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(If you don’t want to read, you can listen. Just click play above.)Greetings! Welcome back to Battery Week here at Volts. In my last post, I went over why lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are so important to decarbonizing both transportation and the electricity sector. Next week, we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of different kinds of LIBs, to see how different chemistries offer different kinds of performance and are competing for different market niches.Before that, though, it’s worth the time to do a little review of battery basics. If you’re like me-a-month-ago, you probably have a hazy understanding at best of the structure of batteries and the processes involved in running them.I’m not going to get into any complicated chemistry — believe me, no one wants that — but I thought it would be helpful later, when we get into the competition within battery markets, to have some rudimentary terms and concepts clear in our heads.Batteries 101F’ing batteries, how do they work?As the name suggests, electrochemical batteries store energy via chemical reaction. Discharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that produces electrons; recharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that stores electrons.The basic unit of the electrochemical battery is the cell. In the cell, two electrodes — negative (anode) and positive (cathode) — are separated by an electrolyte. When the anode and cathode are connected in a circuit, two things happen.1. Negatively charged electrons flow from the former to the latter, generating power. The amount of power is determined by two factors: * current, the number of electrons traveling in a given circuit, and* voltage, the force with which the electrons are traveling.Power = current X voltage. It’s like a river: the force exerted by the water will depend on how much there is and how fast it’s moving. You can get the same force with less water if it moves faster, or with slower water if there’s more of it. Similarly, you can get the same power with less current if you have more voltage, and vice versa.2. The anode releases positively charged ions into the electrolyte, to balance the reaction, and the cathode absorbs a commensurate amount. (Some batteries have a thin semi-permeable barrier within the electrolyte to regulate the flow of ions.) Recharging a battery basically involves reversing the reaction, returning the electrons and the ions to the anode.The anode will be a material that gives up electrons easily in chemical reaction with the electrolyte. The cathode will be a material eager to absorb them. The propensity to shed/absorb electrons is known as standard potential, and the difference in standard potential between the anode and cathode will determine the battery’s total electrical potential. The bigger the difference, the more potential.The whole game of battery design and development is to find a combination of anode, cathode, and electrolyte that performs well along a broad set of criteria — holds a lot of energy, releases energy quickly, operates safely, lasts a long time, is cheap, etc. The tragedy of battery development is that there are always trade-offs. High performance on one criterion generally means lower performance on another. Optimize for holding more energy and you limit how quickly energy can be released; optimize for safety and you limit energy density; and so on. Battery development has seen dozens of chemistries come and go, but four have stuck and scaled to mass-market size: lead acid, nickel cadmium (Ni-Cd), nickel metal hydride (NiMH), and lithium-ion (Li-ion).LIBs have hit on a combination of anode, cathode, and electrolyte that performs well enough along several criteria (especially cost) to work for most short-duration applications today. They dominate consumer electronics, electric passenger vehicles, and short-duration grid-scale storage, and are expanding in other markets as well (though lead-acid batteries remain a $45 billion global market). They have gotten very cheap and a large-scale manufacturing capacity has grown up around them.Let’s take a closer look at LIBs.Lithium-ion batteries 101LIBs have been around in commercial form since the early 1990s, though obviously they’ve improved quite a bit since then. Today’s most common and popular LIBs use graphite (carbon) as the anode, a lithium compound as the cathode, and some organic goo as an electrolyte. They boast two key advantages over prior battery chemistries.First, they need very little electrolyte. LIBs are what’s known as “intercalation” batteries, which means the same lithium ions nestled (intercalated) in the structure of the anode transfer to be intercalated in the cathode during discharge. The electrolyte only has to serve as a conduit; it doesn’t have to store many ions. Consequently, the cell doesn’t need much of it. Saving on electrolyte saves space and weight. (Bonus: the process is almost perfectly reversible, which gives LIBs their high cycle life.) Second, LIBs squee

People of Volts! At long last, Battery Week is here. It is time to get into batteries. Waaay into batteries.Over the next few posts, I’m going to cover how lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) work and the different chemistries that are competing for market share, but I thought I would start off with a post about why I’m doing this — why batteries are important and why it’s worth understanding the variety and competition within the space.Lithium-ion batteries are crucial to decarbonization in two important sectorsWe know that the fastest, cheapest way to decarbonize, especially over the next 10 years, is clean electrification: shifting the grid to carbon-free sources and shifting other sectors and energy services onto the grid. LIBs are accelerating clean electrification in the two biggest-emitting sectors of the US economy, transportation and electricity. (Each is between a quarter and a third of emissions.)First, they are colonizing the EV market and enabling ever-higher performance and range. The global EV market is on the front end of explosive growth:Researchers at Deloitte expect growth to accelerate through 2030:As BloombergNEF analysts show in their “Electric Vehicle Outlook 2030,” it’s not just passenger EVs, either. The fastest growing EV segment will be buses, followed by scooters. The global market for EV batteries alone is expected to hit almost a trillion dollars by 2030. Sustaining that growth is going to require lots and lots of new batteries. The more energy-dense, cheap, and safe LIBs can get, the faster the electrification of transportation will happen.Second, LIBs are being used both for distributed, building-level energy storage and for large, grid-scale storage installations. As the grid shifts from firm, dispatchable sources of energy like coal and gas to variable, weather-dependent sources like sun and wind, it will need more storage to balance things out and stay stable. Batteries can help at the grid level (they can even serve as transmission assets) and they can serve local resilience at the building and community level. Overall, the research firm Wood Mackenzie expects the global storage market to grow at an average of 31 percent a year over the coming decade, reaching 741 gigawatt-hours of cumulative capacity by 2030.The more energy-dense, cheap, and safe LIBs can get, the faster storage will be infused throughout the grid and the more renewable energy the grid will be able to integrate. All together, here’s what the Department of Energy projects for the global energy storage market through 2030:As this graph shows, the vast bulk of the demand for batteries is going to come from transportation, meaning EVs of various kinds. Whatever is used for EVs is probably going to end up getting so cheap, just from scale, that it dominates energy storage as well.There’s one other cool aspect of batteries that gets too little attention. Storing substantial amounts of electricity for cheap is a relatively new thing in human affairs. We are only just now beginning to explore what can be done with it. What’s happened in the relatively short history of lithium-ion batteries is that, as they get cheaper and more powerful, we find new uses for them. Way back in 2015, energy analyst Ramez Naam called this the “energy storage virtuous cycle.” Lithium-ion batteries can do more and more stuffThere’s a reason why, in 2019, the three chemists behind the initial development of lithium-ion technology won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. LIBs boast incredibly high energy density and specific energy, which is to say, they cram lots of oomph into a small, lightweight package, and they are capable of cycling many more times than their predecessors. The first LIBs, commercially introduced in the early 1990s, were expensive, but found a market foothold in small electronic devices — phones, laptops, camcorders — where energy density is at a premium. They have since all but completely taken over the consumer electronics market. As manufacturing scale grew, prices fell and more uses opened up: power tools, lawnmowers, scooters. Scale grew more, prices fell more, and LIBs displaced other chemistries as the top choice for EVs. Especially in recent years, the growth (and anticipated growth) in the EV market has driven an enormous surge of public and private investment to LIBs, with dramatic effects on prices. According to recent research by BNEF, “lithium-ion battery pack prices, which were above $1,100 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, have fallen 89% in real terms to $137/kWh in 2020. By 2023, average prices will be close to $100/kWh.” (It wasn’t that long ago that most experts agreed $100/kWh was an impossible target.)And so the cycle continues. Prices fall and more new uses open up: big trucks, buses, airplanes, data centers, distributed energy storage, and large-scale grid-storage installations. From BNEF:BNEF’s analysis suggests that cheaper batteries can be used in more and more applications. These include energy shifting (movi

(If you’d rather listen than read, just click play above.)President Joe Biden has released the tax plan that is meant to pay for his $2+ trillion infrastructure plan. You can read the New York Times for a full breakdown. The bulk of the revenue will come from a set of changes to corporate tax law, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, imposing a minimum tax on global profits, and discouraging offshore tax havens.All that stuff is great. I just want to say a few quick things about one of the provisions, which would roll back various fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code. In one sense, this is cool, and a big deal insofar as Democrats can actually do it — they’ve been trying for years, to no end. But in another sense, it reveals that the hue and cry over fossil fuel subsidies in the US is somewhat of a tempest in a teapot, more a political symbol than a real source of revenue or decarbonization.Direct US fossil fuel subsidies aren’t that big in the grand scheme of thingsThe administration projects that closing oil and gas tax loopholes will raise $35 billion over the coming decade.That’s 1.4 percent of Biden’s $2.5 trillion in tax-plan revenue. A Treasury Department report from the administration says: “The main impact would be on oil and gas company profits. Research suggests little impact on gasoline or energy prices for U.S. consumers and little impact on our energy security.” (It cites this study.)There are two reasons the changes would have “little impact on gasoline or energy prices.” The first is that oil is a globally traded commodity, with prices set globally — a US company can’t raise its prices without losing out on the global market. So it eats any extra cost as slightly lower profits.But the second is that $35 billion over 10 years just isn’t that much money. Even in 2020, a truly shitty year for US oil companies, Exxon made revenues of $181 billion. That was down 31.5 percent from $265 billion in 2019. For companies with revenues in the hundreds of billions, experiencing market swings of $85 billion a year, an extra $3.5 billion a year spread out over the whole sector just isn’t going to register much.Last year, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the “End Polluter Welfare Act,” which takes a much more expansive view of what counts as a fossil fuel subsidy and pulls together $15 billion a year in tax changes. That would be $150 billion over the next 10 years — 6 percent of the revenue Biden’s plan will raise. (This even-more-aggressive study from Oil Change International found $20 billion a year in subsidies, though the oil and gas industry hotly contests some of the choices it made.)The point is, to get to real revenue, you have to bring in indirect fossil fuel subsidies.The big fossil fuel subsidies are the externalitiesWhen Greenpeace says that US fossil fuel companies get $62 billion a year in subsidies, it refers to this study, which examines what it would take to “correct market failures brought about by climate change, adverse health effects from local pollution, and inefficient transportation.”In other words, the study tallies up the oil and gas industry’s externalities, the costs it imposes on society that are not reflected in market prices. (And it doesn’t even include the costs of defending global oil supply, which are substantial.)Whether it is fair or accurate to call these unpaid costs “subsidies” is largely a matter of semantics, or, worse, metaphysics, but it doesn’t really matter. Fossil fuel companies don’t pay the costs; other people do. A 2017 International Monetary Fund study pegged the global value of direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies at $5.2 trillion — that’s 6.4 percent of global GDP.Of course, making fossil fuel companies pay those costs would involve more than modest tax code tweaks. It would involve a new carbon tax. How much could that raise? A 2017 study by the Treasury Department modeled a carbon tax that starts at $49 per metric ton in 2019 and rises to $70 per metric ton in 2028 (not far out of line with some popular carbon tax proposals). Over the course of that 10 years, the tax would raise $2.2 trillion in revenue — just about enough to fund Biden’s infrastructure plan!It’s a perfect match. It’s notable, then, that no one on either side of the aisle has proposed it, despite an ongoing hunt for revenue. Carbon tax people are always saying it has bipartisan appeal, but in practice, it seems bipartisan in that both parties want nothing to do with it.Anyway, Biden’s run at fossil fuel subsidies (the latest in a long line from Dems) isn’t really about revenue.This story is mostly about political power and social licenseIn every article you read about the portion of Biden’s plan that goes after fossil fuel subsidies, you will see some version of this: “Previous attempts to eliminate subsidies on oil and gas met with stiff industry and congressional opposition.”Despite the fact that $35 billion over 10 years is

Hey, everybody! President Joe Biden has unveiled his first infrastructure proposal and … hot damn. The eight-year "American Jobs Plan" would spend $2.25 trillion on a huge range of initiatives, from highways to the energy grid, water systems, airports, transit systems, broadband, energy R&D, and — paging a Sen. Joe Manchin — abandoned coal mine clean-up. This is an amazing document. Yes, there’s stuff in it that I would take out (some highway spending) and stuff I would add (more transit spending). Yes, a serious transition to sustainability would probably take closer to $10 trillion. Yes, there’s a very good chance the plan gets cut or compromised on the way to passage, if it passes at all, which is far from certain. Still. As presented by the Biden team, it represents not only an enormous total investment, but some really smart investments, in areas where the positive knock-on effects for the clean energy transition could be enormous. There were some true-blue energy wonks involved in writing this thing.I’ll just quickly go over the parts that are most exciting to me and then mention a couple of benefits that are getting underplayed.TransportationThe plan would put $174 billion toward a plan to “win the EV market,” which is on the verge of enormous growth. Biden wants to create a domestic supply chain for batteries and EVs (something that is virtually nonexistent today) and domestic manufacturing capacity to make the EVs, all of which will create domestic jobs. It would offer point-of-sale rebates to purchasers of domestic-made EVs, “while ensuring that these vehicles are affordable for all families and manufactured by workers with good jobs.” It would offer grants and incentives to state and local governments and private businesses to install EV charging stations, with the goal of 500,000 up and running by 2030.And I love this, though I wish it were much bigger: “Replace 50,000 diesel transit vehicles and electrify at least 20 percent of our yellow school bus fleet through a new Clean Buses for Kids Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, with support from the Department of Energy.” This will put us on “a path to 100 percent clean buses.”I have sung the praises of electric city buses; see Vox’s Kelsey Piper on electric school buses. Not only do they save money over time, but they generate immediate air quality benefits for some of the most vulnerable populations — kids and low-income and POC communities, who bear the brunt of diesel pollution. The benefits wildly outweigh the costs. (On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders proposed $407 billion just for electric buses, which is more like it.)Finally, oh, by the way: the plan “will utilize the vast tools of federal procurement to electrify the federal fleet, including the United States Postal Service.” Whaaat? As Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post in January:There are some 645,000 vehicles in the federal fleet. They include roughly 200,000 passenger vehicles, 78,517 heavy-duty trucks, 47,369 vans, 847 ambulances and three limousines.That’s a lot of vehicles.As for electrifying the 225,000 Postal Service vehicles, I have written at great length about what a fantastic idea that is. This part of the plan is honestly like a present to me. Thank you, Joe Biden.It’s not all about cars and trucks, though. The plan also has $85 billion for public transit (“to modernize existing transit and help agencies expand their systems to meet rider demand”), which would double existing federal investment in transit, and at least $80 billion for rail (“to address Amtrak’s repair backlog; modernize the high traffic Northeast Corridor; improve existing corridors and connect new city pairs; and enhance grant and loan programs that support passenger and freight rail safety, efficiency, and electrification.”)As for transportation infrastructure, there’s $20 billion for “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access” and $25 billion “for a dedicated fund to support ambitious projects that have tangible benefits to the regional or national economy but are too large or complex for existing funding programs.”In my dream world I would spend much more on transit and rail, but this is a huge improvement over previous infrastructure bills, even from Democrats. TransmissionReaders of Transmission Month know that long-distance transmission is very much needed for national decarbonization and currently very difficult to build. The big news in the plan is that Sen. Martin Heinrich’s federal transmission investment tax credit (ITC) made it in. The fact sheet doesn’t specify the size of the ITC, but Heinrich’s proposal is 30 percent. The idea is to spur “the buildout of at least 20 gigawatts of high-voltage capacity power lines and mobilize tens of billions in private capital off the sidelines.”And remember my post on usi

(If you don’t want to read the post, click play above and I’ll read it to you.)Hello, beloved readers and listeners! Today I’m going to make an argument that is very important to me: Democrats must pass substantial democracy reform before the 2022 elections. If Dems don’t get this done, the US is in for a long period of political darkness. Democracy in America could very well perish. Climate change will become unsolvable. Every goal progressives seek — taxing the rich, funding infrastructure, fixing immigration, boosting unions, you name it — will move out of reach. It is, I say with some risk of understatement, the most important thing in the world.Let me try to explain why.Biden’s 2020 victory temporarily arrested, but did not stop, the US slide toward minority ruleWhen Biden was elected in November, I felt a conflicting mass of emotions. Most of all, of course, was relief. It is no exaggeration to say that a second Trump term would have meant the end of the American experiment with democracy. But alongside that relief was a persistent sense of dread. The larger context of the 2020 election is an ongoing process whereby America’s mostly white, rural, and suburban conservative minority — which hasn’t won the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004 — is gaining greater and greater structural political advantages each passing year. Republicans are overrepresented in the Senate, overrepresented by the Electoral College, gerrymandered into safe House seats, and busy passing voter suppression bills at the state level. What Dems needed in 2020 was commanding majorities in both houses and a few key state legislatures, enough to stop the next round of GOP gerrymandering and pass substantial democracy reform through Congress.They got majorities, but, far from commanding, they are whisker thin, smaller in the House than in 2018. And Republicans maintained control of all the state governments key to redistricting. That makes Democrats’ job much, much more difficult.Nonetheless, it remains the job. Getting Trump out of office was the first step, but it won’t mean anything in the mid- to long-term if Dems don’t repair democracy. Absent substantial structural reform, the most likely outcome remains the one that Matt Yglesias predicted in 2015: “America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.”I would put it this way: Democrats either pass substantial democracy reform (including statehood for DC) through Congress in the next 18 months or they will lose one or both houses in 2022 and remain locked out of congressional majorities for a decade if not longer. Without voting system reform, Dems are screwed in 2022The most likely outcome of the 2022 elections is that Democrats lose their House majority. To keep it, they would have to defy both history and Republican gerrymandering.Historically, midterm elections are a “shellacking” for the president’s party, as Obama (whose party lost 63 House seats in 2010) put it. With only two exceptions — Clinton Democrats in 1998 and Bush Republicans in 2002 — this has held true all the way back to 1934. Even if they defy that historical trend, Democrats won’t be fighting on a level playing field. Because they retained control of the key state legislatures involved in redistricting, Republicans could win a House majority in 2022 purely with new seats created by redistricting, even if they don’t flip a single blue seat red. To buck these trends and keep the House in 2022, Democrats will need not just the historic turnout that elected Biden, but more. It would take something of a miracle. “If we replicate the GOP’s post-9/11, 2002 midterm performance, we have a chance,” political analyst David Shor told New York magazine’s Eric Levitz. “If we replicate the second-best presidential-party midterm from the past 40 years, we lose.”The Senate will be more competitive in 2022: out of 34 races, Republicans are defending 20 seats and Democrats 14. Nine of those races are considered competitive, roughly evenly divided between parties. But it almost doesn’t matter: if Democrats lose the House, legislation of any substance will become impossible. And odds are getting increasingly stacked against Democrats in both houses, so it could be a long-ass time before they have Congress again. Perhaps there’s some path to bipartisan democracy reform? Ha ha, no.Republicans will fight democracy reform to the deathIf either house of Congress goes to Republicans, any kind of positive voting reform becomes impossible. If they get unified control again, they are much more likely to pass national versions of the kind of targeted voter restrictions they are passing at the state level. Democrats will never get a scrap of help from Republicans on democracy reform, only implacable, relentless opposition. Conservatives will fight it with everything they’ve got, for the same reason they fought it during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era: to the extent voting in the US becomes easier, fairer, and more

Hello, People of Volts! Today I’ve got a special treat for you: a podcast with Jesse Jenkins, energy modeler and assistant professor at Princeton.Those of you on #EnergyTwitter already know Jesse. He’s been doing this as long as I have, working his way up from take-haver to think tanker to graduate researcher at MIT to Princeton prof. Along the way he’s developed a reputation not only as one of the sharpest, most empirically informed energy analysts in the country, but as a scrupulously nice guy, always willing to share what he knows and engage in good faith with questions and arguments. As a journalist, I’ve found him indispensable.So it was a real treat to sit with Jesse for an in-depth conversation on energy system modeling. What exactly is it? How does it work? What does it tell us about the kinds of energy technologies we will need to decarbonize, and their relative scale? How do politicians use — and misuse — models?We get into all of it (as you will hear, I kept Jesse talking so long that I started worrying I might be violating the Geneva Conventions). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here are a few links either mentioned in, or relevant to, the discussion:* A three-part series on the “rebound effect,” whereby energy efficiency reduces the price of a service, which then increases demand for the service, which then wipes out some of the energy and environmental gains of the efficiency. I wrote it in 2012 for Grist.* Jesse’s old blog Watthead, with posts going all the way back to 2005.* A 2015 post of mine about how the International Energy Agency (IEA) consistently overestimates the cost of renewable energy.* The Princeton University Net-Zero America project, an effort to model a variety of pathways to deep decarbonization in the US. * A presentation on the Net-Zero project with Jesse and Princeton’s Eric Larson.Question for the type of folks who read to the bottom: would you be interested in a written transcription of this episode? It would be some work, but if enough people want it I’d be up for doing it, perhaps as a bonus for community members. Let me know in comments or at [email protected] for reading. If you value work like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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

Hello there, Voltron! It’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it? A guy writes a tediously long and wonky series on energy transmission and, next thing you know, transmission grids are dominating the news. By now, the story of what happened in Texas last week is familiar: an extraordinary cold snap simultaneously a) raised demand on the grid to well higher than the grid operator’s worst-case winter projections, and b) knocked out more than 30 gigawatts worth of energy generators. Supply and demand must be kept in perfect balance on a self-contained grid like Texas’, so when demand spiked and supply plunged, something had to give — thus the not-so-rolling blackouts.Most of that lost generation was natural gas and coal. Freezing afflicted not only the water used in power plants but the mining, distribution, and storage of fossil fuels. And, yes, some wind turbines froze, though wind actually performed better than the modest expectations set by ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator.I’m not going to go through the story in detail. I just want to talk a bit about what it means and what we can learn from it. To learn more about what happened, those affected, and the role Texas’s grid and regulations played in events, I recommend reading the following:* The Houston Chronicle had a great story on the events as they unfolded and is, in general, all over it. * In The New Republic, Kate Aronoff has a great overview, with crucial historical context for why the Texas grid is isolated and why it has an energy-only power market.* In the Atlantic, Rob Meyer has great coverage of the Texas planning failures. * The team at ProPublica has a piece on how Texas regulators “have repeatedly ignored, dismissed or watered down efforts to address weaknesses in the state’s sprawling electric grid.”* In the Los Angeles Times, Sammy Roth has another great wrap-up, with a focus on grid vulnerability.* In the New York Times, a team of journalists pulls together a great backgrounder on Texas’s unique power market structure and grid independence. * In the New York Times, Princeton energy analyst Jesse Jenkins has a piece on the crucial failure of Texas utilities to future-proof their assets. * In the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold have a story on the implications of the disaster for the energy-only market.* In Utility Dive, Alex Gilbert and Morgan Bazilian write on what happened and what it means for Texas grid regulation.* The New York Times’ Brad Plumer explains what climate impacts will mean for the nation’s power grids.* At Gizmodo, Molly Taft reports on how much the oil and gas industry is paying Republicans to lie about what happened.* And here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board lying about what happened.Any handful of those stories (save the last) will fill you in on what happened and why. Now let’s talk about what we can learn from it.It was going to be bad in Texas regardlessOne thing worth emphasizing up front is that Texas just faced an extremely unusual event. It got much colder, much faster, and dumped more snow and ice, for longer, and took out more energy infrastructure than even the grimmest forecasts predicted. Yes, the state has had cold snaps before — including in 2011 and 2014, producing a set of recommendations and guidelines that state regulators made voluntary and state utilities largely ignored — but this was extreme even in context. We’re going to touch on better planning, helpful technologies, and reformed regulatory structures, but the grim truth is that there is probably no alternative set of planners or regulations that would have adequately prepared for what took place last week. They certainly could have done better, but this event was fated to be rough.If we’re going to start seriously preparing the electricity system for long-tail, low-probability events — the kind climate change is making more likely — it will be a new thing, not something that’s been mastered by any current entity or regulatory body.Small picture: Texas electricity and natural gas systems need to be weatherized The Texas mess is being characterized as a grid crisis, but it was actually a generation crisis. Two-thirds of the state’s power comes from natural gas, and a) natural gas wells and pipelines froze (cutting normal production by about 20 percent), b) commercial and residential heating got priority access to natural gas, per state policy, and c) natural gas power plants froze. [Clarification: national natural gas production fell by 20 percent; Texas production fell by 50 percent.]Some coal plants and wind turbines also froze up, and one of the state’s nuclear plants went offline for unrelated reasons, but the bulk of the 30+ gigawatts of energy generation that went offline was natural gas power plants (many were also down for scheduled winter maintenance).Natural gas production and distribution falls under the purview of the Railroad Commission of Texas, so it is the RRC that will need to update regulations to make

Greetings, People of Volts! We have come at last to the end of Transmission Month, née Week. It’s been quite a journey.Below are links to and summaries of all the transmission posts. Above is a mega-podcast — all the posts, read by me, strung together, for when you have a couple of hours free. * The subscriber-only discussion post that started everything. Thanks for all the ideas!* Why we need more big power linesAn explanation for why the US needs more big, long-distance power lines to decarbonize, relieve grid congestion, and reduce the cost of power. * How to start building more big power linesBuilding new power lines in the US is absurdly difficult, a kaleidoscope of dysfunction from planning to financing to permitting to siting. Local resistance ends up killing anything ambitious. The federal government needs to step in.* Burying power lines next to rail & roads to make a national transmission gridOne way to avoid siting hassles and local battles is to bury new transmission lines alongside existing rail and road infrastructure. One big line doing this, connecting Iowa wind to the Chicago area, is underway now. * How to make the existing grid work betterA set of “grid-enhancing technologies” stand ready to increase the capacity and improve the performance of the existing transmission grid, from “dynamic line ratings” to “topology optimization.” Utilities just need incentives to install them.* Two more ideas to quickly boost the transmission gridA couple of final proposals to improve existing transmission. One is using energy storage to supplement transmission; the other is replacing existing AC lines with HVDC lines.* Volts podcast: the challenges of building transmission in the US, and how to overcome them, with Liza ReedA discussion with clean-energy researcher about the obstacles facing long-distances transmission lines and some policies that might help clear them away. If you value this kind of deep-dive explanatory journalism, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber. I don’t have any advertisers or sponsors; the only way I can do this is with your support. Thanks for reading and listening. 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

Greetings, faithful Volts readers! Welcome back to the Transmission Week that never ends. The news these last few days has been filled with talk about electricity grids. Texas is suffering from an unprecedented cold snap that has left more than four million people without power for days. It’s a terrible situation. There’s a lot to say about it, what can and can’t be learned, and perhaps I’ll get to it next week.But you didn’t sign up for a breaking-news email, you signed up for Volts! So today brings what I believe what I believe will be my last big transmission post, though I may do a wrap-up after this. Thank you for traveling with me on this longer-than-expected journey.Today, we’re going to look at a couple of final ideas to make the transmission grid work better, short of building new lines — a remainder bin of grid-enhancing technologies, if you will. Idea #1: Using energy storage as a transmission assetAt least since the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the US government has acknowledged that energy storage technologies can be used to ease grid congestion and increase the reliability and flexibility of energy transmission. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in “storage as a transmission asset” (SATA), which refers to energy storage installations that are treated as transmission assets — meaning utilities can “rate base” them and receive a guaranteed rate of return plus any tariffs or incentives for transmission assets. Basically, it means allowing some storage to be treated — legally, financially, and operationally — like a piece of the transmission system.SATA projects — sometimes known as “virtual power lines” — offer a range of benefits to regional energy grids. When a line is congested, it can offload some power to storage. At times of lower congestion, stored power can be injected to maintain high line utilization. Storage can thus relieve congestion and make the grid more reliable. It is much cheaper and quicker to deploy than new transmission, its footprint is much smaller, and it faces a much less onerous regulatory process. It is extremely modular and scalable, which means it can start small and be scaled up precisely to need, and even relocated as grid needs change.Congestion on a power line often causes “inefficient dispatch,” meaning grid operators must ask generators on one side of the line to curtail their output and generators on the other side of the line to ramp theirs up, even if that isn’t the most cost-effective option. Storage on either side of the line can help reduce inefficient dispatch.Another key service storage can provide is to free up unused line capacity. A grid capacity standard called “N-1” holds that the grid must maintain safe operation if a “contingency event” takes out one of the lines. This means all lines must maintain some reserve capacity to absorb energy in the event of an N-1 situation. But storage can serve that purpose — rapidly injecting energy into, or absorbing energy from, the grid in the case of a contingency event — even better than power lines. Adding SATA projects can free up some of that reserve line capacity to carry more power. As with most things transmission, Europe is way ahead of the US on this. Most notably, Germany is developing 1,300 MW worth of SATA in a project known as Netzbooster (grid booster) to free up line capacity otherwise reserved for an N-1 contingency. (Germany has notorious congestion between the wind-heavy north and load centers in the south.) The US has nothing at the GW scale like that, but a few RTOs are moving forward. In August 2020, FERC approved MISO’s proposal for the rules and processes by which it would integrate storage into its planning and project selection.One twist: FERC has indicated that it is “permissible as a matter of policy” in the US for a storage project to be “dual use,” to serve as a transmission asset and receive fixed returns and simultaneously to participate in wholesale energy markets and receive market returns.This move has drawn some criticism, since it seems to blur the canonical separation between energy market participants and the “wires companies” that are supposed to offer them non-discriminatory access to the grid. If a wires company owns a storage asset that is drawing market returns, it has every reason to give that asset privileged grid access.FERC has said dual use is subject to the following four principles:* must be cost-competitive with transmission,* must avoid double recovery for providing the same service,* cannot suppress market bids, and* cannot jeopardize ISO/RTO independence.It’s not entirely clear how dual use storage could, in practice, avoid bumping up against those principles. So far as I know, none of the big RTOs/ISOs has yet hashed out exactly how to make the dual-use thing work. (Here’s an issue paper in which California ISO wrestles with the problem.)There are reasons to remain skeptical of SATA projects. Batteries are still relatively expensive compared

(If you’d rather listen to this post than read it, just click play above.)Welcome back to Volts, where every week is Transmission Week!In my three transmission posts so far, I have focused mostly on the challenges of building new long-distance energy transmission lines in the US — the poor planning, the inefficient financing, the permitting and siting hassles. Today I’m going to turn to a different subject: the various ways that the performance of the existing transmission system could be upgraded and improved through so-called “grid-enhancing technologies” (GETs).To be honest, I probably should have tackled this subject first. Though new lines are going to be needed regardless, it is faster and cheaper to upgrade the existing system, with fewer regulatory barriers. GETs can achieve short-term relief from grid congestion while new lines are being developed.There are three techs that are typically classified as grid-enhancing technologies, and I will focus on them in this post. In my next post, I’ll cover a couple of extra options that I haven’t found any other way to fit in. Let’s jump in. (I should note here up top that I will be drawing heavily from a 2019 report on GETs from the Brattle Group and Grid Strategies.)Closer monitoring to improve line performanceWhen electricity passes through transmission lines, they heat up. As they heat up, they sag. If too much electricity is run through a line, it can exceed its maximum operating temperature or sag to the point that it brushes up against trees or other structures, potentially sparking fires.Grid operators want to avoid that, so they do not load lines to their full rated capacity. They set an operational limit well below theoretical capacity, to create a safety margin. But how far below capacity should the limit be set? That is the question.The heat and sag of a given line are changing in subtle ways all the time. They vary with the ambient temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and wind speed. If it’s warmer, the line will heat up faster; if there’s a breeze, it will heat more slowly. Because the heat and sag are in constant flux, so too is the maximum safe capacity of the line.“The number we love to quote is, an increase in wind blowing across a power line of three feet per second results in a 44 percent increase in the capacity of that power line,” says Jonathan Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, a company that makes equipment for monitoring lines. “That's the equivalent of a light breeze.” (Note: this means that the capacity of transmission lines increases as the production of wind energy increases. Handy!)But transmission system operators do not generally have that kind of real-time information about the heat and sag of their lines. They are forced to estimate, to use an average. In some cases, they assign a line a single “static rating,” well below full capacity. In some cases, they assign the lines seasonal ratings, adjusting for seasonal conditions. These estimates are, necessarily, conservative.As a result, “most transmission lines are loaded at 40 or even 30 percent of their rated capacity,” says Marmillo. That’s an enormous amount of usable capacity going unused, to hedge against the lack of information.That has changed with the development of “dynamic line ratings” (DLRs), whereby lines are continuously monitored and their capacity continuously updated.DLRs have been around for a couple of decades, but the first generations of devices were cumbersome. They were installed directly on the power lines (which involved taking the lines out of commission) and proved unreliable in operation.Technology marches on, though, and the latest generation of DLRs is vastly improved. LineVision’s DLR devices, for instance, have “no-contact” installation, which means no messing with the lines; they attach to the transmission tower. They are topped with LIDAR — the same technology used by autonomous vehicles — which gathers fine-grained data that is then crunched to determine the “net effective perpendicular windspeed,” the most important variable for determining line temperature. “We essentially use the conductor as a giant hot wire anemometer,” says Marmillo.Of course, if you abandon averages in favor of real-time measurement, sometimes capacity will be below what the static average would have indicated. But “we see capacity above static [ratings] about 97 percent of the time,” says Marmillo. It turns out those static ratings are extremely conservative. Allowing more power to travel through lines relieves grid congestion, which is valuable to grid operators. Marmillo says a recent installation of LineVision’s device on a PJM line paid itself back in three months.DLRs are particularly cheap if you compare them to more dramatic solutions to grid congestion. “The cost of deploying a DLR system on a transmission line,” says Marmillo, “is less than 5 percent the unit cost of reconstructing or rebuilding the line.”(Note: there’s an open FERC proposal on the su

Happy Monday! Welcome back to Transmission Fortnight here at Volts. Today’s a fun one.In my previous post, I described the many difficulties facing new high-voltage, long-distance transmission projects, from planning to financing to permitting and siting. It’s a bureaucratic slog.Today we’re going to look at a clever idea for bypassing many of those problems, namely, stitching together a national power grid by burying power lines along existing rail and road infrastructure, where rights-of-way are already established, thus eliminating the endless haggling with local governments and landowners. The idea has been gaining steam in the policy community for the last few years. FERC issued a report in June on challenges to transmission; siting along existing infrastructure was cited as a promising solution. In his Build Back Better plan, Biden promised to “take advantage of existing rights-of-way — along roads and railways — and cut red-tape to promote faster and easier [transmission] permitting.” This op-ed in The Hill sums up the benefits quite nicely, both of a national grid and of building it without siting battles. The vision is taking hold. And at least one small piece of that vision has gone beyond speculation into an actual permitting process. The SOO Green line will carry Iowa wind power to ChicagoA company called Direct Connect is currently in the development and permitting phase of a privately financed, $2.5 billion project called the SOO Green HVDC Link, a proposed 349-mile, 2.1-gigawatt (!), 525-kilovolt transmission line to run underground along existing railroad from Mason City, Iowa, to the Chicago, Illinois, area. It aims to go into operation in 2024.Going underground will allow the line to minimize environmental and visual impact. It will be much more resilient than an overhead line against weather, temperature shifts, sabotage, or squirrels. Two side-by-side cables will run through tubes of Cross-Linked Polyethylene (XLPE) and will be self-contained, lightweight, and easy to handle. They won’t get hot, interfere with signaling equipment (unlike AC lines), or affect rail operations. There are fiber-optic sensors along the lines to monitor sound and heat for any problems. (Nemo Link, the world’s first 400 kilovolt line using XLPE, runs undersea between the UK and Belgium; it began operation in January 2019.)Running alongside the railroad means SOO Green will have no need to claim land via eminent domain. Almost all of that railroad is owned by Canadian Pacific (one of seven large “class one” railroads in the US), so there are a tractable number of parties to deal with. A deal like this offers railroads a new passive revenue stream; royalty fees well exceed what they get from similarly buried fiber-optic lines, of which there are more than 100,000 miles along US railroads. And it’s also a chance for railroads to be part of a positive sustainability story. The project is privately funded, so there will be no need for any complicated cost-allocation formulas. The financiers (including Siemens, which very rarely puts direct capital in transmission projects) will make their money back from those who use the line — the suppliers that put power on it, the shippers that sell power across it, and the buyers that consume the power — through competitive bidding for capacity. SOO Green is holding an open solicitation right now to allocate its 2,100 megawatts among them. The aim is to create a more robust energy market by, for the first time, connecting the MISO and PJM territories. (MISO and PJM are regional transmission organizations; see previous post for details.) Wind power projects are backed up in MISO, waiting to connect, stymied by grid congestion. Meanwhile, nextdoor neighbor PJM is the largest liquid energy market in the world. The idea is that SOO Green will unlock renewable energy development in MISO; Direct Connect projects four to six new gigawatts. That energy will be transported to population centers in PJM, easing grid congestion, reducing the carbon intensity of the East Coast energy mix, and lowering power prices. The connection will also allow MISO and PJM to share reserves for the first time, which could reduce the need for reserve capacity, increase reliability, and save consumers money. Because the MISO side will be drawing from such a geographically broad region, it is likely to be in use almost continuously. “When the wind isn't blowing in North Dakota, it likely is in Minnesota,” Trey Ward, the CEO of Direct Connect, told me. “We anticipate upwards of 90 percent line utilization.”“It's as if we teleported a 2,100-megawatt wind turbine with a 90 percent capacity factor from Iowa into suburban Chicago,” he says. In fact, the converter station in PJM has applied to be treated as a capacity source in that market. (That will require some updating of regulations, just as power market regulations had to be updated to accommodate batteries.) The converter stations at each end of the line ar

Welcome back to Transmission Week here at Volts!In my previous post, I explained why the US needs lots of new high-voltage power lines. They will help stitch together America’s balkanized grids, connect remote renewable energy to urban load centers, prepare the country for the coming wave of electrification, and relieve grid congestion. And oh yeah — we won’t be able to decarbonize the country without them. Nonetheless, they are not getting built! It’s a problem.Today, we’re going to walk step by step through the process and show why they’re not getting built. At each stage, we’ll look at what Congress can do — and what Biden can do without Congress’ help — to get the process moving. This is some wonky stuff, but I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible.Before we start …Transmission-related acronymsThis post will involve numerous acronyms, so to make things easier, I’ve put together a little acronym guide here at the beginning for you to check as needed. If you’re already an electricity system wonk, you can skip this.* DOE: The Department of Energy. The federal agency responsible for, among many other things, energy research.* FERC: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The federal agency that regulates interstate transmission of, and bulk sale of, electricity and natural gas. * IOU: Investor-owned utility. Privately owned companies acting as public utilities. Excepting some federally owned and municipal utilities, most utilities in the US are IOUs. * ISO: Independent System Operator. For our purposes here, you can think of these as the same as RTOs (see below). This is why you constantly hear people in this field using the unwieldy phrase “RTOs and ISOs.” * NIETC: A National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor, designated by DOE as an area in particular need of new transmission to ease costs or congestion. * NREL: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a DOE-run research lab.* PMA: Power Marketing Administration. Federal agencies that operate electric systems and sell the electrical output of federally owned hydroelectric dams in 33 states. They are: Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA), and Southwestern Power Administration (SWPA).* RTO: Regional Transmission Organization. Non-governmental organizations (which nonetheless have government-like powers) that oversee transmission planning and wholesale energy markets in areas of the country that have been “restructured,” i.e., where generation, transmission, and distribution are owned by separate utilities. RTO membership is composed of the utilities in a particular region. Here are the US RTOs and ISOs: CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE.All right, let’s get to it! There’s still not much inter-regional (much less national) transmission planningFor most of the history of the US electricity system, up to the 1990s, almost all utilities were “vertically integrated,” meaning they owned the whole electricity value chain in a given territory, from generators to transmission and distribution. They built large central-station power plants close by to population centers and then ran transmission lines out to them. There was neither much need nor much appetite for building longer regional or inter-regional lines. Over all that time, states developed a persistently parochial lens and tight control over transmission planning. Two things have changed in recent decades. One, renewable energy expanded rapidly and got really cheap, which is why solar and wind are the fastest growing sources of new electricity capacity. However, as we saw in the previous post, the most intense sun and wind in the US are distant from population centers. This suggests the need for a wider scope of planning.Two, a wave of reforms in the 1990s and 2000s led to “restructuring” in regions containing around half the nation’s electricity ratepayers. Vertically integrated utilities were broken up: generation owners were separated from transmission owners and both were separated from distribution-system operators (i.e., the local utility that sends you a power bill). Transmission planning in these restructured regions was given over to RTOs and ISOs. This suggests there ought to be capacity for a wider scope of planning.Indeed, FERC has acknowledged the need for larger-scale, regional and inter-regional transmission planning for decades, and attempted to make it happen through orders 888 (1996), 2000 (1999), 890 (2007), and 1000 (2011). I won’t get into all those orders other than to note that order 2000 created RTOs (membership in which was voluntary for utilities) and was explicitly meant to encourage (though not mandate) broader regional transmission planning. Part of the idea was to create competitive regional markets for transmission, similar to wholesale markets for generation, in which merchant (non-utility) projects would compete on a level playing field with IOU projects. As Ari Pes

[If you would rather listen to the post than read it, click play above.]Hello, Volties, and welcome to Transmission Week here at Volts! It’s been delayed almost as many times as Infrastructure Week, but it’s finally here. All week, we’re going to be digging into the US energy transmission system. For those of you new to the subject, “transmission system” refers to the big, high-voltage power lines that carry electricity over long distances, usually perched along tall metal towers. To use a road analogy, transmission lines are like the interstate system, whereas lower-voltage “distribution systems” are like the nests of highways and streets that serve local populations.I’ve always been fascinated by distribution systems, but I’ve never really taken a deep dive into the transmission side of things. Until now!And now that I have, I understand better than ever why I put it off for so long. It’s complicated, y’all. There are lots and lots of acronyms, agencies, and obscure policies involved. It’s not the sexiest stuff.But it’s important. Transmission is one of the key tools to help decarbonize the country and also one of the biggest, most dangerous bottlenecks standing in the way. We (probably) can’t decarbonize at the scale and speed we need without more of it, but laws, rules, and systems designed for a different century and a different electricity system are slowing it to a snail’s pace. The entire transmission process badly needs attention and reform. And there are signs it may finally be getting some. There’s bipartisan political support for it, along with support from big unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “I'm excited about transmission,” says Fatima Ahmad, senior counsel for the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. “I see jobs benefits, I see bipartisan interest, I see more and more climate policy advocates taking the time to get educated about these issues — all those things make me excited. This is just such a clear next step.”So here’s what we’re going to do. Today, I’m going to try to convince you that transmission matters: we need more of it, we’re not building it, our decarbonization goals are at risk, but we’re at a moment when real reform is possible.In the next post, we’ll get into the weeds. Getting a transmission line built requires planning, financing, permitting, and siting, and right now every single step of that process is dysfunctional and constipated. In each case, we’ll look at what Biden can do (through the agencies) and what Congress can do to expedite the process. Expect acronyms.In the post after that, we’ll look at a related issue: not how to build new transmission lines, but how to improve the existing transmission system with “grid-enhancing technologies.” (Get excited about topology optimization algorithms!)And finally, we’ll review what we’ve learned and contemplate the political landscape ahead.It’s gonna be so much fun!Why we need more transmissionI wrote about the need for more transmission here and here for Vox, if you want to really dig in, but here’s a quick review of the top reasons.We need more transmission to decarbonizeA group of researchers at Princeton recently did some comprehensive modeling of US decarbonization scenarios. Of the scenarios that achieved net-zero, the one with the least new transmission — the RE- scenario, which includes lots of nuclear power and natural gas with carbon capture and sequestration — doubles US transmission capacity by 2050. In the more renewables-heavy scenario, E+, transmission triples. Modeling from Dr. Christopher Clack at Vibrant Clean Energy has produced similar results, as have many other studies.If the US wants to decarbonize at all, it’s going to have to build the sh*t out of some new transmission.We need a national energy grid anywayDespite my road analogy above, the US transmission system is different from its interstate system in one important way: we have a true national interstate network. No matter where you are in the system, you can drive to anywhere else in the system. The US does not have a true national energy network. Instead, functionally speaking, it has three transmission grids: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and ERCOT (a Texas grid, basically). Though there are a few small ties between them, very little energy is exchanged. They mostly operate in isolation.(As you can see from all the labels below, the Eastern Interconnection is divided up among several functional transmission regions, but they are all connected to a common physical grid.)This is goofy. Linking them together with high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines — i.e., creating a true national energy network — would allow them to share, exporting energy when they have oversupply or importing it when supply is stretched. Early morning solar in Arizona could go to New York at the peak of its afternoon demand. Evening wind power in North Dakota could go to California when everyone is turni

[If you don’t feel like reading this post, just click Play above and I’ll read it to you.]Happy Inauguration Day, Voltsians! I know it’s getting somewhat tedious to keep saying this, but yes, I’m still working on that transmission post. I swore when I started my own publication that I was not going to rush anymore — that I would research and work on stuff until I was happy with it. But I never swore not to be neurotic and apologetic about it! Anyway, it’s in the works. Until then, let’s look at a few interesting news developments from this eventful past week. Biden administration pledges to come out of the gate swingingA few weeks ago, I shared some simple advice with the Biden administration: blitz. Do everything within your power, as fast as possible, and don’t get tripped up trying to finesse the media narrative or secure chimerical congressional cooperation.In what is clearly a direct response to my piece (I mean probably), the administration recently leaked plans for its first term, to be kicked off with a 10-day spree of executive actions — roughly a dozen on Day One alone. CTV News got the scoop from a memo by incoming Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, which Politico subsequently confirmed.I really encourage you to click over and read the list — it’s the best I’ve felt in ages. So many lives will be immediately improved through health, immigration, and Covid relief measures. Elections really do matter.But we’re here to talk about climate and energy, so I went through and picked out the relevant stuff:Wednesday, after inaugurationDeclaration that the U.S. is rejoining Paris climate accord.Start of a process to restore 100 public health and environmental rules that the Obama administration created and President Donald Trump eliminated or weakened.Not included in the memo but confirmed by CNN reporting: rescind the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. By February 1Executive actions to address climate change.BeyondWin passage of a $2 trillion climate package to get the U.S. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.Win passage of a plan to spend $700 billion boosting manufacturing and research and development.The list suggests that the administration is going to move aggressively on multiple fronts, but it doesn’t reveal much about what direction it will go on climate. The last two items are going to be pure messaging efforts — as long as the filibuster remains in place, neither has a chance of passage in Congress.The first item, getting back in the Paris agreement, is low-hanging fruit, more symbolic than impactful. Ultimately, a Paris pledge is simply a pledge to pass domestic carbon policy, so it’s the domestic carbon policy that really matters. The second item, cleaning up Trump’s regulatory mess, is extremely important, but it’s a matter of restoration, not building. The third item, Keystone XL, is a genuinely nice-to-see nod to climate activists, but not that big a deal in carbon terms.So everything rides on that vague fourth item: “Executive actions to address climate change.” Will Biden’s EPA launch work on new rules to tackle fuel economy? A new plan to decarbonize the electricity sector? More stringent rules on air pollution? Rules that encourage building electrification? My fear is that the administration will put off that work, thinking that being gentle will make legislation easier. It won’t. Just do the rules!Court strikes down Trump’s plan to (not) regulate power plantsTuesday brought a bit of good fortune that will make Biden’s work easier: a federal court struck down one of Trump’s most important climate rollbacks, and not only that, repudiated the legal argument it was based on.Some background: The Obama administration’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — the Clean Power Plan — was stuck in legal limbo, waiting on a federal court ruling, when Trump came into power and squashed it for good. It never got the ruling or went into effect.The argument before the court was over whether the Clean Air Act grants EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants “beyond the fenceline.” The Clean Power Plan was extremely flexible, allowing states to meet their reduction targets through a portfolio of compliance strategies, many of which (like building new renewables or increasing energy efficiency) took place outside of the regulated power plants themselves — beyond the fenceline. Republican lawyers argued that EPA regulations can only mandate changes “within the fenceline,” which, when it comes to something like a coal plant, amounts to some modest efficiency improvements.When the rule and the lawsuit were scrapped, Trump’s EPA developed a replacement plan based on that legal interpretation: the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. Now, pretty much all the rules that came out of the Trump administration were shoddy and ridiculous, but ACE was something special. Studies found that the rule would lead to an increase in carbon emissions, because it would enable some coal plants to run mo

Greetings, peoples of the Volts! I’ve got a special treat for you today. It’s not my first podcast, exactly, but it’s my first Official Podcast, with music and fancy-pants guests and everything. My guests are:* Dr. Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the excellent recent book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States; and* Sam Ricketts, former climate director for the Jay Inslee presidential campaign, cofounder of Evergreen Action, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and general climate-political man about town. Our subject? How to pass a national clean energy standard through budget reconciliation. If those words mean nothing to you, I recommend reading my previous post, about the Georgia Senate wins and what they mean for clean-energy policy. But I’ll run through some quick background.Biden may need to squeeze his signature climate plan through a budget billOne of the most important elements of Joe Biden’s climate plan — arguably the centerpiece — is a national clean energy standard (CES) that would require the electricity sector to steadily decarbonize until it reaches net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. This is important not just because the electricity sector is responsible for about a third of emissions, but because a lot of other emitting sectors like transportation and heating are going to shift to electricity in coming years, driving up demand. It’s important to have clean electricity for them to use.While Biden does have a Democratic Congress, his majority in the Senate remains slim and the filibuster is likely to remain in place, which means a big climate bill is unlikely. Any big bill at all is unlikely. Probably the only thing that will pass Congress is what’s called a budget reconciliation bill, which can not be filibustered and thus can get by with a simple majority.The only things allowed in a reconciliation bill are budget-relevant items, i.e., measures that raise or lower government revenue. Biden’s CES is a purely regulatory measure — it just changes the rules. It probably couldn’t get through reconciliation.However! Could a CES be tweaked or modified or redesigned in some way so that it is budget relevant and could pass through reconciliation? Could Biden pass his top climate priority after all?That is precisely what Leah and Sam have been working on, and that’s what we discuss, at some length, in today’s podcast. It’s way more interesting than it sounds! (That may be my new tag line.)Bonus MabelLife is a donut, y’all. Grab onto it with all your fearsome teeth. 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

[If you do not feel like reading today’s post, you can listen to it. Just hit play above.]Y’all, before we get started today I have to share the funniest thing that’s ever happened. You know how I went on MSNBC a few weeks ago to talk about how Joe Biden should do everything at once? And you know how former Saturday Night Live comedienne and all-around awesome person Leslie Jones frequently tapes herself watching MSNBC and commenting on people and their rooms? Well get a load of this:Lol. It’s even funnier to read the comment thread beneath the tweet. Apparently I look like all the white bearded guys rolled into one. Anyway. Good times. On to business!I’m working on a longer post about electricity transmission (join the preliminary discussion), but the news cycle has intervened. To wit: on Tuesday, Democrats officially won both the Senate runoffs in Georgia. Joe Biden will have a Democratic Senate!This news has Forest shaking with excitement.So before we get to transmission, let’s talk about what these Senate wins mean, in general and specifically for clean-energy policy. I’ll end with a little bit of advice for the Democratic Congress, which is the same advice I gave Biden: go for it. Control over the Senate mattersDemocrats have 50 senators (well, 48 plus Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King) and Vice President Harris casts the tie-breaking vote, so technically they have a majority in the Senate — albeit the slimmest possible majority.But in the US Senate, the one-vote difference between being in the minority and being in the majority is a chasm. Just ask incoming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Most importantly, the Senate majority leader controls which bills come to the floor. McConnell was forever refusing to bring bills to a vote unless he had the entire GOP caucus behind him — even bills with enough bipartisan support to pass. It was an incredibly effective weapon to suppress and obscure the Democratic agenda. New Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will be able to control the tempo and focus now. Secondly, Senate committees will now be chaired by Dems, who can choose what to hold hearings on, and when. Thirdly, this is going to make it much easier for Biden to get his appointments confirmed by the Senate, which is a huge relief — those fights would have drained his attention and political capital. The day after the election, Biden announced that he would nominate Merrick Garland for attorney general. Ha ha, suck it, Mitch.Fourthly, if Dems can maintain their unity (which is never a given), they can begin populating the federal bench with competent progressive judges to offset the incompetent reactionaries McConnell has been cranking out. And if Justice Stephen Breyer should choose to retire [makes the sign of the cross] they will have an opportunity to get a solid progressive on the Supreme Court.Losing the Senate would have been a disaster for Dems. Congress would have passed nothing, leaving Biden virtually alone to accomplish everything his coalition needs to hang together in 2022 and 2024. Instead they have a narrow majority in the Senate to match their increasingly narrow majority in the House. So it is a non-disaster. That said, it’s not going to lead to progressive legislation.A 50-50 Senate will be owned & operated by Joe ManchinPre-November, Democrats were pretty high on election optimism — smoking some bad polls, as it turns out — and there was talk of a sweeping, New Deal-esque agenda, beginning with aggressive democracy reform and moving quickly into climate change. (Biden’s published plans constituted the most progressive agenda any Democratic presidential candidate has run on in decades.)That was all premised on the idea of Democrats winning 52 or 53 seats in the Senate. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, even that wouldn’t have been nearly enough of a margin for Dems to pass the kind of agenda Biden ran on.But with only 50 seats, Democrats will need unanimity for every move they make. Republicans will be united in obstructionism. It is what they know best; it is where they shine. There are only a few Republican senators who even pretend to be “moderate” any more — Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Mitt Romney (UT), basically — and even if one or two Republicans can be picked off for a given vote, that’s not enough to fully offset losing conservative Dems like Joe Manchin (WV, now chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Jon Tester (MT), plus Independent Angus King (ME).Basically, the rightmost handful of Dems in the Senate will be the narrow aperture through which all legislation must pass, and as such, they will have almost total veto power over every part of the agenda. They will decide what gets through.Manchin does not want to pass Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. He doesn’t even want to pass Biden’s actual climate plan. He doesn’t want to do anything big at all, which he has made very clear:Senator

Hey, Volts readers, guess what? Now you can be Volts listeners! If you would prefer to hear the post below read aloud, by me, just click play above. And if you like having the posts read like this, let me know. If enough people are into it, I might see about getting some better equipment and actually learning how to edit a sound file.Before we jump in, some housekeeping:* Remember, as of Jan. 1, free subscribers will receive one post a week. The other posts, and the ability to comment on posts and discussion threads, will be reserved for members (paid subscribers). I’m somewhat loath to do this — in my perfect world, it would all be free — but I need to, like, live. And buy dog food. So please join! We’re gonna have fun. * There are 20% subscription discounts for groups of four or more and students and educators. If you’re an educator who wants Volts access for your class or group, let me know and we’ll figure something out. * If you want to subscribe but can’t afford it right now, let me know and I’ll set you up. You can reply to this email and I’ll get it. * The Covid-relief/omnibus megabill, containing an enormous energy bill that I discussed last week? Trump signed it. It’s law! (I also discussed it with Matt Yglesias on the first Volts podcast.)Anyway, on to business.Today I’m going to do something a little different. It might seem like an odd digression into philosophy and ethics, but it comes back around to politics. In fact, it explains my core political orientation about as well as anything can.I’m going to explain why I hate the Trolley Problem.The Trolley Problem and its variantsThe Trolley Problem is a famous “thought experiment” in ethics. It traces back to philosopher Philippa Foot, who first wrote about it in 1967, but in the years since there have been dozens upon dozens of variations, in both the philosophical literature and the popular press.You’ve probably heard some version. The most basic goes like this: There’s an out-of-control railcar hurtling toward five people who are tied to the track. You’re next to a switch that could divert the car to another track, but on that track is a single worker who would be killed if you do. What do you do?Variations are endless. What if the person on track two is your son? What if the choice is between five people you know to be murderers and one good person? What if the choice were made from a switch house where you couldn’t see any of the people? The point of these thought experiments is to probe your intuitions and principles. Is it better to do nothing and allow five deaths or to take affirmative action that leads to one death? Does the difference between acting and refraining from acting matter? Does the number of lives matter? Etc. The recent development of autonomous vehicles has brought the Trolly Problem back into popular consciousness yet again. If robots are going to be driving, how will they make these decisions? Will they be utilitarians, maximizing the number of lives saved at every juncture, or Kantians, refusing to knowingly sacrifice one life for another? Presumably however we program them. So maybe we have to decide after all.The Trolley Problem served as the basis for a fan-favorite sequence on the show The Good Place:And of course, times being what they are, it has inspired all manner of memes.Despite its enduring appeal, the Trolley Problem is Bad. It is misleading about moral decision making and, more importantly, misleading about how to improve moral decision making.It’s not moral principles but moral agents that matter mostSome of you know that I spent several years in the late 1990s getting an MA in philosophy and then starting on (but not finishing) a PhD. Anyone who studied analytic philosophy — as I did, at least at first — has spent lots of time with thought experiments. I spent a semester reading the pinnacle of pure intellectual gymnastics, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which is full of thought experiments moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and otherwise. The book is revered in the field, considered one of the great philosophical works of the 20th century, and it completely turned me off. It’s one of many things that led me away from philosophy entirely. As the Trolley Problem is structured, you, the moral agent, have an utter paucity of knowledge about the situation. You don’t know why you’re there, any of the people involved, any history, any detail. All you know is, one life or five lives. The problem is designed to make the agent (the decider) invisible, to isolate the decision itself away from embedded, embodied experience. Which is fine, if you’re just having a think. But discussing the ideal ranking of moral principles is like discussing Kant’s noumena, the thing-in-itself. No human can directly perceive it and wouldn’t know if they had, so there’s an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin aspect to it. All we have are the perceptual and analytic tools available to us, so we should focus on improving them. If you want trol

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. I hope you are somewhere safe and warm.Here’s a little holiday treat for you: I recorded my first Voltscast.Matt Yglesias runs a newsletter called Slow Boring. He is interested in the energy bill that Congress passed this week. I just wrote a long post about that energy bill.We wanted to chat about it. Starting a whole official podcast with professional editing and music and a name and all the rest sounded a bit daunting, so as an experiment, we decided, in the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly …We talked, we recorded it, and we’re sending it to you, unedited. Fast and loose. Let me know what you think and if you’d like to see (er, hear) more like this. I’d like to get into doing more audio in the future. Apparently some people don’t have time to read 3,000-word pieces, but they can listen to me read pieces while they wash the dishes or walk the dog, so I might try a bit of narration. And I’ve had a few early talks with people about doing something more professional and produced.I’ll be honest: I don’t really want to launch an Actual Podcast and get tied to a particular format and schedule. I’m terrible at satisficing and I know if I did it I would obsess over it and it would eat up all my time, and I’d rather spend my time writing. I’d like to do it on a less formal basis, though, at least if y’all are into it, so let me know.In the meantime, stay cozy like Mabel and Forest. 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