder, Yet-Ming Chiang at MIT, is a prolific inventor and also a serial entrepreneur. So Sublime is his 7th startup, and five of the previous six have been very successful.So I didn't join him with the aspiration of becoming a founder. I really knew nothing about entrepreneurship or anything like that, but I did want to invent, and I did love the way he approaches his work from a problem-solving standpoint. So that's what brought us together.David RobertsAnd he's the one who sort of flagged the problem of concrete to you.Leah EllisThat's right. So I was always aware that cement was one of the biggest levers for decarbonization. But I suppose after my PhD, where I'd worked with one of the most illustrious battery scientists, I sort of always had thought that my career would be in batteries. Like, I thought I'd painted myself into a corner. And so when I first met Yet-Ming Chiang, he asked a question that at first I thought was a trick question. He was, "Hey, Leah, like, you've got this Canadian grant to come work with me, and I know you're a battery scientist, but aren't you a little bit bored of batteries?"And I thought that was a trick question because he's the battery guru and I didn't want to insult him, but honestly, I sort of shared his opinion that, well, maybe this isn't his opinion, maybe it's just my

To create a clean-energy economy, the US badly needs an advanced mining industry that can provide huge amounts of key minerals for batteries and other technologies — and it’s nowhere close to where it needs to be. In this episode, KoBold Metals CEO Kurt House describes the current state of mineral exploration, the significant changes it needs to make, and how machine learning and artificial intelligence can help it get there.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBuilding the machines and batteries needed to decarbonize the economy will require enormous amounts of a few key minerals. The proven reserves of those minerals, sitting in mines now operating, are nowhere close to enough to satisfy what is expected to be skyrocketing demand.Without the minerals, we can’t make the clean-energy economy. And we don't know where the minerals are going to come from.What's worse, exploring for new mineral deposits has been getting less and less efficient over the last several decades, as the amount of investment needed per successful discovery has risen. We seem to be getting worse at finding this stuff right when we badly need to be getting better.That state of affairs has drawn in several new startups that endeavor to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve mining’s hit rate. The most talked-about is KoBold Metals. With financial backing from Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and other big-name investors, KoBold is now exploring for minerals on four continents.To get a better handle on mining and how we can improve at it, I contacted KoBold CEO Kurt House. We talked about the projected gap between supply and demand, the somewhat primitive way current exploration works, the massive data-gathering and coordination project the company has undertaken, and the role of justice and equity in this AI-accelerated future of mining.Kurt House, CEO of KoBold Metals, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Kurt HouseI'm so pleased to be here. I'm a huge fan. I listen to the podcast all the time, so it's fun to talk to you live.David RobertsWe're going to talk about something that is of great interest these days, which is finding the stuff that we need to build the clean energy economy. This is something I did a series of articles on a couple of years ago, and it's come up repeatedly over the years. People talk about possible shortages of materials as one of the bottlenecks that might slow the clean energy transition. So maybe let's just start there with setting some context, talk a little bit about the big four minerals that you focus on and sort of what we know about how much we have access to and how much we project we're going to need.Kurt HousePerfect setup question. So, the energy transition is fundamentally about getting off fossil fuels. It's fundamentally about electrifying the economy to the greatest extent possible. So we electrify transport, all electric generation becomes renewable, et cetera, et cetera. That requires a lot of very specific materials and very specific materials because different elements have different physical properties, obviously, and they do different things better and worse than others. And some of those elements are really difficult to substitute for, for very, very deep physical reasons. So KoBold is focused on what we call "the materials of the future," and those are lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel.That's not at all to say that there aren't other important materials for the energy transition.David RobertsAre those four the most important? By just mass, just, we need most of those —Kurt HouseNo, by total mass, it'd probably be aluminum and steel, iron for steel. The reason these are so important, there's two orthogonal reasons that we focus on these. One is how difficult they are to substitute for in specific applications. And I'll talk about that. And then the orthogonal element to it is that they are exploration problems. So aluminum is really useful in a whole bunch of reasons, but it's not an exploration problem. There's just gobs of bauxite, aluminum silicon oxide on the planet, and we know where it is. It's just a matter of processing it in more efficient and less carbon intensive ways.So, it's a metallurgical challenge. It's not an exploration challenge. In the case of lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel, you could take any forecast you want, but basically the end state is something like 2 billion electric vehicles on the planet, plus a whole bunch of renewable energy build out. And any way you slice it, those are just gigantic numbers, and they require gigantic amounts of lithium, cobalt, copper and nickel. And then you can say, "Okay, that's how much we need at, say, 2050 to be mostly off fossil fuels by 2050, how much exists in the reserves of current mines?"So if we take all the mines that are producing today, and they're going to produce out for the next several decades, that's another number. That's another quantity. And that you also have

In this episode, wind industry analyst Samantha Woodworth speaks to the growing pains of the offshore wind industry and what its future may hold.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsLast week, for the first time ever, a commercial offshore wind farm delivered power to the US grid. It was an important milestone — and also the rare bit of good news for an otherwise beleaguered industry. Everywhere else, costs are up, contracts are being renegotiated, and projects are getting canceled. It all sounds pretty bad, especially for a sector that barely even exists yet. What’s going on? How much of this turmoil is temporary and how much reflects lasting structural changes? Is the US offshore wind industry going to die before it even leaves its crib? To gain a little clarity on these questions, I contacted Samantha Woodworth, a senior wind industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie. We talked about the converging difficulties facing the industry right now, efforts to renegotiate contracts that were signed in the Before Times, the odd role that ships play in the whole mess, and the industry's prospects in coming years and decades.Samantha Woodworth, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Samantha WoodworthWell, thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.David RobertsThis is exciting. I have 411,000 questions. The more I dig, the more questions I have. So I'm excited to get into this. It seems like we're really at a hinge point here for offshore wind in the U.S., and there's lots of sort of contradictory signals happening. On the one hand, literally today, the day we're recording, we heard that the first power from an offshore wind turbine is being delivered in New York today. So I think, unless, correct me if I'm wrong, that marks the first actual power from offshore wind being used in the U.S.Is that correct?Samantha WoodworthEssentially, yeah. I mean, it's the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. flowing power to the grid. It is a super-duper exciting day.David RobertsYeah, that is exciting. And also, I think just a couple of days ago or maybe yesterday or very recently, there were some announcements of new offshore wind procurement. But then on the other hand, we have all these other stories coming. So let me just, in terms of the quote unquote crisis of U.S. offshore wind, let me summarize quickly what it seems like what I've gathered is going on, and you can fill in the details and tell me if I'm missing anything.Samantha WoodworthAbsolutely.David RobertsBasically, a bunch of contracts were signed for offshore wind amidst a period of great enthusiasm in the Before Times, like pre-2019, back when things were normal, I don't know.Samantha WoodworthYeah.David RobertsWere they normal?Samantha WoodworthMore or less.David RobertsWhat's normal? But economic circumstances, let's say, were a lot better back then. So you sign these contracts, you sign up, and these projects take a long time to build. So in between the signing and today, we've had a pandemic. Inflation. Russia invaded Ukraine and screwed up the entire globe's supply chains. Now everything looks much, much, much more expensive than it did then. And so now these wind companies are stuck with these contracts premised on much lower prices, much lower inflation, much lower interest rates, et cetera, et cetera. And they're sort of scrambling.Some of them are getting canceled, they're trying to renegotiate, et cetera, et cetera. Is that roughly accurate as a summary?Samantha WoodworthYeah, yeah, definitely the shortlist of things that has kind of compounded to be a perfect storm of issues within the U.S. offshore space. And unfortunately, it's hitting hard everywhere. It's not just the U.S. offshore wind space that's getting absolutely derailed by these issues, but because the U.S. offshore wind space is so new and so young and doesn't have the robust foundation like even U.S. onshore wind does, they're definitely feeling the effects a lot harder with a higher magnitude.David RobertsGot it. So this is a global phenomenon, though. These are not U.S. specific trends here?Samantha WoodworthThat's correct, yeah. Inflation, the pandemic recovery. There's a couple of U.S. specific things related to treasury guidance and that sort of thing. But for the most part, offshore wind is feeling these effects globally. Onshore wind is feeling these effects globally. It stinks — the timing for U.S. offshore, just because we were so close to getting all of these projects greenlit, and it just was the perfect storm of poor timing.David RobertsReally terrible. Really, really terrible timing for this industry in particular. They were just like a toddler, just sort of standing up and taking their first steps and like, now this.Samantha WoodworthYeah.David RobertsWe're talking about all these different things converging. If you had to rank them, what's the sort of biggest? Is it interest rates that are the main thing here, or could

In this episode, Jarra Hicks of the Australian nonprofit Community Power Agency talks about addressing rural resistance to clean energy infrastructure through effective community engagement.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsTo hit its climate targets, the US must build an enormous amount of new clean energy infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure is going to be built in rural communities, and the resistance of those communities to that infrastructure is one of the greatest threats to the clean energy transition.I've done a couple of pods on this subject and will probably do more. Today, we're going to get something of an international perspective. When I was in Australia, I interacted with a broad network of scholars and activists who are thinking seriously about the social mechanics of community buy-in. One of those scholars and activists is Jarra Hicks, who got her PhD at the University of New South Wales with a dissertation on community-owned wind farms in rural (or as they call them in Australia, “regional”) communities. She now runs the Community Power Agency, a nonprofit organization that is working to ensure a “faster and fairer transition to clean energy.”Among other things, Hicks has co-authored a benefit-sharing guide and runs an online benefit-sharing course, both meant to help renewable energy developers better navigate this tricky territory.I've been meaning catch up with Hicks ever since I returned from Australia. Last week I finally got the chance — we talked about the problem of rural resistance, the balance between community engagement and speed, and the many varieties of benefit sharing. I think it will be clear to everyone how this knowledge transfers into the US context. I enjoyed it immensely and hope you do too.All right then. Jarra Hicks, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jarra HicksYeah, thanks for having me.David RobertsThis is a topic of great, great interest in the U.S. right now, but I thought it would be interesting to get a perspective from another country as well, especially since you seem to have devoted your life to learning about this. So I think there are going to be some lessons that are transferable, but let's just start maybe with how you came to this subject of your PhD and of your professional work.Jarra HicksYeah, sure. So I was really lucky. I got the chance to visit a lot of communities that were doing renewable energy projects, and these were communities that were really embracing renewables. They loved renewables and they were getting great outcomes for their communities and for the planet. And I wanted to see more of that. I wanted to see more communities who were really passionate about renewables and able to get a lot of great benefits from being involved in the energy transition. And I wanted to see more communities who felt positive about this change. And if we go back, I first got involved in this in the early two thousands.And at that time, there were a lot of communities who were pushing for more renewable energy uptake. And in Australia at that time, there really wasn't a ton of renewable energy, and probably similar in the states, communities were really wanting to get behind renewable energy as a means of taking action on climate change. And at that time, there was an absence of national policy supporting renewables. So it was about a grassroots movement to get renewables up and running. So we saw programs like communities coming together to organize a bulk purchase and install of solar panels at a community scale.So helping reduce the barriers for people, helping them understand the technology, helping them install it in their homes. But we also saw communities coming together to establish commercial-scale projects like little two-turbine wind farms. And this was really motivated by communities wanting to take positive action on climate change.David RobertsDid that switch at some point to resistance? Because that's the opposite of the problem we have now.Right, well, I guess, yeah. So what we're seeing now is there is emerging resistance to large scale renewable energy projects. And so it is, it's a really different landscape. But what I've learned through my years of being involved is that it's really possible for communities to not only accept renewable energy projects but to really love them and to welcome them in their communities. And it's about the way we go about these projects, and it's about the way we make opportunities for people to really be involved and to genuinely participate in that process.What was the PhD work, what was the specific focus of your PhD?Jarra HicksSo, my PhD looked at small community-owned wind farms. So using commercial-scale turbines, 900-megawatt turbines, 1 MW turbines, but just one or two or three of them at a time. So these are small wind farms that are owned by the community. And those projects, they've emerged from a community desire to have their own energy or to h

In this episode, Peter Lehner, head of the food and farming sustainability program at Earthjustice, gives his expert perspective on the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential impact on agricultural decarbonization in the US.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAs longtime subscribers know — indeed, as the name makes plain — Volts is primarily focused on the energy side the climate fight. I haven't paid much attention to agriculture over the years. I understand that agriculture is a huge piece of the puzzle, both for decarbonization and for sustainability more generally. It's just not really been my jam.However! The Farm Bill — which requires reauthorization every five years — is likely to pass in coming months, and it is arguably the most important climate bill Congress will address this session.To talk me through the agriculture/climate nexus and discuss opportunities in the upcoming Farm Bill, I contacted Peter Lehner. He is the head of Earthjustice’s food and farming sustainability program, and the author of Farming for Our Future: The Science, Law, and Policy of Climate-Neutral Agriculture.We talked about how US agriculture has evaded environmental laws and become the source of 30 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, ways that the upcoming Farm Bill can be tweaked to better fight climate change, and what's next for agriculture decarbonization.Peter Lehner of Earthjustice, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming on.Peter LehnerGreat to be here, Dave.David RobertsAs you may know, if you have read my work over the years or followed me at all, I'm pretty heavily, deeply into the energy world as the source of most of my time and attention in the climate fight. I know on some level, partially because I've been lectured by people numerous times over the years, that agriculture is a big piece of the puzzle — and land use and oceans, which are other things that I also don't spend much time on. And I fully acknowledge that they're important, they're just not my personal passion. However, I've felt vaguely guilty about that for years.And I know the Farm Bill is coming up, which is a significant marker, I think, possibly the source of some significant action. We'll discuss that in a while. But at the very least a good excuse, I think, for me to check in and just sort of see like, what's the state of climate and agriculture, you know, action stuff, what's going on there? So, that's what you're here for, Peter, because you are the expert author of a book on the subject, numerous podcasts, been studying this for a long time. So before we get into the Farm Bill, just maybe — I know that the subject of the ties between agriculture and climate and carbon and methane greenhouse gases is very complicated.You've written entire books on the subject. But I wonder, for people like me who have had their nose mostly in the energy world, if you could just summarize relatively quickly what are the big kind of buckets where agriculture overlaps with carbon and decarbonization and climate generally? What are the big areas of concern that people should have their eyes on?Peter LehnerSure, you know, I should say, Dave, that I came to this really the same as you. I'd been working on energy issues for a very long time. For three decades, I've sued many power plants. I've worked on many different environmental laws dealing with regulation of the power sector. And what happened is, over time, doing general environmental law for New York State, for NRDC, for Earthjustice where I am now, I kept seeing the impact of agriculture as really being enormous and impeding our ability to achieve our environmental and health goals unless it was addressed. So that's why I'm focusing on this now.But like you, I think most environmentalists focus much more on the industrial sector, the power sector, the transportation sector. And part of what I've come to realize is that we all should pay a lot more attention to the agriculture sector. And we'll talk about the Farm Bill coming up. But really the Farm Bill is the biggest environmental law Congress will address that most people have never heard of. Now why is that? So, I'll tell you quickly. First, agriculture uses most of our land. It uses about two thirds of the contiguous U.S.David RobertsCan I pause you there?Peter LehnerSure.David RobertsThat took me two or three seconds to catch up with that before my mind blew. Two thirds of the land of the contiguous United States is devoted to agriculture?Peter Lehner62%, yeah. And that's about using rounder numbers, about 400 million acres of cropland. About half of that is used to grow food that people eat, and about half of that is growing food that animals eat. And close to 800 million acres of grazing land, some of that is federal land, some of that is state land. A lot of that is private land. But all told, it's over a billion acres of land, almost all in the lower 48 is used for agriculture.David RobertsThat is wild.Peter

The first Volts post went up on Dec. 7, 2020. Believe it or not, that was almost three years ago. I want to mark Volts’ third birthday with a few reflections, a couple of fun announcements, and a request. I hope you will indulge me. Volts is subscriber-supportedThere have been a lot of new subscribers since the last time I sent out one of these notes and it occurs to me that some of you more recent arrivals — or some of you who have only heard the pod through Apple or Spotify or whatever — might not know what the basic deal is around here. So here’s the short version. I left Vox to start Volts three years ago with three goals in mind. First, I want to be useful. Clean energy is getting tons of attention these days and lots of people are curious about it, or want to get involved, or are involved and are curious what’s going on in other parts of it. I want to arm those folks with ideas and information. I’ve read and seen enough dire warnings about climate change; I want to show what people are doing about it, and by proxy, all the things you can do about it. The clean-energy transition is a vast puzzle made of many, many smaller puzzles, and they all need people working on them. Second, I want to keep myself (and my subscribers) from spiraling into climate doom, and I’ve found that the No. 1 best way to do that is to highlight all the clever, thoughtful, ambitious, good-hearted people out there trying to help. It’s like Mr. Rogers said: when you’re feeling down about looming fascism and climate chaos, look for the helpers. And third, I want to remain independent, to do this work without being obligated to or constrained by any big media organization, or the hedge-fund bros who own so many of the media organizations, or advertisers, or think tanks, or NGOs, or wealthy patrons. I don’t want to owe anything to anyone except you, the readers and listeners. So I don’t take advertising and I have no sponsors. Volts operates, and I survive, entirely thanks to the income I receive from paid subscribers. This is, I have been reliably informed more than once, a bonkers way to do things from a financial perspective, but I’m a stubborn old Gen Xer and this is how I wanna do it. But I’ll be honest: while the number of Volts subscribers has risen with gratifying consistency — there are more than 53,000 of you now and I love each and every one of you as individuals! — the number of paid subscribers not kept pace.So this is my once-annual direct ask to everyone reading or listening: if Volts has helped inform or inspire you over the last three years, consider paying to support it, and me, so that it can continue. A subscription is $6 a month or $60 a year (or you can make a one-time donation). For the price of one night out with your family or friends, I’ll give you a whole year’s worth of podcasts! It’s like a dollar a podcast! That’s an amazing price for a free podcast. Why should you pay to subscribe? The main reason is simple: pay if you find the work valuable, you want me to be able to continue doing it, and you’re in a financial position to do so. Pay so that those who aren’t in a position to pay can still benefit from it, so the ideas and information can reach the broadest audience.But just to sweeten the pot a bit, let’s discuss some changes in the works!Ch-ch-ch-changesWe’re giving Volts a few little upgrades in the coming year. Why do I say “we”? Because I’ve brought on Sam — a longtime Volts subscriber and climate professional — to advise and help with these upgrades so I can continue to focus on the main work. You’ll be seeing his name around in the comments and on emails coming from Volts. Be nice to him!I mentioned looking for the helpers. We also want the helpers to find one another. So we’re going to do more to help subscribers connect with, learn from, and collaborate with one another.We also want to add some benefits for paid subscribers. I’m pretty militant about all the pods and essays being free to everyone — as I said, I want to be as useful as possible — but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some goodies for my beloved inner circle. So what does all this mean in practice?All subscribers, paid and free, will receive the following upgrades:🔓 We’re opening up the comment sections to all subscribers. I know first-hand that subscribers have a ton of knowledge and insight to share. Moving forward, each new podcast will be an opportunity for all of you to share with one another. 🤝 In the same vein, there will be monthly community threads in which subscribers can share what they’re working on or particular challenges they’re facing. I’m always getting questions from subscribers that I can’t answer but I suspect someone else in the Volts audience can. I want to get y’all connected to one another.⚡ For newcomers, we’re developing a Jumpstart series. If you want to quickly get up to speed on transmission, or thermal storage, or state-level energy politics, we’ll gather all the podcasts and writing you need in one

In this episode, longtime solar industry analyst Jenny Chase, author of Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, catches us up on the current state of the global solar industry and looks to where it’s going.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsJenny Chase went to work for the London-based startup New Energy Finance in 2005, straight out of university in Cambridge. She founded its solar analysis team and helped establish some of the first reliable indexes of prices in the solar supply chain, as well as some of the first serious industry models and projections. The solar power industry barely existed then. Now solar is the cheapest source of new power in most markets and the International Energy Agency expects it to dominate global electricity by 2050. Throughout that heady transition, Chase has run and grown the solar analysis team, even after the company was bought by Bloomberg and became Bloomberg NEF in 2009. It has become one of the most respected teams in the business and a widely cited arbiter of industry data.In 2019, Chase wrote a book summarizing what she learned over her years analyzing the industry. It is called Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, but the title is somewhat misleading — it covers solar power finance but also solar power history, technology, and policy. It is leavened here and there with droll bits of biography or advice from Chase and contains an incredible amount of information in a highly compact and readable package, just over 200 pages. A heavily updated second edition was released this month. Also this month came Chase's yearly “opinions about solar” Twitter thread, which is highly anticipated among a certain kind of energy dork [waves].I figured it would be fun to have Chase on the pod to talk about the current state of the solar industry, whether anything but standard-issue solar PV is ever going to flourish, and what the world needs to help balance out increasing penetrations of solar. Okay then. Jenny Chase from Bloomberg NEF. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jenny ChaseThank you so much for inviting me, David.David RobertsI read your book over the past week and it's just delightful. I really recommend it to anyone. I feel like the title is a little well, I guess it does say without the jargon, but I just feel like the word finance is going to scare off some readers. But it's really just a nice, extremely approachable introduction to this whole thing of solar in the markets and how it's funded and how it's proceeded over the years. So I really was charmed by it. I noticed actually that it had a little bit of kind of autobiography in the first few chapters and I thought it was really kind of funny.I had never really thought about it, but you and I have some parallels in our history. We sort of snuck into what was at the time a relative backwater in the world right around 2004, I think, both of us, and then just kind of hung around.Jenny ChaseAbsolutely. And I can't get another job, so I'm stuck doing solar at Bloomberg NEF now.David RobertsSame, we've been doing this for so long now that I couldn't really do anything else, but we just kind of planted ourselves and stuck around until the area we were in suddenly became huge around us.Jenny ChaseIt's a pretty good place to be planted, though. I mean, back in 2004, I was looking at this industry, and I started specializing in solar in late 2005. And I was like, "One day this might be 1% of global electricity supply, but, you know, that's worth working on. Even 1%, it's worth working on if we can make it clean." And last year, it was 5%, and it isn't done growing.David RobertsSame, I started covering climate change during the George W. Bush administration. I was like, maybe someday someone will do something about this. Maybe someday we'll pass legislation. And then here we are. PV dominates the world. People are targeting net zero. How things change.Jenny ChaseYes.David RobertsSo I want to ask you, you have been following now the solar industry. I mean, honestly, one of the coolest, most fun, most sort of, like, optimistic of all the dark things happening in the world. I know so many people who basically are pinning, like, 98% of their hopes for the future of humanity on this market that you follow. So what a fun thing to be following. But here I'll start with a very big, broad question. A big part of the history of solar that you recount in your book, and I've written on this before, too, and there's been academic papers on it is a series of public supports.Basically, you get the German feed-in tariffs. You get huge Chinese manufacturing subsidies. Spain had a little period of insane feed-in tariffs for a while. So it was definitely public policy that brought solar from obscurity, where it was when you first started following it, to borderline ubiquity now. And I just wonder, could solar survive now? Could solar PV would solar PV survive and thrive now without public supports?Jenny C

In this episode, Astrid Atkinson, co-founder of Camus Energy, talks about her company’s “grid orchestration” work of helping utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of my favorite things I ever wrote was a 2018 piece for Vox on grid architecture — the basic structure of the electricity transmission and distribution networks. It was about how a top-down system, with one-way power delivery from big power plants to passive consumers, might evolve into a bottom-up system, driven by local distributed energy resources. Thanks to all-star illustrator Javier Zarracina, it even has awesome animated illustrations. One person who read that piece was Astrid Atkinson, who at the time was a senior software engineer at Google. She had managed a team that shifted Google search from a top-down system to a massively distributed system, back before the term “the cloud” existed and there was no template available. She and her team had to develop the principles and best practices of getting reliable performance out of millions of unreliable, loosely coordinated machines. By doing so, they radically expanded the scale and speed of what search could do.She thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the power grid could make the same shift? Unlike some people, though, she didn’t just blog about it — in 2019, she left Google to co-found and run Camus Energy, a software company that helps utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories. The company calls what it does “grid orchestration.”Atkinson has been a thought leader in pushing for a new grid architecture. (See Camus’ white-paper series on “the rise of local grid management.”) So I was super-excited to geek out with her on this stuff. We talked about the conceptual shift from centralized to distributed and the drivers making that shift inevitable, plus getting more out of the grid we’ve already built through coordination and efficiency, and how the utility sector can evolve to better manage local resources. I really loved this one.Okay, then. Astrid Atkinson. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Astrid AtkinsonThank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.David RobertsI'm so excited for this. Astrid, I have to tell you just by way of preface that I had a weirdly difficult time preparing for today's pod because I'm just so excited by this whole area, and I'm so jazzed. I have so many things to ask you about, so many things I want to say about all this stuff, and I'm kind of overwhelmed and fried my circuits. But let's start here: Let me describe for listeners what you did at Google and tell me if this is an accurate description. So you were part of a team, I think, leading a team that was shifting the way Google did things away from a model where computing was done on a relatively limited set of high-quality, extremely reliable data centers, tightly centrally controlled, to a model where computing is done not on a small set, but on thousands, millions of distributed computers living all over the place, any one of which might be unreliably connected or off periodically or weak or otherwise glitchy.So basically, moving from a model of tightly coordinated, central control, limited number of entities, to loosely coordinated millions of entities, somehow getting aggregate reliability out of massively distributed, individually unreliable machines. Is that more or less accurate?Astrid AtkinsonYeah, that's about right. So my role was in the site reliability engineering team at Google, which is a function that nobody's ever heard of outside of the kind of tech industry. But you can think of reliability engineering as being basically Google's systems engineering function. It's the entity that's kind of responsible for pulling all of the pieces together between sort of software and operations and networking and hardware and everything, and making sure that you can get them to kind of work as a reliable system overall. And I was part of the original team that kind of — it wasn't a function that existed in the industry before Google made that transition.I was part of that original team at Google and then led a lot of Google's work around scaling out that model.David RobertsAnd so now the idea, more or less is to oversee or encourage a parallel evolution of the electricity grid, basically, from a limited number of tightly centrally controlled entities to a loosely coordinated, massively distributed, huge number of smaller entities, basically.Astrid AtkinsonYeah, I mean, that's definitely the hope. And that's partly derived from the utility industry and the grid space's sense of the changes that are needed and also partly derived from my sense that there are a fair number of parallels between some of the approaches that we took and kind of had to make up on the spot to support massive growth and really significant changes in the way

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is poised to pass new policy that will expand regional transmission capacity, but how impactful will its new rule be? In this episode, grid policy expert Rob Gramlich gives the lay of the land.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBy now, it’s fairly well understood that the US badly needs more electricity transmission lines to keep up with the changing generation mix and growth in demand that will come with clean electrification. But new lines, especially the much-needed longer-distance regional lines, are being built at a snail’s pace. If the US is to hit its mid-century climate goals, transmission capacity expansion must radically accelerate.Congress helped a little with money in the infrastructure bill, and the Biden administration helped by establishing a Grid Deployment Office inside the Department of Energy, but arguably the biggest opportunity for progress comes in the form of an upcoming rule by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It will beef up the commission’s existing rules on regional transmission planning, but exactly how much it will strengthen them depends on the final rule, expected early next year. Transmission advocates are urging FERC to pass a rule with reel teeth — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who sent the commission a letter with encouragement and suggestions in July. Nobody knows more about grid policy than Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, a policy analysis and strategy firm. He is executive director of the WATT Coalition, co-founded and used to run Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, serves as a board advisor to a half-dozen other groups, and has a long history in the industry, including a stint at FERC in the early 2000s. I talked with Rob about the current state of affairs in transmission policy, the scope of FERC’s authority, and the details that matter in the coming rule. Don’t let the technical-sounding subject scare you off — this was a fun one, and incredibly clarifying.Okay then, with no further ado, Rob Gramlich. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Rob GramlichThanks, David. Great to be here.David RobertsI am excited to talk about this. I know that perhaps FERC is not at the top of people's mind when they think about excitement and thrills, but I think people will see by the end of this why this is a very good time to tune in to what FERC's doing. So let's start here. I think we can assume for the purposes of this pod that Volts listeners understand the need for more transmission, specifically the need for more long-distance transmission for a bunch of reasons. We know that the resource mix is changing. We care more about renewables now.They're located in different places. They're located not necessarily next to load. They're remote. We're going to double or triple the amount of electricity we're using in the coming years, because we're electrifying everything. So we need more transmission for that reason. We know that connecting up a wider geographical area makes the whole system more reliable, makes the whole system cheaper. Transmission is the wonder tool of energy. It makes everything better, and yet we are not building it. So back in the late 90s, FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has jurisdiction over interstate transmission, released a series of orders.So in the beginning, there were, just across the nation, just dozens and dozens of individual vertically integrated utilities, all of which were building their own transmission, more or less for their own areas. And so back in the late 90s, FERC saw this and many other people saw the need for more interregional transmission and issued a series of orders trying to kind of nudge things in that direction, doing, among other things, they created regional transmission operators and independent system operators, RTOs and ISOs, which were supposed to be regional organizations that did regional transmission planning. And there were others too, I think, going all the way up to 2011, there were other orders, basically like, "please friggin utilities, get together and start doing some planning, do some interregional planning." And yet, despite this series of orders, and despite the existence now of RTOs, we're still not building interregional transmission.I mean, we're building it at a snail's pace and not necessarily where we need it, and certainly nothing close to the pace we need to be building at. So maybe let's just start here. Why, given the existence of RTOs, which are explicitly supposed to do this, is there still not adequate regional transportation planning? Maybe you could run through the three P's here. That's going to help kind of set us up for what's to come.Rob GramlichSure. Well, first of all, thanks for your help in communicating all that. So let's stipulate that the need for transmission is understood. And that's great that it is, because a few years ago

As I previewed for Volts subscribers a few weeks ago, I attended the third annual Yale Clean Energy Conference last week. It was a blast! It’s always energizing (pardon the pun) to be surrounded by so many young people doing so much cool stuff. It gives this crusty old blogger some hope.While I was there, I recorded a podcast — live on stage! — with Sonia Aggarwal.Sonia is well-known in Energy World. She co-founded (with previous Volts guest Hal Harvey) the energy policy think tank Energy Innovation, where she worked for years before heading into the Biden administration as the (deep breath) special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation, and deployment.She recently reemerged from the belly of that beast and is now back running Energy Innovation. I chatted with her about her experiences in the administration, what policymaking looks like close up, what she’s proud of getting into law, and what gaps remain in US energy policy. It was super-fun.Thanks to Sonia, thanks to the kind folks at Yale, and thanks to all of y’all for listening. Enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Ólafur Teitur Guðnason of Icelandic company Carbfix discusses his company’s approach to carbon sequestration by essentially making fizzy water and burying it deep underground. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThe idea behind the Icelandic company Carbfix is simple: pack water full of carbon dioxide (literally carbonate it, like a SodaStream) and inject it deep underground into Iceland’s porous basaltic rock. Minerals in the rock dissolve in the water, where they react with the CO2 to become calcium carbonates. The carbon effectively becomes rock, which it will remain, for all intents and purposes, permanently. Or at least thousands and thousands of years. It is as long-term as carbon sequestration gets.The idea dates back to 2006, but pilot injections didn’t begin until 2013 and it wasn’t until 2016 that a study published in Science confirmed that 95 percent of the CO2 in the water was mineralizing within two years — far faster than most had assumed possible. Since it started, Carbfix has sequestered almost 100,000 metric tons of CO2 at its original site, but that is just a drop in the bucket compared to what it believes is possible. It has plans to make Iceland a major international carbon-burial hub and to replicate its technology in other geographies, maybe even in the shallow ocean. When I visited the Carbfix operation in October and saw it in action, I was extremely intrigued and had a million more questions, so last week I got in touch with Ólafur Teitur Guðnason, Carbfix’s head of communications, to talk about where the company gets the CO2 it buries, where it plans to get it in the future, whether burial can work in other kinds of rocks and geographies, and exactly how much carbon Iceland can store.All right, then, with no further ado, Ólafur Teitur Guðnason of Carbfix. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Ólafur Teitur GuðnasonThank you so much for having me.David RobertsSo, Ólafur, I visited you guys when I was out in Iceland a few weeks ago and was very taken with this idea. And I don't know how I have been covering this stuff for so long without ever hearing about it, but it sounds like you guys are sort of on the verge of expanding. So I think probably a lot more people are going to be hearing about you soon. So to begin with, for listeners who are not familiar with your company, I'm going to run through the process and tell me if I get anything wrong. So you get a source of water, and we can discuss the source of water more later.But you get water, you carbonate it more or less like a SodaStream carbonates water. You pump carbon dioxide into the water, and then you pump the water deep underground. And this carbonated water is heavier than normal water, so it tends to sink down to the bottom of the water table. And as it is sinking, the carbon dioxide in the water reacts with minerals in the rock to form calcium carbonates. Basically, the carbon dioxide in the water gets transformed into a form of rock, where it will then stay underground as rock for thousands of years. So you've permanently sequestered the carbon.Is that more or less an accurate description?Ólafur Teitur GuðnasonIt's more than more or less accurate, I think. I'll give you a ten out of ten.David RobertsExcellent. Good. Well, I have so many questions about this, but the one thing I wanted to start with is the carbonation process of the water. Is that your intellectual property here? Is that your sort of main thing that you've pioneered here as a different way of carbonating water, or is there something special about the way you carbonate water?Ólafur Teitur GuðnasonYeah, that's one part of it. There are several elements to what we feel is proprietary or what we have solved — technology that we have developed. One thing is the capture of the CO2 emissions from the geothermal power plant, where we were kind of born as a research project within the company that runs the geothermal power plant, as well as universities both in Iceland and the US and France. So that is one element, yes. The dissolving of the CO2 with the water is another element, and the third element would be the way to inject it. So, yeah, there are different elements to this and at different stages of patenting.David RobertsOh, I didn't realize that you were involved in the capture part of this. I knew that part of the CO2 that you're burying is coming from the geothermal plant, but I had kind of thought that was separate. Is this something that you're going to export if you try to export this model to other places or other countries? Is capture part of what you're promising, or are you mostly, do you think, going to be working with CO2 that someone else captured?Ólafur Teitur GuðnasonYes, mostly. Capturing is not our core field. It just comes from the fact that we were born out of this proximity to the geothermal power plant, so we needed a source of CO2, and we may, and have and are collaborating with othe

Rural community pushback to new wind and solar farms has the potential to slow the US clean-energy transition, but very little research has been done on what rural Americans actually think about renewable energy. A recent survey of thousands of rural residents about their opinions on climate change and clean energy development sheds some light; in this episode, Robin Pressman of Embold Research and Mike Casey of clean-energy PR firm Tigercomm discuss the results.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOf the handful of forces that have the potential to stymie the clean-energy transition in the US, perhaps the most immediate and dangerous is rural NIMBYism. Rural communities will, by necessity, host most of the wind and solar farms the US needs to decarbonize, but rural resistance is already responsible for dozens of canceled projects and growing delays.What do rural Americans think about renewable energy? Where are they getting their information and what sorts of arguments are getting through? There’s been weirdly little research on this question, despite the growing severity of the problem.Into that breach comes a new poll done by Embold Research, which surveyed thousands of rural residents to uncover their opinions on climate change, wind and solar power, and the promises of energy developers. The poll was commissioned by the clean-energy PR firm Tigercomm, which also interviewed community engagement staff at energy developers to find out what they’ve been hearing in the field.I contacted Mike Casey, the president of Tigercomm, and Robin Pressman, the head of Embold Research, to discuss what the poll found and what it means for clean energy developers engaging these communities.All right then, with no further ado, Mike Casey of Tigercomm and Robin Pressman of Embold Research. Welcome to Volts. Thank you both so much for coming.Robin PressmanThanks for having us.Mike CaseyThank you, Mr. Roberts.David RobertsMike, let's start with you. Let's just talk a little bit about the background here. There are kind of two bits of research here that we're going to discuss today. On the one hand, Robin's firm has done this polling of rural Americans. I hate that I'm going to have to say the word rural over and over again in this podcast. It's my least favorite word to say. But also, your firm has done a bunch of interviews with developers, renewable energy developers, specifically the people at the renewable energy developers who are responsible for going into these communities and developing these projects.It's sort of the advanced people who are going out to talk with the rural people and live in that world. And I'm interested in both those perspectives. But maybe actually, Robin, let's start with you. So, tell us a little bit about what this poll did, who it polled, and what kinds of things you were asking about.Robin PressmanSo, we wanted to take a look at your favorite word, "rural," Americans and understand perspectives on renewable energy. We've seen a lot of polls lately that look at the country as a whole, that look at specific communities where projects are being built. We're certainly polling for people in those local communities and areas. But what we really wanted to do was to get sort of a 30,000-foot view across the country of what perspectives rural Americans have, where they are at this point in time, and how they're feeling about the renewable energy transition that is happening. And so we surveyed 2,645 rural Americans across the country, and we were able to have conversations with them, both the quantitative survey and then also the qualitative, get information from them that they could fill in so we could learn a little bit more about their perspective.So, sort of virtual conversations, not actual conversations. And we were able to really get a look and understand where they are and go beyond just sort of the loudest voices in the room, which has really been a big stumbling block in these communities, to getting these projects built.David RobertsIn the small handful of items that I would list as threats to the success of the clean energy transition, threats to the success of IRA and all the rest of the bills, NIMBYism and permitting is probably the biggest and most threatening one. And so everybody's thinking about this right now. Everybody in the energy world is thinking about this right now. And one of the big questions I think that's on everybody's mind is this resistance that we're seeing, is it a small handful of people that are being paid by right-wing groups stirring up this trouble, or are they speaking in some sense on behalf of a broader sentiment?In other words, are they articulating the true sentiments of people in those areas? So maybe the place to start is just what did you find out, that they think about renewable energy?Robin PressmanSo, to start with, there is support for these projects, both solar and wind in rural communities. And support does outweigh the

In this episode, Shayle Kann, cleantech investor and host of the podcast Catalyst, shares his educated opinion on the most overhyped and underhyped technologies and trends in clean energy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIf you listen to Volts, you probably also listen to — or at the very least, should also be listening to — Catalyst, the Canary Media podcast hosted by veteran cleantech investor Shayle Kann. Like Volts, it features fairly nerdy deep-dive interviews, though they are mercifully shorter, and they’re more focused on cleantech, less likely to drift into politics and activism. (Shayle is a partner at Energy Impact Partners, where he assesses and funds cleantech companies for a living, so unlike me he brings some expertise to the table!)Anyway, our pods have been mutual admirers for a while now and we thought it would be fun to do something together. So the following episode features Shayle and I discussing a few technologies and trends we think are overhyped, and a few we think are underhyped. We get into electric stoves, interest rates, thermal batteries, and much more. It was just as fun and enlightening as I expected — especially where we disagreed — so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. All right, here we are. I'm here with Shayle Kann, the host of Catalyst. Shayle, welcome to the greatest crossover event in podcast history.Shayle KannMan, I had already written down that joke. I had written down that literal joke for my monologue. I got to come up with something else.David RobertsIt's the Infinity War of podcasts for nerds. You know, Shayle, I have been listening to Catalyst for a long time, a big fan, and we've been talking for a long time now about how we ought to do something, do some sort of crossover, have some sort of chat, especially since we're both quasi under Canary now. So what we decided on was to chat a little bit about the clean energy landscape via the lens of a couple of what we feel are overhyped trends or technologies and a couple that we think are underhyped. And so we're just going to walk through things that way and have a little chat along the way about what we're seeing and doing. So, Shayle, are you ready to go?Shayle KannI am. But before we start, can I ask you a question?David RobertsYeah, please.Shayle KannSo when I was trying to come up with my overhyped and underhyped things, I was having, like, a surprisingly difficult time determining what I think is overhyped or underhyped relative to whom? You know, I kept coming up with things where I was like things that are overhyped to the people who care about energy on Twitter, which is not representative of anything important. So I was trying to figure out overhyped or underhyped by whom and to whom. And I don't know if you struggled with the same thing?David RobertsI did struggle with that. We do live in a weird, tiny, little insular world in which many things are overhyped that normal people have never heard of. And vice versa. So I think I did a mix. So you'll just have to explain the context of your answer while you're answering. You have to explain underhyped or overhyped to whom while you're answering. Some of mine are definitely overhyped or underhyped to our audience.Shayle KannRight? Yeah, exactly.David RobertsWhich, as you say, does not mean much to the wider world, since we both have audiences of energy nerds, handsome, viril, unusually intelligent energy nerds —Shayle KannOf course.David Robertsin our audiences.Shayle KannYeah, I also struggled a little bit with, like, there's some things that I think might be overhyped because I overhyped them. Just a bit circular.David RobertsI know one of my underhyped is something that I have been relentlessly trying to hype for years, but I just don't think I have the hype power to bring it up to the hype level, where it would be sufficiently hyped. So we'll discuss those along the way. So we starting then with your first underhyped trend. So tell us what it is and perhaps to whom it is underhyped.Shayle KannOkay, so I think this is underhyped by almost everybody outside of a relatively small corner of the clean energy world that's like trying to pound the drum as loud as possible about this, which is the trend of onshoring of manufacturing in clean energy supply chains. Onshoring, and I guess I would add near shoring or friend shoring, but predominantly onshoring. So let me contextualize a little bit, which is I know you were around for the whole solar story as solar was just starting to mature, but the short version of that story in my mind, if you go way back in solar history, was Japan was really the first market that both installed any meaningful amount of solar and produced it.Right. You had these companies like Sharp and others, way back in the '90s. And Japan had this feed-in tariff for residential solar, and that was small and steady for a long time, and not a whole lot happened. And then what really kickstarted the solar marke

In this episode, Princeton professor and energy modeler Jesse Jenkins tackles the question of how we can build a decarbonized energy system that relies on inherently variable wind and solar power.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIf you’ve spent much time discussing clean energy on the internet, you’ve probably come across a disturbing piece of information: the sun, it seems, is not always shining. What’s worse, the wind is not always blowing! It’s crazy, I know. Unlike coal or natural gas or nuclear — “dispatchable” power plants that we can turn on or off at will, when we need them — we do not control solar power and wind power. They come and go with the weather and the rotation of heavenly bodies. They are, to use the term of art, “variable.” Many people, bringing to bear varying levels of good faith, conclude from this fact that we shouldn’t or can’t shift to an electricity system that is based around wind and solar, at least not without occasionally shivering in the cold. Is that true? Do we know how to balance out the variability of wind and solar enough that we can fully decarbonize the grid with them? This is probably the number one question I hear about renewable energy, the number one reservation people have about it, so I decided it’s time to tackle it head on.To help, I called on longtime Friend of Volts, Princeton professor and energy modeler extraordinaire Jesse Jenkins. We walked through the basic shape of the problem, the different time scales on which variability operates, and the solutions that we either have or anticipate having to deal with it. This one is long and occasionally gets a bit complex, but if you’ve ever wondered how we’re going to build an energy system around wind and solar, this is the pod you’ve been waiting for. All right, I am here with Princeton professor and longtime friend of Volts, Jesse Jenkins. Jesse, welcome back to Volts. Thanks for coming back.Jesse JenkinsHey, Dave. It's always good to chat with you.David RobertsJesse, the reason we're doing this is that in the course of my research, I have come across some extremely disturbing information which I felt like I needed to share with you and the world as soon as possible. Apparently, the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing.Jesse JenkinsWait, what?David RobertsI know this changes everything, so we're going to have to talk through this.Jesse JenkinsOh, man.David RobertsBut seriously, I don't mean to make too much light of this. This is a subject about which people say lots of dumb things, but it is at its heart, I think, a perfectly valid question, a perfectly valid area of concern. In fact, it is the central area of concern about renewable energy. It is the central question to answer, which is the term that used to be used is intermittent. Renewable energy, wind and solar are intermittent, I think. Now the preferred term of art is variable, but I think probably the most accurate terminology for our purposes is non-dispatchable.It just means we don't control it; we don't turn it on and off. It comes and goes with the weather.Jesse JenkinsYeah, I prefer just weather dependent. Right. I think it makes more intuitive sense to people. Like you said, it's solar and wind power, so it depends on the weather. That is not shocking, but also defining of what the resource is.David RobertsAlso dependent on the turning of the planets and the solar system.Jesse JenkinsThat's true.David RobertsBut anyway, people know what we mean. We don't control them. A lot of people, I think, especially people who are coming, who haven't given a lot of thought to the clean energy transition and are starting to grapple with it for the first time, I think intuitively run up against this question early on in their thinking, which is "how do we deal with this?" So, I want to take those questions as good faith questions and talk through answers to them to the extent we have answers, to the extent we do know how to deal with it, to the extent we do have the tools to deal with it, and the extent to which it remains to some extent unsolved.I want to start with a couple of really big picture questions before we hone in on the details. I think the first big one to ask is just what greenies, what climate people seem to be recommending, and what we seem to be doing, at least in the early stages, is shifting from an electricity system based on dispatchable power plants that we can turn on and off at will to a system that is fundamentally based on non-dispatchable weather-dependent power plants that we can't turn on and off, which, as we're going to talk through, raises a whole host of issues and problems to solve.So I think the first thing to address is just why do that at all? Why take on that trouble? Why not just shift from dirty dispatchable energy to clean dispatchable energy like nuclear, hydro and geothermal? Why take on the burden of dealing with variable energy at all?Jesse JenkinsYeah, it's a g

District energy refers to a system in which a shared central plant distributes steam, hot water, and/or chilled water to multiple buildings via underground pipes. In this episode, Rob Thornton of the International District Energy Association shares about district energy’s newfound popularity and the role it could play in the clean energy transition.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsDistrict energy is one of the oldest concepts in all of energy, dating back at least to the ancient Romans. It simply refers to connecting multiple buildings to a common source of heating and cooling — a furnace, heat pump, geothermal well, or what have you — and distributing the heat via water or steam flowing through underground pipes. There are hundreds of district energy systems in operation, in every country in the world. (Virtually all of the buildings in Iceland, which I visited recently, are heated by district energy systems running on geothermal.)However, fossil fuel heat has been so cheap for so long that district energy has never quite become the default — it’s just been too easy to stick a natural gas furnace in every building. There hasn’t been much pressure to share heat.But with the climate crisis and the clean energy transition, that’s changing. These days, lots of people are looking for cleaner sources of heat and more efficient ways to share it, so district energy is becoming sexy again. Among other things, it’s a great way for cities to meet their carbon goals without overburdening their electrical grids.With all that in mind, I contacted Rob Thornton, the head of the International District Energy Association, to chat about the clever new sources district energy systems are drawing on (everything from sewage to deepwater lakes), the infrastructure they can integrate with, and the other services they can provide.All right, then. With no further ado, Rob Thornton of the International District Energy Association. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Rob ThorntonThanks for having me, David. Pleasure to be here.David RobertsI am super into district heat, so I was delighted when you all reached out to me. I've been meaning to do something on it, but I think it's, at least in the US, not particularly familiar or well understood to most people. It's relatively rare in the US, which we will discuss later. So, let's start with a definition. What is district heating?Rob ThorntonSo, we call it district energy because it's both heating and cooling in cities, campuses, communities. Essentially, it's a central plant that's providing steam, hot water, and/or chilled water to an underground thermal piping network to provide heating and cooling to buildings in a city central business district, campus, airport, hospital, healthcare, et cetera. So, it really is the aggregation of multiple users of heat or cool provided by a central plant. So, each individual building doesn't need to dedicate space or equipment, right, to boilers, chillers, et cetera. So, yeah, that's the simple definition.David RobertsCould not be more simple. It's using one source, a single source of heating and cooling for multiple buildings, which you think seems like an obvious thing to do. What, in terms of existing district energy systems in the world, what is that central source? Typically, empirically, what's the most common current central source?Rob ThorntonI'd say at the moment, still natural gas.David RobertsJust a big boiler?Rob ThorntonWell, often large boilers, sometimes gas turbines, recovering the heat, making additional electricity. So, combined heat and power. But that's shifting with the energy transition appetite for lower carbon solutions. There's a lot of integration, optimization happening. Industrial heat pumps, renewable heating and cooling, a variety of sources. That's the advantage of district energy. You change the central plant, and actually the benefits flow to multiple, sometimes hundreds, thousands of customers by updating the central plant.David RobertsIs it safe to say these days that all things being equal, natural gas is probably the cheapest, that's why it's the most common?Rob ThorntonWell, it's cheapest, it's cleaner than some other solutions. It's dispatchable, available, widely available. And it wasn't always that way. District energy started really by the Romans, but then Thomas Edison I would really characterize as the inventor back 140 plus years ago, and he discovered he couldn't really just sell electricity. He had to actually sell heat, too. Building owners saying, "Oh, I'll buy your power, but what am I going to do with the dynamo in my basement that provides the heating?" And so Edison realized, in order to make a profit at this enterprise, I have to sell both the heat and the power.So, while it's not commonplace, in fact, district energy is prevalent. 900 systems in North America, thousands all over the world. Every major city has district energy from Paris to New York City, ob

Iceland aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral nation; thanks in large part to hydropower and geothermal, it’s well on track to meet that goal by 2040. In this episode, Halla Hrund Logadóttir of the Iceland Energy Authority reflects on the country’s energy history and looks to its ambitious future.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIceland is an island just south of the Arctic Circle, perched directly atop a rift where two tectonic plates are drifting apart, exposing the magma below. It is a small country (physically about the size of Kentucky, with a population a little larger than Cleveland, Ohio’s), but what it lacks in size it makes up for in drama. It is a land of glaciers and volcanos, ice and fire, wind and rain and snow — and deep heat that makes them bearable. I was there for four days last week, meeting with sustainability-related businesses, hearing about everything from micro-algae to grid monitoring to carbon recycling to using 100 percent of the fish. There’s an incredible amount of innovation going on there, and to my unending delight, a great deal of that innovation is in some way or another in a symbiotic relationship with geothermal, the heat and power that Icelanders pull from underground. Iceland’s electricity is entirely carbon-free — roughly 70 percent hydropower and 30 percent geothermal — and so is its heating, 90 percent of which is geothermal. Overall, 85 percent of its energy consumption is carbon-free, and it is aiming for 100 percent by 2040.To hear more about all this, I visited the Reykjavik office of Halla Hrund Logadóttir, who runs Iceland’s National Energy Authority, overseeing the country’s electricity system. She used to teach at the Iceland School of Energy at Reykjavik University and now teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she co-founded the Arctic Initiative and founded the Arctic Innovation Lab. There’s no one with a better sense of the overall state of Iceland’s energy situation. We talked about the country’s history with geothermal, its current energy mix and policies, and its race to become the world’s first fully carbon-neutral nation. I'm here with Halla, who — I'm going to call you by your first name. Will you say your name for us?Halla Hrund LogadóttirSo I'm Halla Hrund Logadóttir. One of these Icelandic simple names.David RobertsYes, extremely. That is extremely Icelandic. And you're head of the National Energy Authority? National Energy Authority here in Iceland. And I've been visiting Iceland here for the last three or four days, visiting lots of startups and sustainable businesses of various kinds, and have found it absolutely fascinating, much more than I expected. Such a unique — so many things about Iceland in general, but Iceland's energy situation that are just absolutely unique and fascinating. So maybe the place to start is you could just tell our American audience, which is, you know, Americans are not known for their deep knowledge of other countries —So maybe we could just start by a little history of Iceland and geothermal, which is, I think, the sort of origin story of Iceland's current situation. Maybe just tell us what happened back in the 60s and 70s and why and sort of what the result is.Halla Hrund LogadóttirAbsolutely. And I think just to kind of start where we are at today and then looking back: Today, nine out of ten houses in the country are heated with geothermal, and overall, 85% of our primary energy use comes from renewables. So the hydropower is the other main source of electricity production, basically. But the heating mainly comes from geothermal and it is a unique situation, but it is a story that goes way back. It started with bathing that is kind of from the Vikings coming here, staying warm in this cold country. But then in the early 1900s, there was a farmer that found a way to connect his farm to a neighboring hot spring here in Mosfellssveit, which is close to Reykjavík, where we're sitting now, and a few others did the same.And so it was a story of entrepreneurship and innovation. Then municipalities noticed this technology and it became a part of a policy, to make a long story short. But then the first drilling for geothermal was done in the early 1900s and 1928 here in Reykjavík. And I think such an important part of this story is the fact that those were small projects, but they were used to heat key buildings like the hospital you can still see downtown and a primary school that we have downtown. And this was really important because it made the technology, the fact that it worked, very visible to people and made the buy-in for the technology — you always need buy-in from voters and so forth.The benefits were very obvious from these two key examples and from these small successes the big transition, the big story, begins, which also I think is interesting now when we think about the overall energy transition, it usually starts with small pilots that then become added up to a

In this episode, veteran journalist Brian Beutler waxes nostalgic about the past 20 years of political journalism and muses about its future.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)I’ve known political journalist Brian Beutler for a long time. We met back in the late 2000s in DC, in the heady days leading up to Obama’s victory, and have kept in touch fitfully ever since.Brian, one of the smartest and most insightful political analysts writing today, has published in a wide variety of outlets, but this month he followed me into the wilderness — left his job at Crooked Media to launch his own newsletter, Off Message. He’s already written some great stuff and made some cool videos — check them out. I figured I would take the occasion to catch up with him, wax nostalgic about politics past, discuss partisan journalism, and muse about how opponents of authoritarianism might show a little more vigor. Please enjoy this long and somewhat indulgent ramble down memory lane.Text transcript:David RobertsSo I'm sitting here with my good buddy Brian Beutler, who is a political journalist living in Washington, DC. He has been a political journalist for a long time. We've known each other for a long time, been involved in this mess of political journalism for a long time. He has worked, Brian, where all of you worked everywhere. The American Prospect, did you do that one?Brian BeutlerI didn't do that one.David RobertsThe New Republic.Brian BeutlerYes, I was there.David RobertsDid you do an American Progress stint?Brian BeutlerNo, you're misremembering. I was actually with you at Grist. I think I was on a freelance contract for like six months or a year way back in 2006.David RobertsSmokes, I forgot about that.Brian BeutlerI worked at a bunch of places when I was like, a pup. So I think Raw Story still exists. First reporting gig. But I really got my training as a reporter at TPM. I was there for several years.David RobertsRight. That's the one I was trying to call to so spell it out for people. It's Josh Marshall's site.Brian BeutlerYeah, it used to be Talking Points Memo that's I think still the URL, but it's just TPM.One of the longest standing, I mean, still going strong.I rely on it all the time. I'm friends with my old editor there. He's still basically, like, running the day to day there, I think, the world of TPM. And then a very brief stint at Salon, which I enjoyed, but then The New Republic came and was like "join us instead." And so I said yes. And I did that through a really tumultuous period from like 2014, I think, to 2017. And then I was editor in chief at Crooked Media for six years, and now I am independent.David RobertsYes, this is the occasion for the pod is my friend Brian has left Crooked Media and is now launching on his own, launching a newsletter because all the cool kids now have newsletters, a newsletter called Off Message where he is going to continue political journalism. You should all go sign up. I've learned an enormous amount from Brian over the years. And so I thought, on the occasion of Brian's birth as an indie, self-employed journalist, welcome to the fold, that we would sit down and catch up and I guess you could say, does the world really need two white, bearded, middle-aged guys of roughly similar socioeconomic backgrounds and ideological outlooks, affirming one another's priors for an hour?Maybe not, but this is my pod, and if I want to have an indulgent episode periodically, that is my right as an independent. We got no bosses anymore, Brian to tell us not to do so.Brian BeutlerMy two favorite flavors are waxing nostalgic and vigorous agreement. And we're just going to —David RobertsWe're going to get right into that.Brian BeutlerGive your listeners all that.David RobertsAll right. I feel like one of the signal characteristics of political journalism, and I expect this has probably always been true in all times and places is just that a lot of stuff happens, one thing after another happens, and it's a constant scramble. And so you can do it for a long time. And you really do not get many opportunities to sort of step back and think about kind of the arc of politics as you've experienced it over the course of a career. I guess what people used to do is report their whole lives and then become opinion columnists and write books.But anyway, so one of the things I want to do is just think a little bit about kind of the arc of American politics that we've experienced and where that leaves you and kind of what you think about it and how you're thinking about politics has changed over experiencing all this. So you — when did you come to political consciousness as an adult, would you say?Brian BeutlerIt was definitely during the George W. Bush presidency, the first term of the George W. Bush presidency. And it was actually, like, less Bush vigor, although in hindsight, once I became politically awake, it kind of reverse incepted me how important it was. We've been on a wild ride since then. That

In this episode, Antora Energy CEO Andrew Ponec talks up his company’s game-changing approach to thermal energy storage.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in March, I did a podcast on the possibility of using wind and solar electricity to decarbonize industrial heat, which represents fully a quarter of all human final energy consumption. The trick is to transform the variable energy from wind and solar into a steady, predictable stream of heat by using some form of heat battery. The idea is that heat batteries will charge when renewables are cheap or negatively priced, around midday when all the solar is online, and then use the stored heat to displace natural gas boilers and other fossil fuel heat sources in industrial facilities.Among other things, this vision represents a huge opportunity for renewable energy developers — industrial heat is effectively a brand new trillion-dollar market for them to play in. And they can often enter that market without waiting in long interconnection queues to connect to the grid. Anyway, that episode, which I highly encourage you to listen to at some point, was with the CEO of a thermal battery company call Rondo. In it, I mentioned another thermal storage company whose technology caught my eye: Antora Energy. Like Rondo, Antora is part of the broad “box of rocks” category, but its tech can do some things that, for the time being, no other thermal battery can do.I don’t want to say much more here — discovery is half the fun — but I will say I’m as geeked about this technology as I have been about anything in ages. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I first heard about it three or four years ago. Now the company has launched its first commercial-scale system! So I’ve brought Antora co-founder and CEO Andrew Ponec on the pod to talk through how it works, what it can do, and how it could transform industrial heat markets.So with no further ado, Andrew Ponec. Welcome to Volts, thank you so much for coming.Andrew PonecThank you for having me, David.David RobertsThis is so fun for me. I've honestly been thinking about this tech for years and really hoping that you guys would make it far enough to justify me doing a pod with you. So I've been rooting for you. So we're going to get to kind of the role heat batteries and heat storage can play in the energy system a little bit later. But I just want to start with the technology itself. So the basic idea here is you're heating up a rock, right. And what you do with the heat, we'll get to that in a second, but let's just start with the rock itself. Tell me about the material you're using for your rocks and their qualities and why you chose that material.Andrew PonecWe looked at a lot of different options for the material that we wanted to store energy in, and there are a lot of different types of rocks, types of solid materials that we might choose. And after a pretty thorough search, we decided to focus on carbon, solid carbon. And that was for a number of reasons. We were looking at different attributes that we thought were important, one of which was cost, one of which was earth abundance. We were also looking for things that had existing supply chains and that were extremely stable and safe for long-term operation.And when we went through all of that process, carbon came out on top as the best option, although I should say that it didn't come out on top the first time around, actually because of a mistake I made in our spreadsheet. Carbon has a really unique property, which is that it gets better at storing energy as it gets hotter. So the specific heat capacity, its ability to store energy, increases by about a factor of three between room temperature and 800 or so degrees Celsius. So you can imagine what the process would be like to choose a material.We built a big spreadsheet. We put all of the materials candidates in it. We put what their ability to store thermal energy was, did some calculations on what the cost would be, and then stack ranked them. And in the first pass, carbon was near the bottom, because the mistake I had made was going online and just googling the specific heat of carbon and of course, got the room temperature value. And it was only a few months later, after we were exploring all sorts of other materials, that we kind of went back and looked and said, "Man, carbon has everything we want, except that its storage capacity is really low."And it was kind of our disappointment in carbon that made us take a second look and then realize this really remarkable property of carbon, that it gets better at storing heat as it gets hotter. And then it was by far the best choice. And that's where we've gone from there.David RobertsSo I think when most people hear carbon, especially in our space, they think about carbon dioxide, they think about carbon in the atmosphere. So what is solid carbon? What does it look like? What's it used for? Like, what is solid carbon out there doing

In this episode, Minnesota State Representative Larry Kraft shares about the state’s ambitious, progressive transportation policy, which includes climate accountability measures that no other state has implemented.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2022, Democrats narrowly won a trifecta in Minnesota — House, Senate, and governor — whereupon they launched into an absolute frenzy of activity, passing bills on everything from abortion to paid leave to gun control to free school lunch to clean energy. Vanity Fair called it a “tour de force for progressive legislation.”I covered the state’s new clean-energy law on a previous pod, but I also wanted to take a closer look at the big transportation bill that was signed in May. It passed somewhat under the radar, but it’s got some very cool stuff in it. One key feature is that it requires both state and municipal transportation-planning agencies to take the state’s climate goals into account when assessing new projects — to hold themselves accountable to those goals. As obvious as that may seem, it’s not something any other state has done. To discuss the significance of this and some other provisions of the bill, I contacted one of its primary authors, first-term state Representative Larry Kraft (D). We talked about what these changes mean for transportation planners, the kinds of transportation projects that can reduce emissions, the new money the state will raise for public transit, and the state’s new e-bike incentive (!).By the way, if you enjoy this conversation, you should know that Kraft co-hosts a podcast of his own, on climate policy in small and mid-sized cities. It’s called City Climate Corner, with co-host Abby Finis. Check it out.All right, then, with no further ado, Representative Larry Kraft of Minnesota. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Larry KraftOh, my gosh. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here.David RobertsThis is cool. You are a freshman legislator. You entered the Minnesota legislature in 2022, last year. It's sort of hilarious to me: You slipstreamed into the most exciting and productive legislative session for Democrats in living memory that I'm aware of. Like, I hope, you know, on some level, this is not what politics is normally like, Larry.Larry KraftYeah, I have good timing. And I tell you, I hear that. And what I tell people is, you know "I'm sure you're right. But at this point, it's all I know. So let's keep going."David RobertsYeah, you just go in and you start passing bills, changing things right and left, wow. The Minnesota success story, I think people have heard a lot about it by now. There's more bills than you can shake a stick at, more progress, just a wild amount of progress. But let's focus on transportation. So Minnesota is similar to many other states in that transportation has become the largest source of greenhouse gases in the state. I think it's 25% —Larry KraftYeah, 25, 27%.David Roberts— in Minnesota. So this is sort of my overall impression: Especially at the state level, is there's been this sort of, like, parallel tracks going for a while now of on the one side, happy climate talk, which ends up mostly focused on the easy stuff, which is electricity, right? And then transportation over here on this other track just expanding, getting more and more carbon intensive willy nilly, and the twain have not really met. So this is like what's happening in Minnesota, really. To my mind, maybe Colorado got there a little bit ahead of you. But really what's happening in Minnesota is the first time that people grappling with climate change really are taking on transportation in a serious way.So let's start by just talking about what kind of targets are on the books in Minnesota now, prior to this transportation bill. Let's just talk about sort of like, what targets have been set in terms of greenhouse gases and in terms of VMT, vehicle miles traveled.Larry KraftRight. So in 2007, Minnesota passed. Actually, it was a bipartisan bill on climate that set state goals as 80% emission reductions, greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2050, and then set some interim targets. In this last session, we updated that to be net zero by 2050. And then on the transportation side, there's been folks that have been working on this for a few years and set a vehicle miles traveled reduction goal of 20% reduction per capita by 2050 and 14% by 2040.David RobertsAre those targets, are these sort of aspirational things, or are those binding in some way? Are those statutorily binding?Larry KraftThey were not statutorily binding. It was in a climate action framework that the governor initiated that the VMT target started. But I think what we did this session was to give some teeth behind them and some mechanism to actually achieve them.David RobertsRight. So before we get to that, let's talk a little bit about RMI. Rocky Mountain Institute did a big study basically looking at what would hap

In this episode, Maine State Senator Nicole Grohoski discusses an upcoming ballot measure that gives Maine voters the opportunity to replace the state’s unpopular for-profit utilities with a nonprofit public utility.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsMaine’s two big investor-owned power utilities — Central Maine Power and Versant Power — are not very popular. In fact, they boast among the lowest customer satisfaction scores of any utilities in the country, perhaps because their customers face some of the nation’s highest rates, suffer more and longer outages than average Americans, and pay more to connect rooftop solar than ratepayers in almost any other state. This November, Mainers will vote on a radical alternative: a ballot measure to replace the two for-profit utilities with a single nonprofit utility that would be called Pine Tree Power. Maine and many other states already have lots of small nonprofit municipal utilities, but this would mark the first time a whole state with existing private utilities decided to make them public en masse.Naturally the utilities are opposed and have dumped $27 million and counting into a campaign to crush the measure; supporters have mustered just under $1 million. To discuss this David vs. Goliath fight, I contacted one of its champions, Democratic state Senator Nicole Grohoski. We discussed why she thinks a public utility would perform better, what it would do for clean energy, how it would be governed, and what other states can learn from the effort. With no further ado, Maine State Senator Nicole Grohoski. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Nicole GrohoskiThank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be with you today.David RobertsI am super excited to talk about this issue. There's a lot of ins and outs I want to cover, but maybe let's just start with a brief history of this thing. So the idea here is, as I said in the intro, to replace Maine's two big investor-owned utilities, Central Maine Power and Versant Power, with a single publicly owned main utility called Pine Tree Power. Tell me who first had that idea? Where did it first pop up? I know it was legislation and then it got vetoed. Just tell us a little bit about how we got to where we are now.Nicole GrohoskiThe history is really interesting, and I'll try to not spend too much time on it, but I think it's really important to start with the reality here in Maine as a backdrop. So a couple of things that are important to know for listeners is that we, as Mainers, find that our electricity isn't really affordable or reliable and our utilities aren't trustworthy. So we have, for many years running now, the worst customer satisfaction in the country, some of the highest rates in the country for electricity, and those just keep going up. We have experienced a 20% increase this summer, with another increase coming in January.And we also have the most frequent outages in the country. And there are a couple of other reliability metrics that we're not doing so well on, including the length of outages and how long it takes to restore power. So basically what we see here in Maine is that the status quo of these for-profit multinational corporations is just not working for us. About a tenth of our residents in Maine received disconnection notices earlier this year because they just couldn't afford to pay their bills. And it's not working for companies or big corporations that really rely on low cost and reliable electricity to compete.So that's kind of the background. So a number of us were wondering, does it have to be this way? Is there an alternative to worst of the worst? We are Maine, we are very proud and independent, and we like to be leading, but this is not the way that we wanted to be leading. So there was a lot of grassroots pressure. In 2017 we had a big storm, and the power was out for days. But at the same time, there was a billing fiasco, which resulted in billing errors for over 100,000 customers, which is in a state of 1.3 million people, that's a very big percent.So there was a lot of pressure, a lot of phone calls to legislators, to the Public Utilities Commission, to the public advocate about these utilities. And so I think that really planted a seed for a number of folks. Specifically, Maine's first public advocate pointed out to some members of the legislature, including Representative Seth Barry at the time, myself, and a few others, that there were other options and that the financial and local control aspects of those options might be really helpful for Maine. So we started meeting in 2019 with the previous public advocate, economists, labor, legislators, people that were part of a group called CMP Ratepayers Unite.And that's when we formed this idea of creating a consumer-owned utility for Maine that would be non-profit and similar to the ten other consumer-owned utilities we have in Maine. I don't know that we had a name for it at that time, but we d

In this episode, organizer Jeff Ordower of 350.org talks about how the environmental movement can shift its focus from blocking what it doesn’t like to building what it does.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt is a much-discussed fact that the environmental movement cut its teeth blocking things — mines, pipelines, power plants, and what have you. It is structured around blocking things. Habituated to it.However, what we need to do today is build, build, build — new renewable energy, batteries, transmission lines, and all the rest of the infrastructure of the net-zero economy. Green groups are as often an impediment to that as they are a help. So how can the green movement help things get built? How can it organize around saying yes?Recently, the activist organization 350.org hired Jeff Ordower, a 30-year veteran organizer with the labor and queer movements, in part to help figure these questions out. As director of North America for 350, Ordower will help lead a campaign focused on utilities standing in the way of clean energy. I talked with him about organizing around building instead of blocking, the right way to go after utilities, the role green groups can play in connecting vulnerable communities with IRA money, and what it means to focus on power. All right then, with no further ado, Jeff Ordower of 350, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jeff OrdowerThank you so much, David, for having me. I'm excited to be here.David RobertsOkay, well, I want to get to 350 and climate activism in a second, but first I'd like to just hear a little bit about your history in activism, which is mainly on the labor side. And what I'd really like to hear, and this is probably like a whole pot of its own, but insofar as you can summarize, I'd love to hear from your perspective when you were working as an organizer in labor. Looking over the fence at climate activism, what was your sort of take or critique like from the labor perspective? What did you think climate activism was doing right or wrong?Or what did you think you could bring to climate activism from the labor side?Jeff OrdowerYeah, I both did labor organizing and I come out of base-building community organizing. I actually come out of the notorious ACORN was where I spent the first half of my organizing.David RobertsThe late, lamented —Jeff OrdowerYeah. So it's very similar. But I started in labor, moved to ACORN very quickly, and then as ACORN was destroyed, both helped to start new community organizing efforts. And then lately, over the last few years have been involved with labor organizing. And it's interesting because I really started tracking what was happening in climate around Copenhagen, which was 2008, 2009, at the same time where ACORN was going through its difficulties. And we were trying to figure out what to build and how to build it and how to build something that was more intersectional. So I was — the personal piece of my story is I was working in St. Louis, which is where I'm from, and part of what we do as community organizers is think about how do we challenge the local power structure?It's about power and it's about how we build power for folks who don't have the power that they need and help collectively do that. And St. Louis is, like many midwestern towns, is kind of a branch office for many Fortune 500 companies these days. So the most powerful players in the region were coal companies. Peabody Coal was the largest private sector coal company in the world. Arch coal was the second largest in North America.Both were headquartered in the St. Louis region because it's at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. So, as the only Fortune 500 company in the city limits of St. Louis that was getting tax breaks, there were lots of reasons to fight Peabody and so started on a campaign about that, but there was also this tremendous excitement that was happening. So we were both at the beginning of the Obama administration. There was a time of great hope. For those of us who —David RobertsI recall vaguely, vaguely distantly.Jeff OrdowerWell that's interesting. So, for climate folks, they're like, "Oh, this is not a time of great hope." But the fact that after six or seven attempts, depending on how you count it, at winning health care for everyone in the country, I look back at that early days of Obama and say, wow, we got financial reform to some degree, but we got health care was the most important thing that changed so many people's lives. So I actually think climate folks view that era a little bit differently than we might in having really a generational win. And I'm sure we'll get into this a little bit later, but it is how I think about IRA is also the next generation or the next generational win that we've gotten.But, looking at that, I think the sheer number of resources that the climate movement was mustering — you know there were many organizations in St. Louis at the time that had

How can the US make it easier, faster, and cheaper for homeowners to install rooftop solar? In this episode, Sunrun CEO Mary Powell shares her vision for boosting not only residential solar, but other forms of residential electrification too.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn Australia, one out of three households has solar panels on the roof. In the US, it’s one out of 25. That probably has something to do with the fact that in the US, rooftop solar is twice as expensive, twice the hassle, and takes twice as long to get installed.Why is the process so broken? And what could be done to make it smoother and faster?To discuss these and related matters, I went to the source: Mary Powell, the CEO of Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential rooftop solar company — or more accurately, the nation’s largest residential electrification company.Before taking the top spot at Sunrun, Powell spent more than 20 years in leadership at Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest power utility and a nationally recognized pioneer in clean energy. Sunrun brought her on to help the company move into products — batteries, EV chargers, virtual power plants — that were once thought the province of utilities.I talked with her about how to speed up the rooftop solar interconnection process, the role of net metering, Sunrun’s move into vehicle charging and VPPs, and the future of distributed energy. All right, then, with no further ado, Mary Powell of Sunrun. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Mary PowellOh, my pleasure. I was looking forward to chatting with you.David RobertsMary, I'm looking at my notes here and I have — let me just count real quick — one million questions to ask you. So, we're going to have to move quick here because I've got so much. But just by way of framing, I was in Australia recently and was listening to them talk about their rooftop solar success story there, the sort of rooftop solar miracle. So the US is at, I think, something like 4% rooftop solar penetration. And Australia is up around 30%, 35%, something like that. One out of every three households, mainly because it is two to three times less expensive and way, way, way faster to get on your roof there.Most of what I want to talk about are in different forms. How can the US process be made cheaper and faster? That's kind of, I think, the theme of our discussion here today. But before we get to the reality of why things take so long, let's talk a little bit about perception. So I guess Sunrun is now the biggest residential solar company in the world — I know, in the US.Mary PowellYeah, certainly in the US. Yeah, we're the largest, not just residential solar company, but we are the largest in the combination of solar-plus-storage. So we really see ourselves as a clean energy lifestyle company, and we're really well positioned to meet customers wherever they are on their clean energy journey and help them transform their lives to something that's more affordable, certainly something that's cleaner. So we have solar, we have storage, we have sophisticated electric panels, we have EV chargers, and of course, we have that amazing partnership with Ford on the F-150 that you can use to back up your home.David RobertsGoing to get into all that later.Mary PowellGood.David RobertsBut I assume as part of what you do, you do a lot of consumer research, a lot of talking to homeowners. So the first thing I'm interested in really is what do US homeowners say they want when they come to you? Why are they now installing rooftop solar and batteries? Why are they doing it? Or perhaps even more to the point, what do they say about why they're not doing it? What are the sort of pain points you hear about from customers?Mary PowellSo the reason customers are going solar, and increasingly, as I said, solar-plus-storage in California now we're up to probably about an 80% attachment rate. So customers that are going solar really want the benefits of storing their energy as well and having the resilience and the comfort and the peace of mind that comes with that. Back to what I'm hearing from customers: It's so interesting. I would say for so many years, largely it was an industry where customers were enticed to go solar to save money, so they knew they could save money off of what they were paying their utility.And Dave, that's still true. I mean, in every market that we sell in, the cost per kilowatt hour that you generate on your roof is lower than the cost you're paying your utility. So many customers still find the value of savings to be very appealing, but it really has evolved over time where so many customers, I talk to customers every single week as well as I've worked in our stores and I've been in customers homes. And increasingly what you're hearing is that they just want stability. I mean, I've heard so many customers have said to me, "Mary, like, it's fine if I save money, but honestly, I just want greater independence and

Clean-energy transmission lines in the US are horribly congested, and buildout of new ones is agonizingly slow. Yet while other parts of the world use grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) to significantly improve performance of existing transmission lines, the US system has been resistant to deploying them. In this episode, Julia Selker, head of a GETs trade group called the WATT Coalition, discusses the potential of GETs. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript) Text transcript:David RobertsOne of the primary threats to the clean energy buildout spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act is a lack of transmission. Models show that hitting our Paris climate targets would involve building two to three times our current transmission capacity, yet new lines are desperately slow to come online. Meanwhile, existing lines are congested and hundreds of gigawatts of new clean energy sits waiting in interconnection queues.Wouldn’t it be cool if there were some relatively cheap and speedy ways to get more capacity out of the transmission infrastructure we’ve already built? To ease some of that congestion and get more clean energy online while we wait for new lines to be completed?As it happens, there are. They are called grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs, and they can improve the performance of existing transmission lines by as much as 40 percent. It’s just that, in the US at least, utilities aren’t deploying them. They’ve been tested and deployed all over the world, but the US system has resisted using them at scale. I contacted Julia Selker, head of the Working for Advanced Transmission Technologies (WATT) Coalition, a GETs trade group, to discuss exactly what these technologies are, their enormous potential to ease grid congestion, why utilities still resist them, and what kinds of policies can help move them along. So with no further ado, Julia Selker. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Julia SelkerThank you so much for having me.David RobertsThis is, to me, a very exciting topic that is like many exciting topics in the world of energy, somewhat obscured behind a wall of jargon and technical sounding terms. So we're going to do our best up front to decode some of this and lay it out in a simple way so people can grasp it. But before we get to GETs, before we get to the GETs, let's talk just a little bit about the need here, the need for more capacity on the transmission system. Run down a little bit, because I know you've done or have been involved in some research on grid congestion and things like that, give us a little rundown of why this topic is so important right now.Julia SelkerYeah, absolutely. The United States is basically desperate for transmission capacity and there are a few ways that we see that in data, and one is transmission congestion. So this is a quantification of the cost of a transmission constraint. So if you don't have enough transmission to deliver the cheapest electricity, you'll then have to turn on a thermal generator or something more expensive than a wind or solar generator, for instance, and that will increase costs for consumers. So back in the day, let's say 2016, the market monitors found $3.7 billion of congestion in the regional transmission organizations and the independent system operators that actually transparently report congestion data.And if you scale that to the whole US, we're looking at about $6.5 billion in congestion in 2016. But in 2022, the national number was over $20 billion in congestion.David Roberts20 billion.Julia Selker20 billion. It's rising astronomically. And it makes sense: There's more low cost generation available, gas prices are going up. So the redispatch cost is another term for this is going to get higher as you have to curtail more renewables and dispatch more expensive generation because there's just not enough transmission to deliver all the clean energy. So we also see this in clean energy interconnection costs and delays. Back when there was a lot of headroom on the grid from large scale infrastructure expansion back in the day that projects could interconnect at lower costs and with faster timelines.But now projects are seeing bigger and bigger upgrades, all that headroom is used up and projects are seeing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in transmission upgrades that need to happen in order for them to interconnect to the grid.David RobertsVolts listeners will recall just a few weeks ago had a pod on interconnection queues and they'll recall that sort of you get in a single file line and if you happen to be the project that triggers a need for a transmission upgrade, that whole cost gets added to your project, which renders many projects unviable. And that's just happening more and more often now because the grid is more and more congested and there's more and more upgrades needed. So it's making that process take longer too.Julia SelkerYeah, and beyond the cost. I've heard from clean energy developers that they are looking at se

In this episode, Reed Hundt, the CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, discusses the merits of green banks, quasi-public or nonprofit institutions that provide seed capital to accelerate the growth of clean energy. There are more than 20 active green banks at the state level. Now Biden has proposed a federal green bank. Hundt explains how it could help.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Reed Hundt, August 13, 2021(PDF version)(Active version)As we speak, Democrats in Congress are at work putting together a budget reconciliation bill that will include enormous swathes of President Biden’s agenda, including his climate agenda.One of the policies being discussed for inclusion is the creation of a “Clean Energy & Sustainability Accelerator,” more commonly known as a green bank.The idea of a federal green bank has been floating around forever. There was one in the ill-fated Waxman-Markey climate bill of 2009 (which never made it through the Senate) and there’s been one introduced in Congress virtually every year since. But this time it might happen! So it’s time to brush up on what a green bank is and what it does.It would not, contrary to some popular misconceptions, be an agency of the federal government, nor would it finance projects purely with federal money. Rather, it would be an independent, nonprofit entity that uses an initial grant of federal money to pull private capital off the sidelines and into climate-related projects. After the initial grant, the bank would be self-sustaining.The model has been tested: there are green banks in more than a dozen states, which have generated $5.3 billion in clean energy investment since 2011, including $1.5 billion in 2019 alone. And there are more than 20 states where the process of establishing a green bank has begun.These state- and city-level green banks are popular and successful, but because states and cities tend to be short on funds, they too often lack the capital needed to fund worthy projects. Right now there are more than $20 billion worth of projects that are eligible for green bank funding and are now waiting. One of the roles of a federal green bank would be to capitalize all those local banks, to get all those projects rolling.To learn more about green banks, I was happy to talk to their greatest champion: Reed Hundt, the co-founder and CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital. Hundt has been advocating for green banks for over a decade — including seven years on the board of the Connecticut Green Bank — and it is largely through the coalition’s work that the network of state and local green banks has been established.I was eager to talk with Hundt about how a national green bank would work, the kinds of projects it would fund, how it would account for equity, and the potential if it’s done right, for a green bank to accelerate the clean energy transition. Reed Hundt, welcome to Volts, thank you for coming.Reed Hundt:Thank you very much. I was talking to a friend of mine in Tennessee and he told me that you're from Tennessee. He said that you were the best analyst and commentator about energy issues in the whole state of Tennessee.David Roberts:I don't know whether that's damning by faint praise?Reed Hundt:Well then I said to my friend, “No, no, the two of you are,” because the person I was talking to was my high school classmate Al Gore.David Roberts:Oh, funny! Yes, he and I have bonded over our Tennessee roots before. I want to talk about green banks with you, but real quick, by way of setting context before that, let’s talk history. Obama faced a similar situation [to the one Biden faces] — different in a lot of ways, similar in some ways. But you wrote a book about Obama's response to the crises he faced that was extremely critical of Obama. So as we contemplate what Biden should be doing in this similar situation, let's review real quickly, what did Obama do wrong and what does that tell us about how Biden should be approaching this mess?Reed Hundt:You're in a very small club, which is the club of people that know about the book called A Crisis Wasted, and as a founding member of the club, I’m very happy to have a new member. So the problem in 2008-09 was that, as Rahm Emanuel said at the time, a crisis is too good to waste. But all of the advice to the President-elect was small where it should have been big, constrained where it should have been bold, and was short range rather than long range. The people were not badly motivated, but in retrospect and at the time, their counsel was insufficient to meet the needs, not only of the moment, but of the next 10 years. The big difference for the Biden administration, and indeed for the entire Democratic Party in the current year, is the decision from the very beginning of this presidency and of this particular Congress to follow what Larry Summers himself said in 2008: the risks of doing too little are much much worse than the risks of doing too much. Larry didn't follow his own advice then,

Energy storage as deployed on the US grid today has a dirty secret — it actually increases carbon emissions. In this episode, Tierra Climate founders Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet discuss their vision to incentivize emission reductions by making batteries and other energy storage eligible for carbon offset.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt is widely understood that decarbonizing the grid will require a large amount of energy storage. What is much less widely understood is that batteries on the grid today are generally not reducing carbon emissions — indeed, their day-to-day operation often has the effect of increasing them.Yes, you heard me right: most batteries on today's grid are responsible for net positive carbon emissions.I was quite disturbed when I first found out about this, mostly through the research of Eric Hittinger at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and I wrote a piece on it on Vox way back in 2018.Contemporary research suggests that nothing has changed in the ensuing five years — most batteries still behave in a way that increases emissions. But a new startup called Tierra Climate is trying to change that. It wants to incentivize emission-reducing behavior in batteries by making it an eligible carbon offset. Just as a renewable energy producers can make extra money through the sale of renewable energy credits (RECs), battery operators could make extra money through the sale of carbon offsets on the voluntary market — but only if they change the way they operate.It’s an intriguing idea and the only real solution I’ve seen proposed to a problem that no one else is even talking about. So I wanted to chat with founders Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet about why batteries increase emissions today, what incentive they would need to change their behavior, and what’s required to set up an offset product. And yes, I recall that Volts recently featured an episode extremely critical of carbon offsets — we’ll get into that too.So, then, with no further ado, Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Emma KonetThanks for having us.David RobertsEmma, let's start with you. You worked at a battery company before jumping to this startup. Let's walk through a few basics here. Let's just start with this question. If I'm an investor and I want to build a big battery and attach it to the grid, how would I make money? What are the sort of routes through which I could make income with a battery?Emma KonetSo batteries typically have three ways in which they make money. The first one is, I think, what everyone traditionally thinks of a battery doing, and it's called energy arbitrage. And basically that just means that a battery buys power when the price is low and it sells power when the price is high.David RobertsRight.Emma KonetAnd the difference between those prices is what the battery is paid. Of course, some energy is lost through the process of storing it, and so batteries are not 100% efficient. So that's kind of the traditional idea of how batteries operate. But that's actually not really what a lot of batteries are doing on the grid today. Instead they provide what are called ancillary services and those are basically products that help to keep the grid frequency at 60 Hz. It's really important for reliability, just in everyday power grid operations, that that happens and the grid operates more efficiently when it's in a tighter band, around 60 Hz.Batteries are really good at providing those products because they can very quickly ramp up and down and they can provide those products around the clock.David RobertsYeah, this is a really cool thing about batteries, just to sort of insert kind of an aside here is those grid services used to only be able to be provided by giant spinning mass, giant fossil fuel power plants. So it's very cool that we have this basically digital source now of these grid services — is much more precise.Emma KonetExactly. And just much more efficient. So that's the second revenue stream available to batteries and then the third is what's called capacity revenue. And this is not available in every market, but it's basically available in every deregulated market outside of Texas. And it's like long-term grid planning. So the grid operator looks at the expected demand forecast on the time horizons of years rather than days or weeks and determines how much power plant generation capacity it's going to need to satisfy that demand in the future. Then it creates a market to establish the price of what basically it costs to bring new generation online to meet that demand and also to satisfy power plants that are retiring and going offline and that we need to backfill. So that is another service that batteries can offer.David RobertsPaying them to be available basically.Emma KonetExactly. Yeah, exactly.David RobertsAnd you mentioned this, but maybe it's worth clarifying a little bit. Capacity payments are obviously only

In this episode, right-wing media critic Matt Sheffield and I discuss the disinformation crisis and the climate change crisis, and how they are deeply intertwined.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsMatt Sheffield started his first conservative media website, bashing news anchor Dan Rather for liberal bias, way back in 2000, and in subsequent years became a key figure in right-wing media criticism. But the rise of Trump left him disillusioned and he has since become a prominent critic of right-wing media. He now runs a site called Flux dedicated to accurate, inclusive journalism.Last week, Matt and I got together on one of these live Twitter Spaces things — a glorified conference call, basically, to which people can tune in and ask questions — and had a wide-ranging conversation about the disinformation crisis, how it manifested in climate change, and what can be done about it. The audio was archived, available exclusively to Flux and Volts subscribers. I hope you enjoy it.Matt SheffieldWe're doing a space tonight to discuss climate change and the birth of the disinformation economy. And David has been a longtime climate change correspondent and environmental columnist for a while, and he's also the proprietor and publisher, writer, et cetera, of Volts, a newsletter, which he started one year ago today, which he was just recounting that for our previous space, which I accidentally ended somehow. So your experience overall has been pretty good, you were saying? And I think I ended the space inadvertently right after you said you work better alone.David RobertsYes —Matt SheffieldI inadvertently proved your point, I think.David RobertsYes. This is why I don't talk to people. Yeah, it's been going great. I have found that readers are excited to go deeper and wonkier and share my obsessions. I'm sure different writers have different opinions about this, but I much prefer it over writing for a general interest publication.Matt SheffieldAnd you wrote a retrospective on your site today that — one of the things you said is that you appreciated not having to reintroduce topics over and over again in terms of — you assume that your current readers actually know who you are and something about the material, I guess.David RobertsRight, yes. It's the famed return to blogging. It is a persistent audience who will follow me over time and thus who I don't have to explain that climate change is bad in every post anymore.Matt SheffieldYeah. And I guess it's a way of trying to have a continued conversation rather than one that starts over de novo every time. Right?David RobertsYes. And it's explicitly I mean, I did it knowing that I would be writing for a much smaller audience. It's not a mass audience play. It's very much for a self-selecting group of people who are more than average interested in my subject matter. So I think it can still have influence because I think the people who do read it are sprinkled throughout the world, the energy world, in high places. But I've basically transitioned away from mass writing, I guess is what I'd say.Matt SheffieldSo now, before you were doing just for those again who hadn't seen what you were doing before you were working at Vox and then before that you were working at Grist, which is a website that's still out there doing climate coverage. How is it different now compared to your Grist days would you say?David RobertsOh goodness. Well for one thing I didn't know what the hell I was doing back in my Grist days. I was hired at Grist as an editorial assistant in I think like 2004 with no background in journalism and no real background in environmentalism which is what Grist was supposedly about and knowing nothing at all about climate change or anything really. So the ten years I spent at Grist were in retrospect it's something I think journalists don't really get anymore these days, which was it was a place where I could labor in obscurity while I learned what the hell I was doing.Matt SheffieldYeah. And I think that's an interesting observation you make there because that is one of the things that's definitely very different about media now is that you and I are both Gen Xers in our forties and in the old days, the media industry was very sort of anti young people in terms of letting them have public facing work to a large degree. And so basically they had people work as research assistants or as publicists or something like that —David RobertsOr come up through local papers. I'm old enough to remember when the way you came up through the reporting game is through local papers. And it's interesting if you go through that route you're taught a certain set of skills and rules and norms but I wasn't taught those at all. I had never had any experience in that world at all. So all I was reacting to and sort of shaping myself around was what do readers like? What is helpful to readers? And if you just follow that string you don't end up in the model of the inve

In this episode, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project shares a progressive vision for permitting reform and the factors that could speed up the US clean-energy buildout.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsTo achieve its Paris climate targets, the US is going to have to build out an enormous amount of clean energy and clean-energy infrastructure in coming years. But that buildout is going slowly — painfully, excruciatingly slowly — relative to the pace that is necessary.This has given rise to considerable debate on the left over what, exactly, is slowing things down. Much of that debate has come to focus on permitting, and more specifically, on permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.A deal that would have put some restrictions on NEPA in exchange for reforms to transmission planning was effectively killed by progressives toward the end of the last congressional session, leading many people inside and outside the climate movement to accuse progressives of being The Problem. They are so attached to slowing down fossil fuel development with NEPA, the accusation goes, that they are willing to live with it slowing clean energy. And that’s a bad trade.Progressives, not surprisingly, disagree! Their take on the whole permitting debate is summarized in a new paper from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Project: “A Progressive Vision for Permitting Reform.”The title is slightly misleading, since one of the central points of the paper is that permitting under NEPA is only a small piece of the puzzle — there are many other factors that play a role in slowing clean energy, and many other reforms that could do more to speed it up. I called up one of the paper’s co-authors, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project, to ask her about those other reforms, the larger political debate, and the progressive community’s take on speed. All right, then. With no further ado, Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project. Welcome to Volts, and thank you so much for coming.Johanna BozuwaThank you so much for having me, David.David RobertsThis is a hot topic, as you're well aware, permitting and the larger issues around it. And so, before we jump into specifics, I wanted to start with a few sort of broad, call them philosophical, questions.Johanna BozuwaPerfect.David RobertsAs you know, progressives have been under quite a bit of fire lately, not only from their typical opponents on the right and in the fossil fuel industry, but from a lot of sort of centrists and even a lot of sort of allies in the climate movement. For — I think the general idea is they are too attached to stopping fossil fuels and not yet supportive enough of building out renewable energy. And the mechanisms that they rely on to slow and stop fossil fuels are also slowing and stopping renewable energy. And so I think the general critique is that they ought to swing around and be more pro-building and loosen these requirements, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure you've heard all this.Johanna BozuwaYes.David RobertsSo I guess I'd just start with this question. Is, do you think the progressive — and by the way, I meant to say this by way of a caveat, I'm going to be sort of using you as a spokesperson for progressivism, which I think we both realize is ridiculous.Johanna BozuwaRight, exactly.David RobertsProgressives are heterogeneous just like anybody else. There's no official progressive position. But as a crude, let's just say as a crude instrument here, we're going to ask you to speak for that perspective as you see it.Johanna BozuwaPerfect.David RobertsSo in your opinion, do you think progressives have taken it into their heart that things are moving too slowly and they desperately need to move faster?Johanna BozuwaMy answer to that question is that I think speed is progressive. You know, David, I don't need to tell this to you or any of the people that listen to this podcast or even progressives. We're dealing with the existential threat of the climate crisis and lives are on the line. And so I think that as progressives, we do need to take the speed question seriously. And I think what I would push back on is the fact that people have this myopic focus on permitting as the thing that's slowing everything down. And especially when I'm talking about permitting, NEPA permitting.David RobertsRight. We're going to definitely get to that.Johanna BozuwaYeah. And I just think that when it comes to this question of "Do progressives believe in speed?" I think that they actually very much do. And one of the things that I get frustrated with sometimes, when I hear these arguments like "Oh, progressives don't want to build anything," I think what progressives are interested in is building the right thing. And if we think about the United States and how our energy system rolls out today, we have a real issue that fossil fuels can expand at the same time as renewable energy i

In this episode, Australian comedian Dan Ilic hosts me on The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsWhile I was down under in Australia, I appeared on a show called A Rational Fear, a pod about climate change which is, I’m told, the winner of Australia’s Best Comedy Podcast. More specifically, I appeared on a spinoff show they’re doing called [ahem] The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation, a series of interviews with climate types hosted by comedian and journalist Dan Ilic.It was short, and fun, so I figured, why not share it with the Volts audience? Enjoy, and do check out A Rational Fear some time — it’s quite delightful.Dan IlicI'm recording this on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I encourage you all to think about whose land you're on and the wealth of the life that you enjoy on that land and why you enjoy it. As we head into this referendum month, I think it's all upon us all to kind of think about listening more. And if you don't know what the Voice Referendum is all about, go and find out. Let's try listening.David RobertsDespite global warming, A Rational Fear is adding a little more hot air with long form discussions with climate leaders, good and bad.IntroThis is coal, don't be afraid. The — heat waves and drought — Greatest — mass extinction — Moral — we're facing a manmade disaster — Podcast — they're the climate criminals — of Our Generation. All of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax. The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation. GMPOOG for short.Dan IlicEvery now and then, the A Rational Fear podcast turns green. We talk to someone who is super interested and who lives and breathes climate on a podcast I like to call The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, or GMPOOG for short. And I'm excited for you all to meet our next GMPOOG guest. Since about 2015, I have been following his writing on Vox.com and the Grist, but in more recent years, I've been listening to his podcast and reading along with his newsletter. It is Volts, or rather the presenter and the writer of Volts podcast, David Roberts. Welcome to A Rational Fear.David RobertsSo glad to be here.Dan IlicOr welcome to The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation.David RobertsYeah, I'm not sure I can keep that acronym in my head.Dan IlicWell, the first guest on The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation was former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who coined the phrase that climate change was the greatest moral problem of our generation. So that's why we called GMPOOG, GMPOOG. You are one of the foremost experts when it comes to climate and energy. I love Volts. I devour it, I listen as often as I can. And for such a complex and often combative topic, quite frankly, your voice is so calming and reassuring.David RobertsThank you.Dan IlicI mean, you could sell anything, which is why you're here today. To sell us on small modular nuclear reactors.David RobertsExactly. And carbon capture and sequestration. That's my thing.Dan IlicWell, it's such a sprawling conversation I'd love to have with you. Let's start there. We do hear a lot from a very small subsection of our politics all about small modular nuclear reactors. In fact, Barnaby Joyce, who at one time was a leader of a party in this country, said, "People aren't talking about the cost of living down at the supermarket. They're talking about small modular nuclear reactors."David RobertsAre they?Dan IlicSo I want to ask you, David Roberts, is anybody talking about small modular nuclear reactors?David RobertsI mean, yes, people are talking and talking and talking about them. The more relevant question is anyone building small modular nuclear reactors? And the answer to that is a big no. So I think they play more of a rhetorical role than an actual physical role in the energy system.Dan IlicWhy is there this energy, for better, no pun intended there, around small modular nuclear reactors? Why is this conversation happening now? Why is there a big drumbeat happening not only in Australia but other countries for it when there are no working models anywhere in the world?David RobertsThere's two answers to that a cynical answer and a less cynical answer. The cynical answer is if you need something to say about climate policy and the other party has already claimed renewable energy, you need something to talk about, right? You need a climate policy and there's nothing left to grab but nuclear. And you want to claim to have a policy, but in practical terms, delay any actual real solutions. That's the cynical answer. The less cynical answer is renewable energy is variable. It comes and goes with the weather. So you need what's called firming. You need sources that can firm up renewable energy i.e. that you can turn on and off at will. And right now gas is serving that role. And so in a decarbonized system, you need something else to serve that role. So exactly what will serve that f

In this episode, Saul Griffith — co-founder of Rewiring America and, more recently, Rewiring Australia — chats about all the things that energy nerds love to chat about.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIf you are a Volts subscriber, you are almost certainly familiar with Saul Griffith. I've been following him and his work for years, and I think I can say without hyperbole that he is the smartest person I have ever met. An Australian by birth and an MIT PhD by training, he got his start as a tinkerer, inventor, and entrepreneur, responsible for, among other things, the kite-based wind power company Makani and the innovation incubator Otherlab.A few years ago, alarmed by the lack of progress on climate change, he turned his attention to public advocacy, authoring the book Electrify and co-founding Rewiring America. That organization has, in relatively little time, become incredibly influential among US thought leaders and policy makers. It played a key role in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.In 2021, Griffith and his family moved back to Australia, where he helped found Rewiring Australia, and sure enough, it has already become as or more influential than its American counterpart. As Volties know, I am currently down in Australia. I was scheduled to do a public event with Griffith, so I thought it would be fun to meet up a little beforehand to record a pod.Neither of us had particularly prepared for said pod, but it will not surprise you to hear that Griffith was nonetheless as fascinating and articulate as always, on subjects ranging from IRA to Australian rooftop solar to green steel. Enjoy.I won't belabor any further introductions. Saul, thanks for coming.Saul GriffithThanks for joining me in a strange little kissing booth in Sydney's central business district.David RobertsYes, we are. This is the second ever Volts recorded in person. And just so the audience knows, this came together at the last minute and neither of us have prepared at all. So we're all just freestyling here and we're just going to have a conversation. So, Saul, let's start with you were intimately involved in the sausage making of IRA. Why don't you just start with telling us a little bit about how on earth someone like you ended up in the halls of DC with the ear of lawmakers. What's the origin story of this?Saul GriffithThe romantic origin story is just before I married my wife and I think it was 2007, I said, if the world hasn't made sufficient progress on climate change by 2020, can I become an ecoterrorist? To which, it was so far in the future, she said yes.David RobertsSurely, well, by then, surely.Saul GriffithAnd then 2019 came around and I said, remember that you made that promise to me. And she said, yes, but we didn't have two children, so you're not allowed to do that. And she sort of actually first planted the idea in my head. You're always complaining that the hardest thing to do in energy technology is the regulatory stack. So why don't you focus on regulatory and policy for a while? I give you leave. We can afford it. See what you can do. Right about then, I was having another conversation with a guy called Alex Laskey. He was a founder of Opower.He wanted to talk to me about heat pumps. We were working on some new heat pump technologies and the conversation spiraled out of control and we said, well, working on heat pumps is good, but these Democrats keep saying climate change. So this is in the primaries. Every time any of them say climate change, they wince a little bit and try to shy away from what you would do. So we started Rewiring America. We booked a few tickets to DC, we took a few trips to DC and we thought that we were going to be an advocacy organization, trying to help Democrats talk positively about what the energy transition could be, how we could save money, how our health outcomes could improve, how we could change local community economics.So we were trundling along with that effort, working with all of the presidential candidates at the time, and I can retroactively say I loved them all exactly equally.David RobertsDidn't you love Jay Inslee just a slight bit more, though?Saul GriffithUnderstanding where you're from, I know why you say that. And I did love Jay Inslee just a little bit more and just a little bit more than Jay Inslee I also loved Elizabeth Warren.David RobertsYes, RIP, I know she's still alive.Saul GriffithI'm sure she's, well, maybe not politically.David RobertsBut RIP to her.Saul GriffithI have a habit of judging people by their staff and it was so obvious to me that her staff loved her and believed in the mission and it was extraordinary to behold. So we were doing that and then the election was won and it became — we'd hired, Alex and I are probably both ADHD to an extreme, so we hired a competent adult to run the organization Rewiring America, a guy called Ari Matusiak. He'd actually worked in the White House under Biden, worked on similarl

In this episode, activist Miriam Lyons gives an overview of Australian climate policy past, present, and future.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsG’day mates! As you all know, I’m in Australia at the moment, on a whirlwind speaking/listening tour regarding this country’s response to the Inflation Reduction Act.I’ve been learning a ton about Australia’s history with climate policy, its clean-energy resources, and its current politics. It’s all much more complex and interesting than I appreciated before coming, so I thought it would be cool to record a podcast “in the field,” while I’m here, with someone who could provide an overview of all that stuff. To my great delight, I was joined — live! in studio! — by Miriam Lyons. Lyons’ resume is … daunting. She founded a progressive think tank called the Centre for Policy Development and led it for seven years; she led the climate justice campaign at GetUp, the Australian equivalent of Moveon.org; she has written or co-written two books on economics and the clean-energy transition; and currently, she is director of the Australian Economic Transformation program at the Sunrise Project, which works to scale social movements and accelerate the transition.Needless to say, she is quite familiar with the ins and outs of Australian climate politics! We had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion. Enjoy.So, Miriam Lyons. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Miriam LyonsThank you so much. Very excited to be on the pod.David RobertsThis is excellent. Oh, also, Volts listeners might be excited to know that this is the first Volts that I've ever recorded in person in the same room with my guests. That's exciting too. I know usually I'm a hermit at home, so this is cool. I would like to do more of it. Okay, so let's start then with a little bit of capsule history. I think the Volts audience is aware of the agita of climate politics in the US. From sort of Waxman-Markey era of 2009, 2010, all the way through the turbulence, et cetera, through IRA.So let's talk a bit, a little bit about what's been happening in Australia during that same time period. Give us a sort of summary of the history.Miriam LyonsI've been thinking about how to sum up all of Australian climate politics really briefly. Okay, so in a galaxy far, far away. A colonized country was sitting on one of the world's biggest carbon bombs, and what happened next is an epic tale of triumph and betrayal. I think the TL;DR version is that we are one of the world's biggest exporters of climate pollution. We are also the sunniest continent on Earth and one of the windiest. So we have this enormous potential to be a massive exporter of climate solutions. And we're currently hitting our crossroads, which is that moment where we decide whether we want to be a Kodak country that is so attached to its old technology that it's failing to notice —David RobertsOh, that Kodak. For the minute. I had the bear in my head. I was like, wait, what's the bear analogy? Oh, and the photograph analogy.Miriam LyonsYeah, that one. It's just like, oh, there's all this sun and wind. What could we possibly do instead of killing the world with our coal and gas exports? So that informs a whole lot of the history of our climate politics, of course. And our fossil fuel lobby have been experts in using their enormous profits to win friends and influence policy and more importantly, to bully politicians when they don't get their way. And that playbook has worked really well for them for quite a long time, but it is now running out of oomph. And I think, you know, a big question now is whether our major parties will notice that the gun that the industry is holding to their heads doesn't have quite so many bullets in it anymore, but to kind of go back in time:John Howard was our second longest-serving Prime Minister and a climate denier. He was unseated by Kevin Rudd in 2007 for two main reasons. So one was a massive backlash against his attacks on workers' rights, but the other reason was his failure to act on climate change. I saw the polls at the time. Those were the consistent two main reasons that voters switched from him to Kevin Rudd. So Kevin Rudd came in, he signed the Kyoto Protocol and he introduced a very modest emissions trading bill. So it was going to cut emissions by about 5% and any stronger emissions cuts were going to be conditional on what other countries did.David RobertsLet's discuss the political parties here. I forgot, we have different political parties at play. So the Conservative Party here is called the Liberal Party.Miriam LyonsYes. So this is down under everything's topsy turvy. The Liberals are the conservatives.David RobertsExactly, southern hemisphere thing. And the liberal party or the center-left party is the Labor Party.Miriam LyonsThe Labor Party.David RobertsSo Rudd was of the Labor Party.Miriam LyonsRudd was of the Labor Party and the Labor Party was born from the workers' right

The US is nowhere close to being able to build the amount of long-distance power lines it will need for a clean energy transition. In this episode, electricity transmission expert Liza Reed breaks down the many problems with the current dysfunctional system, and what it will take to build up the needed infrastructure. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsElectricity transmission has been having a moment lately, getting more attention from analysts and policymakers than it has in … well, at least in my lifetime. There's good reason for this: every single model of deep decarbonization shows that, to get there, the US will need lots, lots more long-distance high-voltage power lines, to carry renewable energy from the remote areas where it is concentrated to the urban load centers where it is needed. The problem is, the current system for planning and building those long-distance power lines is utterly dysfunctional, at every level, which means they aren't getting built. The US will not decarbonize on time or on budget unless it can figure this out.It's a thorny, complicated subject — not just understanding all the flaws in the current process, but figuring out how to move forward with solutions. Loyal Volts subscribers will recall that I wrote a five-part series on these issues earlier this year, but if you're looking for a more compact & polished version, I highly recommend a newly released report, jointly produced by the Niskanen Center & the Clean Air Task Force, called, "How are we going to build all that clean energy infrastructure?" The report emerged from a workshop held with a variety of professionals across the industry and serves as a plain-language summary of the problems facing transmission in the US today and the candidate solutions. It's remarkably readable, even for non-nerds — I recommend checking it out.To walk through those problems and possible solutions, I'm excited to have as my guest today Liza Reed, the Research Manager for Low Carbon Technology Policy at Niskanen. Reed completed and defended a dissertation on these issues just a few years ago and has been a crucial help to me in parsing through them, so I'm thrilled she's joining me today, so that Volts listeners can also benefit. Liza Reed, welcome to Volts.Liza ReedThank you so much. It's wonderful to be here.David RobertsSo the Niskanen Center has just come out with this report about transmission and its many challenges. So I thought the best way to structure the conversation would be to kind of walk through the report a little bit. But first, sort of by way of context, tell us, what is the transmission challenge in the United States? What are the decarbonization models telling us about what we need?Liza ReedThe challenge is that we don't have enough transmission and that we need more transmission.David RobertsPretty simple.Liza ReedYep, it's that simple.Liza ReedAnd we don't have the right mechanisms in place to get the kind of transmission that we need.David RobertsBut when we say need more relative to what we have, are we talking like a 20% increase, doubling, tripling? Give us a ballpark figure.Liza ReedThere's sort of a range of estimates that come out of reports, but generally in the double to triple in the capacity is what we're seeing coming out of these decarbonization reports. So that's in the gigawatt miles, is sort of the metric.David RobertsAnd we're not building anywhere close to that pace.Liza ReedExactly. Not at the speed we need and particularly not at the type that we need because transmission is being built. And this is one of the challenges when we talk about this decarbonization challenge, is that there is transmission being built. But transmission is generally defined as anything over 100 kilovolts. And the type of transmission that is going to move a lot of power quickly and over long distances is 500 kilovolts on that high range. So there's a ton of gigawatt miles being built between 100 kilovolts and sort of 345 kilovolts compared to what we're getting at these higher voltages that can transfer a lot more power, go a lot longer distances that provide a different kind of resilience and access to different power in different geographic regions.David RobertsRight. So the ones that are getting built are generally, I guess local is not quite the right word, but sort of like a utility will build a line within its territory to connect or strengthen two of it's —Liza ReedExactly.David RobertsAnd what we need are these longer ones between territories, between regions, possibly national. So we're nowhere close on track. And so let's go through — the way you structure the report is around the five P's of transmission. So I thought we would walk through the P's. And what's going wrong with them currently. The first one is planning. So as I understand it, basically utilities have their own planning processes and that's basically what they use to decide on transmission.But then there are other en

In this episode, clean grid expert Chaz Teplin demystifies interconnection queues.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBy now, you’ve probably heard that tons of new renewable energy projects are “stuck in the interconnection queues,” unable to connect to the grid and produce electricity until grid operators get around to approving them, which can take up to five years in some areas. And you might have heard that FERC recently implemented some reforms of the interconnection queue process in hopes of speeding it up.It all seems like a pretty big deal. But as I think about it, it occurs to me that I don’t really know what an interconnection queue is or why they work the way they do. So I’m going to talk to an expert — Chaz Teplin, who works on carbon-free grids with RMI — to get the lowdown.We’re going to talk through the basics of interconnection queues, why they’re so slow, what RTOs and FERC are doing to reform them, and what remains to be done (namely some friggin’ regional transmission planning).With no further ado, Chaz Teplin. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Chaz TeplinThanks for having me.David RobertsYou know, as I said in my intro, it seems like the clean energy community at this point has heard the term interconnection queue enough times that they all know it enough to say it, right. We know on some level that interconnection queues are slowing things down and they're backed up and that's why we're not building renewable energy as fast as we should be. But I suspect that quite a few of my listeners are roughly where I am, which is that's basically where my knowledge runs dry. I can say the words, so I'm excited to talk to you about what the heck they are, why they exist, etc., how to solve them, etc.So maybe let's just start with why is it that all of a sudden everybody's talking about interconnection queues? Why has this come to the top of the pile recently?Chaz TeplinYeah, everybody's talking about interconnection queues and there's been a recent order from FERC amid the hullabaloo. Right. So I think it's a good news, bad news story. The good news is that there's currently two terawatts of generators asking to connect to the US grid. And almost all of that two terawatts is clean energy, wind, solar and storage. So for those of us that have been in the business for a while, this is unbelievably great news. That means there's so many projects out there of clean energy mostly there's some gas, but clean energy mostly that believe it's economic to connect to the grid and they're willing to pay a fee in order to ask to connect.David RobertsAnd how much is that relative to what's currently on the grid?Chaz TeplinYeah, it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but two terawatts asking to connect 1.25 terawatts approximately on the US grid today.David RobertsRight. So there's more waiting to get on than exists currently on the grid. Now, we know, I'm sure you're going to say, we're going to say probably 50 times during this pod, just because something's in the queue doesn't mean it will necessarily get built. So it's not like all of that two terawatts is real or inevitable, but still, the fact that more is waiting to get on the grid than currently exists on the grid is quite striking.Chaz TeplinThat's right. And every year more is asking to connect, right? So, yeah, absolutely, it's not going to all get built. But I think it's a fairly clear demand signal that generators and developers are giving. They want to connect to the grid. They believe they can make money doing so, so it's great news.David RobertsAnd yet they are stuck there.Chaz TeplinSo that's the good news. The bad news is twofold. First, say I'm a wind or solar generator developer wanting to connect to the grid. It's going to take me years after I ask, before I even find out if I'm allowed to connect. Three, sometimes even five or more years. It depends on the grid and some of the details, but it takes years. And that adds cost and obviously time to your project that you don't want. And that's unfortunate. And second, it's bad because a lot of times what the grid operator comes back with is a really large bill that could easily make it so that your project is uncompetitive, no longer makes sense.And so you see high dropout rates. So yeah, the queue is huge. That's good. It shows that there's demand, but it's bad because projects take too long to get through the queue and even find out what the cost is going to be to connect. And often those costs are high.David RobertsThis might even be too obvious to say, but I think it's worth emphasizing at the outset that it's just a little crazy. Anyone who's an investor or who's tried to manage a project or build a project, just imagine if you had to say to your investors, not only like, this is a worthy project now, but this will be worthy in three years, or it will be worthy in five years. How do you know? It's just an insane addition of uncertainty and

In this episode, influential climate blogger Joe Romm discusses whether carbon offsets are, per the title of his recent white paper, “unscalable, unjust, and unfixable.”(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCarbon offsets — whereby one party pays another party to reduce carbon emissions — are an extremely convenient thing to have for people, businesses, and institutions that have money to spend, want to do something green, and either won't or can't reduce their own emissions.So offset markets have flourished for decades, even in the face of investigation after investigation, exposé after exposé, showing that the emissions reductions they represent are dubious or outright fraudulent.Things may be coming to a head, though, especially as it slowly sinks in that the Paris Agreement in many ways renders the entire enterprise of offsets moot. If everyone is trying to get as close as possible to zero emissions by 2050, what is gained by trading those reductions back and forth?A white paper digging deep into these subjects was recently published by none other than Joe Romm. Romm has a PhD in physics from MIT and worked at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, but most people in my world know him as one of the earliest and most influential climate bloggers. He’s also authored numerous books on climate solutions.As of earlier this year, he is now a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, being run by climate scientist Michael Mann. His first report is on offsets, and it’s a doozy. I called to talk with him about the role offsets have played in the past, the reforms the UN is attempting to make to them, and their future in a post-Paris world.Okay, with no further ado, Joe Romm, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Joe RommOh, well, thank you so much for having me, Dave.David RobertsYou know, it's funny. I'm sure you will resonate with this. Probably the number one question I get asked my entire friggin career is people writing in to say, "Hey, such and such, my utility or some firm or some company is offering me these voluntary offsets. Are they worth it? Is it worth it doing this?" And I've been meaning forever and ever and ever to do something squarely on offsets, because what I always want to tell people is, like, "No, they're kind of junkie," but I don't want to exaggerate or stereotype. And I thought maybe I was missing some nuances.So then I read your paper and realized I was missing a bunch of nuances, but they're all nuances. Showing that offsets are way worse than I imagined. Far worse than I had even dreamed. So let's get into it. Let's just start, though, in case any listeners out there don't know exactly what we're talking about. Just what is a carbon offset? And there's two basic kinds the sort of mandatory kind and the voluntary kind just run real quick through what an offset is.Joe RommSure. Well, I use a definition from the General Accounting Office: Reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from an activity in one place to compensate for emissions elsewhere. So a typical transaction is the developed country or a company, instead of reducing its own CO2 emissions, pays a developing country to reduce its emissions by an equivalent amount instead. And then if the buyer purchases enough offsets, they've been going around calling themselves carbon neutral or net zero. And I would say the interaction that most people have had with offsets, the most common one is when you're buying an airline ticket and you sort of have that option to spend a few dollars to offset your emissions, usually by planting trees.And the short answer is don't waste your money.David RobertsRight. But the idea behind it originally, and they go way, way back, the idea behind it originally is that it's kind of expensive to reduce emissions in developed countries and wealthy democracies, and there's lots of super cheap reductions waiting to be had in developing countries. So the idea was, let's flow some money from developed countries to developing countries. You'll help do some virtuous projects there and we'll reduce emissions. And it doesn't matter where you reduce emissions, right, because it's all one atmosphere and you'll get cheap reductions. That was the driving idea. And conceptually speaking, it's not crazy.It just kind of turns out that every particular turns out to be difficult to do in a rational way. So we're going to get to some specifically sort of modern or contemporary issues around offsets relating to the Paris Agreement and how that kind of changes the whole playing field. But before we even get there, let's just talk about the history of offsets and the issues that face them, the difficulties. This basic idea of like, I reduce emissions here and I sell it to you and then you count it against your total, the basic issues that they have faced.And I feel like every couple of years I see another big comprehensive sort of re

Geothermal developer Fervo Energy has successfully brought online the first ever full-scale commercial power plant sourcing from enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) — a groundbreaking development both literally and figuratively. In this episode, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer discusses the company’s accomplishment and where flexible geothermal is headed.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsTraditional geothermal power, which has been around for over a century, exploits naturally occurring fissures underground, pushing water through them to gather heat and run a turbine. Unfortunately, those fissures only occur naturally in particular geographies, limiting geothermal’s reach. For decades, engineers and entrepreneurs have dreamed of creating their own fissures in the underground rock, which would allow them to drill geothermal wells almost anywhere.These kind of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) have been attempted again and again since the 1970s, with no luck getting costs down low enough to be competitive. Despite dozens of attempts, there has never been a working commercial enhanced geothermal power plant.Until now.Last week, the geothermal developer Fervo Energy announced that its first full-scale power plant passed its production test phase with flying colors. With that, Fervo has, at long last, made it through all the various tests and certifications needed to prove out its technology. It now has a working, fully licensed power plant, selling electricity on the wholesale market, and enough power purchase agreements (PPAs) with eager customers to build many more. EGS is now a real thing — the first new entrant into the power production game in many decades.Here at Volts we are unabashed geothermal nerds, so naturally I was excited to discuss this news with Fervo co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer, an ex-oil-and-gas engineer who moved into geothermal a decade ago with a vision of how to make it work: he would borrow the latest technologies from the oil and gas sector. Ten years later, he’s pulled it off. I talked with Latimer about how EGS works, the current geographical and size limitations, how he plans to get his technology on a rapid learning curve to bring down costs, the value of clean firm power, the future of flexible geothermal, and much more. This is a juicy one.All right then, with no further ado, Tim Latimer. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Tim LatimerThank you for having me.David RobertsTim, this has been a long time coming. I've been tracking your adventures from afar for a few years now, and now you've reached a real milestone here, a real milestone for you, a real milestone for your company, a real milestone for geothermal power, which Volts listeners are like me, big fans of. So to help us appreciate the significance of the milestone in question, I want to back up a little bit and do some background first for listeners who have not, for whatever bizarre reason, heard my previous geothermal pods. So a couple of times we've talked and you've told me kind of this short, potted history of geothermal, the last couple of decades of geothermal, the sort of struggle to align the money and the attention and the technology and everything.So maybe by way of starting just share that with our listeners, sort of like geothermal's struggles to take off in, say, like a post-2000 context.Tim LatimerAbsolutely. Well, to do that, I probably have to explain a little bit about how geothermal works, which is straightforward in the idea, difficult in the implementation, but geothermal has been around for forever. The first geothermal power plant was built in Italy over 100 years ago. Major places like New Zealand, Iceland, and northern California built massive utility-scale power plants going back to the 70s and 80s. But essentially what happened is — as the choicest areas for drilling geothermal, the places that steam was literally coming out of the ground got tapped — we ran out of really good resources and technology couldn't keep up with the challenges needed to go deeper, go into less permeable areas, and still produce economic electricity.So geothermal has been kind of a boom and bust industry. The big technology push for a long time was the idea of something called enhanced geothermal systems, which was a DOE-led effort going all the way back to the 1970s to try to incorporate things like hydraulic fracturing, advanced drilling techniques, better subsurface characterization, to try to solve that problem and let geothermal be a more widespread resource. But many of the early technical attempts came far short of expectations, and so the industry had fits and spurts a lot of unrealized promise that never came about. And kind of the two big waves recently, in the late 2000s, there was a big push to do more geothermal energy development. And you always think about what does it take for a new tech to actually get to market? Well, you got to have the technology there, you've got to ha

In this episode, I have a conversation (IRL!) with longtime energy analyst Ramez Naam about a wide range of nerdy but fascinating topics.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAs I previewed a few weeks back, on Wednesday, June 28, Canary Media held a live event in the downtown Seattle home space of beloved local independent radio station KEXP. It’s a gorgeous space, with a coffee shop and a small vinyl store, well worth a visit if you make it up this way.In addition to a lively panel about the IRA and plenty of mixing and mingling with a fascinating, diverse crowd of energy nerds, the event featured a conversation between me and energy analyst/guru Ramez Naam.We had a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from hydrogen to space-based solar power to geoengineering. Then we opened it up to Q&A and got a bunch of geeky questions about grid-enhancing technologies and performance-based ratemaking. It was so fun!As promised, it was recorded for all you wonderful Volts subscribers. Enjoy. David RobertsI just wanted to say before we started, I should have thought in advance how to say this delicately. A lot of us have been to a lot of energy events, a lot of us old hands, and especially in the early years, we got very accustomed to seeing seas of gray hair at said events. And so it's just such a thrill that things have come as far as they have and this room is full of exciting young people doing cool stuff. Makes me feel old, but it's a small price to pay.Ramez NaamAre you saying that we're old now?David RobertsYes, I'm afraid, yeah, if you do the math. Also, this is being recorded for my podcast. This will be an episode of Volts. So maybe everybody in the room say hi to Volts listeners at home. You could have been here, but you were too lazy. I'm joined today by Ramez Naam, who is a longtime energy guru I guess would be the word, forecaster, VC guy, now author of books on climate change and Sci-Fi books and other books, speaker, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody I have been looking to for wisdom since I started this back in the dark ages.So I'm excited to talk just about sort of where things are now that we've been in this game for 20 years and how things have changed and sort of what's next? So the way Mez came to my attention, and I think a lot of people's attention in this world, was a 2011 blog post in which Mez said, here's the rate at which solar is getting cheaper. I'm going to make the bold prediction that it is going to continue doing that, which you'd think wouldn't be that revolutionary of a thing to do. But anybody who knows energy forecasts knows that as long as there has been solar, there have been people forecasting that it's going to stop getting cheaper, that it's going to level out, it's going to plateau.If you look at the forecast, it's just plateau, plateau, plateau. And the reality is just down, down. And Mez just said, yeah, it's going to go down. And if you just project ahead on existing learning curves, you get what looked like ludicrously optimistic projections, which you then updated in 2015 and then updated again in 2020, and both times found that despite having been decried for ludicrous optimism, prices had in fact fallen farther than your forecast. And you did a similar post on batteries, more or less, with the same structure. So I guess the way since, I think we agree that solar, wind and batteries are going to be the core of the electrify everything century, I guess my first question is just do you think solar is going to keep doing that?Ramez NaamYeah. Well, so first, David, it's awesome to be here. We've been together for twelve years now and we met basically on Twitter, arguing with this stuff back then. So, yeah, in 2011 I wrote a piece for Scientific American, a blog post, and at the time, the IEA International Energy Agency had a forecast for solar costs, said the cost of solar would drop by about half from 2010 to 2050. And my forecast was very naive. I'm not that smart. I was very lucky. I came from tech, where we have Moore's Law, and so I just applied the very same sort of very dumb learning model to solar.And because I didn't know enough about energy to know how I was going to be wrong, it worked, more or less. So my forecast was the cost of solar would drop about a factor of ten to 2050, and it actually dropped twice as fast as I thought it would. And again, there were various things wrong in that model and I've updated them since and found where the errors are, I think. Will it keep getting cheap? The future is uncertain, but the odds are yes. So my personal forecast is the cost of solar will drop by another factor of four by the time solar is about a third of all electricity generation on Earth, something like that.Now, could it be twice as fast? Maybe that's pushing it. Could it be half that rate? Yeah, but it's already the point, so I think it is clean electricity, especially solar, and now batteries have gone through, they're entering th

In this episode, Kelly Mitchell of journalistic watchdog group Documented discusses Republicans’ furious pushback against ESG funds due to their ostensible greenness, and the ridiculousness of said vehemence since ESG ratings are actually a poor reflection of companies’ true environmental impact.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsFor the last few years, the fastest growing segment of the global financial services industry has been ESG (environmental, social, and governance) funds.Here’s how it works: one of several ratings firms uses its own proprietary formula to rate how well a company is responding to environmental, social, and governance risks. An environmental risk might be: will the county where you’re locating your data centers have sufficient water supply in coming years? A governance risk might be: have you filed all the proper disclosures?Fund managers like BlackRock then gather highly rated companies into ESG funds, which are sold to investors as socially responsible. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow into ESG funds every year.Note that there’s a bit of a shell game at the heart of the enterprise. What customers and investors generally think is that a company gets high ESG ratings because it goes above and beyond in those areas, that it is trying to “do well by doing good.” But in reality, high ESG ratings simply mean that a company is responding to material risks — maximizing its profits, as public companies are bound by law to do. So Tesla gets no ESG credit for accelerating the electric vehicle market, but it can pull a low ESG rating (and fall out of ESG funds) over vulnerability to lawsuits over working conditions. (This is why Elon calls ESG “the devil incarnate.”) McDonald’s loses no ESG points for the enormous carbon impact of its supply chain, but it gains points for reducing plastic in its packaging, because regulations against plastic packaging are imminent in Europe. So investors get to feel like do-gooders and big companies are rewarded for carrying out their legal obligation to assess risks to their business. There’s not much social benefit to the whole thing, but everyone feels good and green and happy.Except now there’s a problem: Republicans bought it. The whole sales pitch — they believe it. They believe that companies in ESG funds are going out of their way to do social and environmental good … and they’re furious about it. Over the past year or two, an enormous, billionaire-funded backlash against ESG has consumed the GOP, leading to multiple congressional hearings, hundreds of proposed state bills, and red-state treasurers vowing never to do business with woke lefty activist funds like [checks notes] BlackRock. It is stupid almost beyond reckoning. And I’m just brushing the surface. To dig into the deep layers of dumb and where it all might go, I called Kelly Mitchell. She’s a senior analyst at the journalistic watchdog group Documented, which uncovered emails and other communications between the architects of the anti-ESG campaign that led to a New York Times exposé.All right then, let's do this. With us, we have Kelly Mitchell from Documented. Kelly, welcome. Thank you so much for coming to Volts.Kelly MitchellThank you, David.David RobertsKelly, when I first decided to do this episode, I started looking into it, thinking, you know what, this all seems kind of stupid. But what happened is as I dug in and explored it into the nooks and crannies, some of the background, some of the work you've done, some of the work Documented has done, what I discovered is that it is actually so much stupider than I ever could have imagined. The depth of stupidity here is remarkable. So I just want to thank you. I feel like you should get hazard pay for what you do. And I just want to thank you for immersing yourself in this. It must be wearying.Kelly MitchellIt is. It's like the Thunderdome of stupidity. But I'm glad we can talk about it.David RobertsYes, let's talk about the levels. Okay, so let's bracket for the moment what ESG actually is in reality. We'll get to that later. Bracket for the moment the merits of the criticisms that conservatives have of ESG and let's just talk about what's happening. So I think probably normal news consumers are aware that sort of ESG, or the sort of boogeyman of ESG, has come up sort of out of nowhere and is everywhere now. So maybe just tell us a little bit about what has happened here, who's doing what and what are the bills? And tell us the phenomenon we're discussing.Kelly MitchellWell, the current iteration of this phenomenon really kicked into high gear probably in about 2021. And there's been a long history of folks who have opposed corporate social responsibility, who have opposed any restriction on investment in things like coal or natural gas. But a lot of gasoline was thrown on the fire in 2021, probably for two major reasons. So first is that Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, published two back-to-back letters

In this episode, Priya Donti, executive director of nonprofit Climate Change AI, speaks to how artificial intelligence and machine learning are affecting the fight against climate change. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAs you might have noticed, the world is in the midst of a massive wave of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) — hype tinged with no small amount of terror. Here at Volts, though, we’re less worried about theoretical machines that gain sentience and decide to wipe out humanity than we are with the actually existing apocalypse of climate change. Are AI and ML helping in the climate fight, or hurting? Are they generating substantial greenhouse gas emissions on their own? Are they helping to discover and exploit more fossil fuels? Are they unlocking fantastic capabilities that might one day revolutionize climate models or the electricity grid?Yes! They are doing all those things. To try to wrap my head around the extent of their current carbon emissions, the ways they are hurting and helping the climate fight, and how policy might channel them in a positive direction, I contact Priya Donti, an assistant professor at MIT and executive director of Climate Change AI, a nonprofit that investigates these very questions.All right, then, with no further ado, Priya Donti, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Priya DontiThanks for having me on.David RobertsWe are going to discuss the effects of artificial intelligence and machine learning on the climate fight. And I think we're going to, for reasons that will become clear as we talk, kind of like taking on an impossible task here. As we'll see, it's going to be very difficult to sort of wrap our heads around the whole thing. But I think we can make a lot of progress and maybe get clear about sort of some of the directions and some of the applications and get a better sense of how things are going, because this is something I've been sort of meaning to think about and talk about for a while.I'm excited. But to start, can we just get some definitions out of the way? Because I think people hear a lot of these terms flying around. There's artificial intelligence, AI. There's machine learning, ML, in the business, and then there's just sort of the digitization of everything, and then there's just sort of more powerful computers. Like, if I'm running a climate model and I want to put more variables in there, but I'm constrained by the amount of computing power it would take, computers that have more power and more processing cores or whatever, then I can do that.So help us understand the distinction between these things, between just sort of more and better and faster computing and something called machine learning and something called artificial intelligence. What do all these things mean?Priya DontiYeah, so I'm going to start with AI: Artificial intelligence. So AI refers to any computational algorithm that can perform a task that we think of as complex so this is things like speech or reasoning or forecasting or something like that. And AI has two kind of main branches. One of them is based on rule-based approaches where you basically write down a set of rules and ask an algorithm to reason over them. So when, for example, Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in the game of chess, this was a kind of rule-based scenario where you were able to write down the rules of chess and get an algorithm to understand and reason over what to do given that set of rules. Of course, there are lots of scenarios in the world where it's really difficult to write down a set of rules to capture a task, even though we kind of know how the task goes.David RobertsMost you could say are difficult.Priya DontiExactly. And so, one of these things is, like, if I have an image, what does it mean for that image to contain a picture of a cat? I can probably tell you, okay, there's got to be a thing with ears, a head, a tail, but it doesn't capture that always because you can't always see the tail. Like, how does this work? And so, machine learning is a type of AI that basically tries to automatically learn an underlying set of rules based on examples. So, for example, it takes large amounts of data, like, that it can analyze and use to help kind of figure out what the patterns are in that underlying data, and then apply those patterns to other similar scenarios, like classifying other images that the algorithm hasn't yet seen but are similar to what it saw when actually being created.And yeah, I would say that in terms of what's the distinction between these things and computing, I would say computing is a workhorse behind many of these algorithms. So in order for these algorithms to work, you need fast computers that are able to kind of execute the computations behind the creation of these algorithms. Behind the learning. You also need good data. And with those things together, you can basically create a lot of these more po

In this episode, Anthony Wang, co-founder of ETFuels, describes his company’s business model of using renewable energy to make green hydrogen, then using the hydrogen to make carbon-neutral methanol.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAnthony Wang, a mechanical engineer by training, spent years as a researcher on hydrogen technologies. He worked with governments to develop policy and infrastructure plans — he was project manager on the EU's big hydrogen backbone project — and with private companies like Total and Shell to develop hydrogen technology roadmaps. He has authored or co-authored several industry-defining reports on hydrogen and been cited in countless publications.A few years ago, he decided to throw his hat in the ring and try to actually build hydrogen projects in the real world. All his research and contacts in the energy world led him to a very specific — and, to me, extremely intriguing — business model.ETFuels, the company he co-founded, develops projects that couple giant off-grid renewable energy installations with hydrogen electrolyzers; it then uses the resulting green hydrogen to synthesize carbon-neutral liquid fuels. (First up is methanol for shipping, but the company plans to branch out into other e-fuels.)This model somehow manages to implicate half the stuff I’m interested in these days — green hydrogen, markets for hydrogen fuels, off-grid renewables, coupling renewables directly with industrial loads — so I was eager to talk with Wang about it. We dug into the limits of “electrify everything,” the difficulty of transporting hydrogen, and the economics of e-fuels, among other things.This one gets fairly deep in the weeds, but if you find the real-world challenges of developing clean-energy projects interesting, you don’t want to miss it. All right, then, with no further ado, Anthony Wang. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Anthony WangThank you so much for having me, David.David RobertsSo you were sort of recommended to me as somebody who knows a lot about hydrogen, about sort of green hydrogen, the markets. I know you've worked with public on policy roadmaps. I know you've worked with private companies on technology roadmaps. So I know you've given a lot of thought and sort of analysis to the green hydrogen phenomenon, the green hydrogen market. And you settled when you decided to start a company of your own, you co-founded this company, ETFuels. You settled on a very particular business model, which I just find sort of fascinating as it sort of implicates half the things I'm interested in these days in the energy world.So I wanted to just run through it with you and talk about why you made the choices you did and get into some of the bigger issues that way. So just for listeners' benefit, the idea here is you find a big piece of land somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. You build a bunch of renewable energy, mostly solar, maybe some wind. Instead of hooking the renewable energy up to a grid, you pipe it directly into electrolyzers and make green hydrogen out of it. And then instead of exporting the green hydrogen or selling the green hydrogen, you use the green hydrogen, combine it with CO2 to make methanol, basically, carbon-neutral methanol, which you are then going to sell to shipping companies. So that's a big puzzle. That's a big puzzle with lots of pieces put together. So I want to kind of start at the front end of it. My intuitive reaction to this is you're taking valuable renewable energy and then you're converting it to hydrogen, you lose a lot in that conversion, and then you convert it again to methanol and you lose a lot in that conversion as well. It sounds sort of inefficient.So the question comes up like, why not just sell the renewable energy? So why off-grid in the first place?Anthony WangFor us, obviously, it depends where you're talking in the world, right? So renewable energy, if you can get it connected to the grid, you're completely right, it's extremely valuable. I mean, you've seen what prices of power have done in the last couple of years in Europe and in the US. And if you can use it to electrify your vehicles or heat up a heat pump, that's a very good use of that renewable energy. That said, there are many places in the world where solar and wind, on a levelized cost of production basis, are the lowest cost sources of energy we have.And on top of that, most of these locations are not connected to grids. And so one question that always puzzled me a bit was everyone's talking about renewable energy getting cheaper and cheaper and being the lowest cost source there is. So why, why aren't we seeing that being reflected at all in, in the prices that we see a) on the wholesale market, and b) ultimately on our bills at the end of the month? And thought a lot about this, and I'm not an economist, but it does seem to me that while we've got very good at producing renewable energy in a very cheap way, I'd argue it's the c

Unlike other parts of the country, the 11 western US states have not joined together in a regional transmission organization (RTO) to more efficiently and cost-effectively administer their respective electrical transmission systems. In this episode, Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, discusses the current status of a potential western RTO and the political factors affecting the conversation.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn about half the country, power utilities have turned over administration of their electrical transmission systems to regional transmission organizations (RTOs), or what amounts to the same thing, independent system operators (ISOs). RTOs and ISOs oversee wholesale electricity markets and do regional transmission planning, which increases system efficiency and reduces costs for ratepayers.The power utilities in the 11 western US states are not joined together in an RTO. California has its own ISO, but it only covers that one state. In the rest of the region, utilities are islands — they each maintain their own reserves and do their own transmission planning within their own territories. It leads to enormous duplicated efforts and inefficiencies.For years, there has been discussion of creating a western RTO, to bring the western states together to share resources and coordinate transmission planning. Analysts have found that an RTO could save the region’s ratepayers billions of dollars a year.Recently the discussion has begun to heat up again. A regionalization bill in California was tabled this year but promises to return next session. Governor Gavin Newsom expressed his support for the idea. Nonetheless, numerous sticky technical and political issues remain to be hashed out.To explore the promise and risks of a western RTO, I contacted Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. We discussed the political forces pushing for and against an RTO, the way the west's electrical system has changed since the last time this discussion came up, and incremental steps that can be taken in the direction of greater regional cooperation.All right then, with no further ado, Michael Wara, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Michael WaraThanks for having me.David RobertsSo we're here to discuss something that is somewhat complex and rests on a set of concepts that might not be — that everybody might not come in understanding. But because I want to talk about the specifics and I don't just want this to be a 101 kind of thing, I'm going to assume Volts listeners have some basic background. So I think the main thing to know is the US electricity system is sort of divided in two. On the one hand, you have the traditional old school, vertically integrated utilities which own the generation and the transmission and the customer interaction, the whole deal.And then the other half is what's called "deregulated" or "liberalized" or whatever the term is. Basically have created markets, wholesale energy markets, where generators compete and sell into the markets. And then distribution utilities which interact with customers buy power from those markets and sell it to customers. And those areas with energy markets are overseen by organizations called Regional Transmission Operators or sometimes Independent System Operators. RTOs and ISOs, as everyone in our world is so familiar with saying over and over again I'll just use RTO, I think from now on as a shortcut for those. So in these liberalized areas RTOs sort of manage regional transmission planning.And the idea is if a bunch of different utilities can sort of share backup and share reserves and share generally they're going to lower costs for ratepayers. And so there are RTOs in the Midwest, there's one in the Northeast, et cetera. Listeners might be familiar with PJM and MISO. These are all regional transmission operators in various parts of the country. So as it happens, the western states, the eleven western states of the United States are almost all old school vertically integrated utilities which means they operate as islands. There's not a lot of sharing. So California has its own RTO or ISO, in this case California ISO or CAISO, but it only does planning for California.So what we are here to discuss is the long standing discussion about whether the western states should form an RTO of their own, join together into a regional organization so that they can do more of this sharing. That is the question before us. And there are all sorts of ins and outs and details about this but that is the basic background. So maybe the place to start is just at a very general level, sort of abstract level. You could explain what are the advantages of joining an RTO versus just operating as an island? What is the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow?Michael WaraI'd want to start

Will the US clean-energy transition be hampered by a shortage of electricians, plumbers, and skilled construction workers? In this episode, Betony Jones, director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Jobs, talks about the challenge of bringing a clean energy workforce to full capacity and the need for job opportunities in communities impacted by diminished reliance on fossil fuels.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsNow that the Inflation Reduction Act has lit a fire under the clean-energy transition, a new worry has begun to emerge: can the US create the workforce it needs to build all of this stuff? And can it care for the fossil fuel workers who are displaced in the process?Across the trades that will be necessary to build out clean energy — electricians, plumbers, construction — industries are reporting worker shortages. Meanwhile, entire communities are being disrupted and displaced by the closure of refineries and other fossil fuel facilities.What can the government do to help growing industries create the job pipelines they need? And what can it do to help cushion the blow to fossil fuel communities?To get to the bottom of these questions, I contacted Betony Jones, the director of the Office of Energy Jobs at the Department of Energy. She has spent years thinking about clean-energy workforce issues and working with industries to create shared job training and apprenticeship programs. We talked about the jobs that are coming, the jobs that are going away, and the need for an active hand in smoothing the transition.With no further ado, Betony Jones. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Betony JonesIt's great to be here. Thank you.David RobertsYou know, ever since the Inflation Reduction Act passed and the rest of the legislation sort of like kicking off a new era of clean energy acceleration, I've been thinking about what are the remaining kind of now the policy log jam has broken, what are the remaining impediments? What are the remaining dangers? And I've sort of narrowed it down to the four Horsemen. The four or four horsemen of the clean energy apocalypse political blowback, which is basically Republicans taking back over and undoing everything NIMBYism, which is the difficulty of building all the things we need to build interconnection queue and transmission i.e. making the grid big and robust enough. And then, fourth, workforce issues. I'm going to try to do a pod on all these eventually, but we're here to talk about workforce issues. So just by way of background, maybe start by telling us what your office is and what it's for and what it's intended to do.Betony JonesFirst, I just want to say when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, that was really game changing for someone like me who's been working at the nexus of climate change and labor issues for so long. And so to answer the question of what my office does, the Office of Energy Jobs at the U.S. Department of Energy is responsible for a few things, but one of them is making sure that the jobs that are being created from these historic investments are good, quality, family sustaining jobs that people want. And so writing the rules around the funding and how it goes out the door and how it's made accessible.David RobertsWas the office created by Biden, or has this been around a while?Betony JonesThis iteration was created by Biden, but it has also been around for a while. I think Obama had an Office of Energy Jobs, and so did President Trump. But our office is really focused on, first and foremost, making sure that the investments are getting out into communities, that the investments are creating broadly shared prosperity and good jobs for American workers, and that we're investing in new industries in the domestic supply chain to provide the materials and equipment for this clean energy transition. So that's really exciting. It's actually just an absolutely incredible opportunity to show that we can address the climate crisis while creating real material benefits for American workers.David RobertsYeah, you're really at the nexus there. That's a white hot area. So when I think about workforce issues and the clean energy transition, there's sort of two sides of it. There are the people in communities who are going to lose fossil fuel based jobs, and then there are the people in communities that are going to gain clean energy jobs. I want to start with the latter, although we will return to the former later. So there's all this work to be done electrifying and everything else. But I wonder, do we have a clear quantitative understanding or projection or good models or a sense of exactly what the job shift is going to be? I.e. Like how many jobs are going to be created in what industries, how many will be lost in what industries, or is there so much uncertainty that we're sort of adapting as we go?Betony JonesThere's always uncertainty because nobody can tell the future. I mean, my office puts out the U.S. Energy Em

In this episode, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona of Way to Win discusses the ins and outs of Democrats’ notoriously ineffective political messaging, and what needs to be done about it. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIf there is one thing upon which almost everyone in US politics agrees, it is that Democrats suck at messaging. They constantly find themselves on the back foot, struggling to respond on culture war issues that make them uncomfortable. Biden's approval rating remains abysmally low and the enormous accomplishments he and congressional Democrats have secured despite the barest of majorities remain almost entirely unknown to most of the public.But why? What exactly is the problem with Democratic messaging? That is where the agreement breaks down.Is it too liberal or not liberal enough? Has a young vanguard distorted the party's perspective and alienated it from swing voters or is an old guard holding back a diverse new coalition? Is Democratic messaging using the wrong words and phrases, or is the problem that it simply doesn't control enough media to ensure its messages are heard?To dig into some of these questions, I wanted to talk to Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder, vice president, and chief strategy officer for Way to Win, a Democratic research, analysis, organizing, and fundraising group that came together in the wake of the 2016 election to make sure its mistakes were not repeated.Way to Win just released its final report on the 2022 midterm elections, digging into who exactly bought advertisements, where they ran, and what they said, as well as how they performed with various demographics. I’m excited to talk to Ancona about what Democrats are saying, what they’re not saying, who’s hearing it, and how they can do better.So with no further ado, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jenifer Fernandez AnconaThank you so much for having me.David RobertsI'm excited to do this because like anyone who's followed U.S. politics for many years, I have beefs about Democratic messaging and theories about it and all sorts of stuff to say about it. And I found over the years that everybody has a lot to say about Democratic messaging and everyone feels that they're an expert on it. But what I've come to see over time is most people, probably including me, are full of it and are just going off instincts and hunches and projecting their priors overinterpreting their own particular epistemological bubbles on and on and on.So I'm extremely glad to have, I think, probably the closest thing the world has to an expert on this subject, on the pod to discuss it by way of bolstering that claim. Before we get into the details, let's just talk about Way to Win. Like, why did it come together and what has it been doing since the 2016 election?Jenifer Fernandez AnconaWell, we came together essentially in the wake of that election when we felt like the same strategies that led to that complete failure. And honestly, a lot of the losses that we had seen over the course of the last four years across the country at the state level and local level, that we needed new strategies to change, that we weren't going to get out of this crisis using the same strategies that got us into the crisis. And that is what we were hearing as we were in Democratic big, major donor funding circles at that time, a real inability to recognize that major shifts were needed and an unwillingness to even confront what had led to Trump's rise and ultimate power.David RobertsAnd one wonders what could shake people out of that kind of complacency if not that.Jenifer Fernandez AnconaExactly. Yeah. So a bunch of us came together, and it was those of us who had been working in the field of trying to bring more resources to movement building, progressive movement building, multiracial coalition building. Especially. We had Tory Gavito, who was one of our co-founders, who's now the CEO of Way to Win. She came from Texas. She's in Texas and was part of trying to, over time, flip Texas blue and had learned some really important lessons in the past few years. And we just felt like we needed to nationalize this idea of taking the fight to different places.So we got so stuck in a battleground state world, which was really focused in the Midwest, and yet so much of the population growth is actually happening in the South and Southwest. And we saw the importance of states like Georgia and Arizona coming into power, but not enough resources actually going there. So that was one of the things, is, like, we need to re-imagine the map and actually expand the places where we could go to build power and to take power from Republicans. So we were some of the first coming on the scene to say we need to put major resources into Georgia, just as Stacey Abrams initial campaign was going, but it wasn't on the map of most national political organizations.They still weren't talking about Georgia or even Arizo

Hey Voltrons! I’ve got no guest today, just a couple of little announcements.First: At long last, we have gotten serious about transcripts around here. I hired a company called Fanfare and they are methodically going back through the Volts catalogue and transcribing everything. I believe they’re back to May 2022. Before too long, every pod will have transcripts. Also, they are transcribing new episodes quickly — usually within a day or two of posting.Each transcript comes in three forms. The first is full text on the episode page; the second is a downloadable PDF, in case you want to print it out or send it to someone; and the third is an “active transcript,” where you can play the sound file and it will follow along in the text for you. The active transcripts are really cool, especially for hearing-challenged subscribers; I encourage you to check them out.(As an example, here's the geothermal pod: text transcript; PDF; active transcript. Once transcripts are done, I add links to the different versions at the top of each episode page.)I considered making the active transcripts available to paid subscribers only, but ultimately, I came back around to the same reasoning I've used thus far: I want this content to be as available to as many people as possible. So they are free to everyonelWhich I guess is a good time to remind everyone that the only way I can keep doing this, keep adding features like this, is through the generosity of my paid subscribers. My gratitude to each and every one of you remains unbounded. (If you’d like to make a one-time donation, you can do so here.)The other thing I wanted to note is for listeners in the Seattle area. On June 28th, Canary Media will be holding a live event in Seattle, at the headquarters of the radio station KEXP. In addition to some other speakers and some mixing and mingling, the main event will be my onstage discussion with Ramez Naam, a well-known clean energy analyst, about the state of the clean energy industry.For those who can't make it, the conversation will be recorded and released as a podcast. But if you are in the area, I encourage you to drop by and say hi. Tickets are $49, which will help raise money for Canary, the best thing to happen to clean energy journalism in ages.I’m cooking up some other cool stuff here in the Volts kitchen, but that’s probably enough for now. As always, to all you listeners, paid and unpaid, thank you so much for your time and attention. I know there's lots of content out there, new outlets clamoring for your subscription dollars, so rest assured that I never take that time for granted.Onward and upward. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Maryland state Delegate Lorig Charkoudian, author and primary sponsor of the state’s newly passed Promoting Offshore Wind Energy Resources (POWER) Act, shares about the exciting policy innovations embedded in the ambitious bill and what they have the chance to accomplish.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsMaryland was one of the first states in the US to see the potential of offshore wind energy. It passed its first offshore wind bill in 2013, and another supportive bill in 2019, but a few weeks ago, the Maryland General Assembly passed, and newly elected Democratic Governor Wes Moore signed, a bill that dwarfs both of those predecessors.Whereas the state’s previous target was 2.5 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, the Promoting Offshore Wind Energy Resources (POWER) Act targets 8.5 gigawatts.But that is just the headline. Underneath that target are clever new policy innovations that promise to make the funding and development of offshore wind energy more politically resilient and economically just for the long term, and to bring thousands of offshore-wind supply-chain jobs to the state. And the whole process is going to be turbocharged by the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act.I love me some clever policy innovations, so I was eager to talk to the bill’s author and primary sponsor, Delegate Lorig Charkoudian, about who will pay for the new offshore wind, the transmission backbone that can help accelerate development, and the high-paying union jobs that will be created by the industry.All right, then, without further ado, delegate Lorig Charkoudian. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Lorig CharkoudianThanks for inviting me. It's a thrill to be here.David RobertsI love a good policy talk. I love a good policy.Lorig CharkoudianMe too.David RobertsAnd this Maryland bill is a delight, so I'm excited to get into it. The first thing to say is promoting offshore wind energy resources where you get "power" as an acronym. Just well done, good acronym work. I don't know who on your staff is responsible for that, but I love a good acronym.Lorig CharkoudianAnd I have to say the advocates always give me a hard time because I write brilliant policy and then I have terrible names. So on this one, Jamie from Chesapeake Climate Action Network came up with a name, and they were key on getting the bill passed too.David RobertsAwesome.Lorig CharkoudianThat worked out well.David RobertsThe Power Act. So before we jump into this, this is a bill about offshore wind in Maryland. Just to set everybody's expectations. Before we jump in, though, I want to back up a little bit and talk about offshore wind in Maryland. My understanding is that Maryland passed its first offshore wind bill in 2013, and then there was another bill in 2019. And yet, as far as I'm aware, there is no operating offshore wind off the coast of Maryland. Why is that? What's gone on in the history of this industry in this state that there's kind of so much hype and so little actual wind turbines?Lorig CharkoudianYeah, well, it's a real challenge and it's kind of the story of renewable energy the challenges of renewable energy and offshore wind in a lot of places. So we were first out of the gate in 2013, one of the first on the East Coast, and then we had a couple of things happen. And so first we had the — Ocean City fought really hard against having the wind actually built. The Hogan administration really pandered to the Ocean City opposition. And so there were a bunch of sort of slow walking things that happened at the Public Service Commission.David RobertsYou got nimbied.Lorig CharkoudianYes. So you've heard that before. So we had that going on. And then that ran into the Trump administration and all the things that were going on at the federal level and BOEM and slowing things down from that perspective. And then all of that ran into the buzzsaw of PJM and the interconnection queues and slowing everything down from that end. And then we hit the pandemic and supply chains.David RobertsWell, you really hit the perfect storm of all the things wrong with renewable.Lorig CharkoudianEnergy, everything that could go wrong. But I'm happy to say that those projects are really back on track now, so we expect to see them in the next couple of years. And a lot of things that we have in this bill set us up so that the various delays, transmission in particular, PJM, interconnections, that those don't become the barriers going forward. Got it as disheartening as that has been, all that's going forward now, and we learned from the last ten years and set ourselves up for success on this bill.David RobertsRight, so there's construction underway offshore, or what stage are the current projects at?Lorig CharkoudianWell, yes, some construction. And the really exciting thing just when we keep in mind that offshore wind is not only a really important renewable energy resource, but it's also a really important econ

Many transit systems are reeling financially in the aftermath of the pandemic, and the situation in California is particularly dire. In this episode, Nick Josefowitz of SPUR and Beth Osborne of Transportation for America discuss the urgent need for the state budget to boost transit funding, and the catastrophic implications if it doesn’t.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThe pandemic was devastating to America's transit systems — not only the lockdowns, but the enduring shift to working from home that followed. It has left transit systems everywhere desperate for riders and funding.Nowhere is that more true than California. The state’s transit systems find themselves at the edge of a fiscal cliff. If they do not receive some new funding from the state in this year's budget — which will be decided and finalized by June 15 — they are going to be forced to implement dramatic cutbacks in service. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) could eliminate weekend service! It’s grim.As anyone familiar with municipal transit systems can tell you, once routes and service are cut, it is extremely difficult to bring them back. And without transit, it will be that much more difficult to build infill housing, get people out of cars, or revive flagging downtown districts.It’s a looming catastrophe — for climate, for social justice, for the state’s reputation. So where is the governor? Where is the urgency in the legislature to prevent this? The deadline is rapidly approaching and the escalating urgency of transit activists has largely been met with silence or indifference.To discuss the crisis, I contacted Nick Josefowitz. He’s the chief policy officer at SPUR, a California nonprofit focused on sustainable cities that has been one of the most prominent voices raising alarm about the situation. And to avoid total doom and gloom, I also contacted Beth Osborne, the director of DC-based Transportation for America, so she could share some stories about states that aren’t screwing up their transit systems.With no further ado, Nick Josefowitz and Beth Osborne, thank you so much for coming on Volts.Nick JosefowitzThanks for having us.Beth OsborneGlad to be here.David RobertsI have wanted to do stuff on transit for a while. It's always been a little difficult to know how to wrap my head around it, how to carve off a distinct issue or what angle to approach it from. But helpfully, reality has served up a horrible crisis. So just a wonderful excuse to jump into this subject. So before we back out to a more general picture, let's start there. Nick, with you. Just tell us, what is the transit funding cliff crisis and how the heck did it come to this?Nick JosefowitzWell, the transit fiscal cliff, as we're calling it, is sort of most acute in California, although it's something that's happening elsewhere as well. And as a result of more people working from home, fewer people are commuting every day. Transit agencies rely in part on fare revenue to sustain themselves, and in California, they rely more on fare revenue than in other places. And as a result, we are about to see massive service cuts for California transit agencies with the big transit agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area most impacted. San Francisco Muni is saying that they're going to have to cut one line a month for the next 20 months.David RobertsYikes.Nick JosefowitzBART is saying they would have to stop weekend service, potentially stop serving certain stations. It's a real mess. And it's the type of mess that once you're in it, it's very difficult to get out of it.David RobertsAnd this was just the natural upshot or consequence of the pandemic and work from home. There's nothing beyond that that came and took money out of the transit kitty.Nick JosefowitzNot really, no. It's really just sort of people commuting less. And so much of our transportation infrastructure and our transit systems were built around the commute, and that's what's sort of driven the crisis. But the fact that we've allowed ourselves to be on the precipice is a decision that we've all collectively made, or that I should say in this case, the state government has made. The federal government stepped up during COVID and provided operating support to transit agencies around the country to help them continue to run buses and trains.David RobertsThrough the infrastructure bill.Nick JosefowitzRight, exactly. Through all the COVID relief bills, there was really meaningful support for transit. But that's run out and there's not any more coming. And now it's really up to the state of California to support transit like other states have done.David RobertsAnd this is really coming down to the wire. So what is the wire exactly? What is the deadline here?Nick JosefowitzSo the deadline is June 15. That's when California is constitutionally required to adopt a budget. And so it's a good 15 days away. And so we basically have, I think, two weeks here to convince the state, the governor, the le

In this episode, Emily Morris of startup Emrgy discusses the promise of small-scale hydropower and the opportunities it could provide for both power infrastructure and water management.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsHello Volts listeners! I thought I would start this episode with what I suppose is a disclaimer of sorts. I suspect most of you already understand what I’m about to say, but I think it’s worthwhile being clear.Every so often on this show, like today, I interview a representative from a particular company, often a startup operating in a dynamic, emerging market. It should go without saying that my choice of an interviewee does not amount to an endorsement of their company, a prediction of its future success, or, God forbid, investment advice. If you are coming to me for investment advice, you have serious problems. I make no predictions, provide no warranties.The fact is, in dynamic emerging markets, failure is the norm, not the exception. My entire career is littered with the corpses of startups that I thought had clever, promising products — many of whom I interviewed and enthused about! Business is hard. In most of these markets, a few big winners will emerge, but it will take time, and in the process most promising startups will die. Such is the creative destruction of capitalism. I'm not dumb enough to try to predict any of it.More broadly, I am not a business reporter. I do not have much interest in funding rounds, the new VP, or the latest earnings report. (Please, PR people, quit pitching me business stories.) I do not know or particularly care exactly which companies will end up on top. I am interested in clever ideas and innovations and the smart, driven individuals trying to drag them into the real world. I am interested in people trying to solve problems, not business as such.Anyway, enough about that.Today I bring you one of those clever ideas, in the form of a company called Emrgy, which plops small hydropower generators down into canals.Now I can hear you saying, Dave, plopping generators into canals does not seem all that clever or exciting, but there’s a lot more to the idea than appears at first blush. For one thing, there are lots more canals than you probably think there are, and they are a lot closer to electrical loads than you think.So I’m geeked to talk to Emily Morris, founder and CEO of Emrgy, about the promise of small-scale hydropower, the economics of distributed energy, the ways that small-scale hydro can replicate the modularity and scalability of solar PV, and ways that smart power infrastructure can help enable smarter water management.Alright, then, with no further ado, Emily Morris of Emrgy. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Emily MorrisThank you for having me. It's exciting to be here.David RobertsYou know, I did a pod a couple of weeks ago about hydro and sort of the state of hydro in the world these days. And one of the things we sort of touched on briefly in that pod is kind of small-scale, distributed hydro, but we didn't have time to really get into it. And I'm really fascinated by that subject in general. So it was fortuitous a mere week or two later to sort of run across you and your company and what you're doing. Your sort of model answers a lot of the questions I had about small-scale hydro.Some of the problems I saw in small-scale hydro, just because it just seems to me so at once small, but also kind of bespoke and fiddly. And your model sort of squarely gets at that. So anyway, all of which is just to say I'm excited to talk to you about a model of small-scale hydro that makes sense to me and some of the ins and outs of it.Emily MorrisYeah, absolutely. And I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to tell you more about our model. And I love that you called small-scale hydro bespoke because I was talking with one of the larger IOUs a few weeks back and they referred to hydro as artisanal energy. And I got such a kick out of that because it is in so many ways, hydro can often be a homeowner's pet project that has a ranch or something like that. And bringing hydro into a world in which solar panels are taking over distributed generation and utility scale, and doing it in such a standardized, modular, repeatable format, bringing that architecture into water, is something that hasn't yet really been done successfully. And what we're trying to do here at Emrgy.David Robertsit is kind of like a lot of this echoes solar. It's sort of an attempt to sort of replicate a lot of what's going on with solar. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start the business model is, to put it as simply as possible, is you make generators and you plop them down into canals. So let's start then with canals, because I suspect I am not alone in saying that I've gone almost all my life without thinking twice about canals. I know almost nothing about them. Like, what are they? Where are they? How many are there?This water infrastr

In this episode, environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck discusses the critique of emissions-focused climate policy that she laid out in her book Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOver the course of the 2010s, the term “net-zero carbon emissions” migrated from climate science to climate modeling to climate politics. Today, it is ubiquitous in the climate world — hundreds upon hundreds of nations, cities, institutions, businesses, and individuals have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. No one ever formally decided to make net zero the common target of global climate efforts — it just happened.The term has become so common that we barely hear it anymore, which is a shame, because there are lots of buried assumptions and value judgments in the net-zero narrative that we are, perhaps unwittingly, accepting when we adopt it.Holly Jean Buck has a lot to say about that. An environmental social scientist who teaches at the University at Buffalo, Buck has spent years exploring the nuances and limitations of the net-zero framework, leading to a 2021 book — Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough — and more recently some new research in Nature Climate Change on residual emissions.Buck is a perceptive commentator on the social dynamics of climate change and a sharp critic of emissions-focused climate policy, so I'm eager to talk to her about the limitations of net zero, what we know and don't know about how to get there, and what a more satisfying climate narrative might include.So with no further ado, Holly Jean Buck. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Holly Jean BuckThanks so much for having me.David RobertsIt's funny. Reading your book really brought it home to me how much net zero had kind of gone from nowhere to worming its way completely into my sort of thinking and dialogue without the middle step of me ever really thinking about it that hard or ever really sort of like exploring it. So let's start with a definition. First of all, a technical definition of what net zero means. And then maybe a little history. Like, where did this come from? It came from nowhere and became ubiquitous, it seemed like, almost overnight. So maybe a little capsule history would be helpful.Holly Jean BuckWell, most simply, net zero is a balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere. So we're all living in a giant accounting problem, which is what we always dreamed of, right? So how did we get there? I think that there's been a few more recent moments. The Paris agreement obviously one of them, because the Paris agreement talks about a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks. So that's kind of part of the moment that it had. The other thing was the Special Report on 1.5 degrees by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which further showed that this target is only feasible with some negative emissions.And so I think that was another driver. But the idea of balancing sources and sinks goes back away towards the Kyoto Protocol, towards the inclusion of carbon sinks, and thinking about that sink capacity.David RobertsSo you say, and we're going to get into the kind of the details of your critique in a minute. But the broad thing you say about net zero is that it's not working. We're not on track for it. And I guess intuitively, people might think, well, you set an ambitious target and if you don't meet that target, it's not the target's fault, right. It's not the target's reason you're failing. So what do you mean exactly when you say net zero is not working?Holly Jean BuckWell, I think that people might understandably say, "Hey, we've just started on this journey. It's a mid-century target, let's give it some time, right?" But I do think there's some reasons why it's not going to work. Several reasons. I mean, we have this idea of balancing sources and sinks, but we're not really doing much to specify what those sources are. Are they truly hard to abate or not? We're not pushing the scale up of carbon removal to enhance those sinks, and we don't have a way of matching these emissions and removals yet. Credibly all we have really is the voluntary carbon market.But I think the main problem here is the frame doesn't specify whether or not we're going to phase out fossil fuels. I think that that's the biggest drawback to this frame.David RobertsWell, let's go through those. Let's go through those one at a time, because I think all of those have some interesting nuances and ins and outs. So when we talk about balancing sources and sinks, the way this translates, or I think is supposed to translate the idea, is a country tallies up all of the emissions that it is able to remove and then adds them all up. And then what remains? This kind of stuff, it either can't reduce or is prohibitively expensive to reduce the so called difficult to abate or hard to abate em