Volts

Perhaps the most politically difficult aspect of climate change is that, after decades of denial and delay, there is no longer any coherent “moderate” position to be had. To allow temperatures to rise past 1.5° or 2°C this century is to accept unthinkable disruption to agriculture, trade, immigration, public health, and basic social cohesion. To hold temperature rise to less than 1.5° or 2°C this...

In this episode, Saul Griffith (co-founder of Rewiring America ) and Arch Rao (founder and CEO of Span , which makes smart electrical panels) discuss the need to electrify US homes, the challenges standing in the way, the kinds of solutions that will ease the process, and much more. Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Saul Griffith and Arch Rao, June 28, 2021  ( PDF version ) David Roberts:...

Here at Volts, I recently spent a week … OK, a month writing about batteries, which store energy for electronic devices, electric vehicles, and, at least for short periods of time (four to six hours), the power grid. Lithium-ion batteries are extremely good at those tasks — and they’re getting better, and cheaper, all the time. But here’s the thing: a net-zero-carbon grid is going to need storage...

Long-time readers know that I am a veteran hater of the US Senate, the graveyard of good ideas and progressive policies. America’s upper chamber is one of the world’s least productive and most ridiculous legislative bodies, its dysfunctions matched only by its boundless self-regard. Don’t get me started. Instead, get Adam Jentleson started! Now there’s a guy who has earned his ire at the Senate. A...

(If you’d rather listen than read, just click Play above.) Energy nerds love arguing over the value of distributed energy resources (DERs), the rooftop solar panels and customer-owned batteries that are growing more popular by the day. There’s a fight in California right now over the value of energy from rooftop solar, just the latest skirmish in a long war that has ranged over numerous states . T...

I have been reading Will Wilkinson’s writing since I was a baby blogger, way back in the early 2000s. By then, I had already left behind the libertarianism that gripped me in college, but Will was still a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. I disagreed with him about many things, but I always found him rigorous and engaging. Over the years, I’ve followed as he’s moved from Cato to the...

It is now widely agreed among energy wonks that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to, as I like to put it, electrify everything . That means cleaning up the electricity system while shifting other energy uses — especially transportation and buildings — off of fossil fuels, onto electricity. When it comes to electrification, one technology in particular sits at the nex...

As you might have gathered from the name, when Battery Week began … a month ago, I did not anticipate it going on quite so long. Since it has dragged out a bit, I thought it might be helpful to pull everything together in one place. If you click play above, you will find a lithium-ion battery megapod: all the battery pieces read aloud, plus the podcast with Chloe Holzinger, strung together into on...

Welcome back, my Volts friends, to the Battery Week that never ends. (Just kidding — this is the last of it.) For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries, specifically, lithium-ion batteries: how they work, why they have taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future. Even with as many PDFs as I’ve r...

(If you don’t want to read, you can listen! Just click play above.) Hello! Welcome back to Battery Week here at Volts … where we use the term “week” somewhat loosely. Up to now, we’ve been focusing on lithium-on batteries (LIBs) — why they are so important , how they work , and the varieties of LIBs that are battling it out for the biggest battery market , electric vehicles (EVs). It’s fairly clea...

Greetings! Last week, I wrote about the ambitious slate of climate and energy policies that the state of Washington has put in place over the last two years — culminating, a few weeks ago, with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, which would cap the state’s emissions and reduce them 95 percent by 2050. It’s a dizzying amount of progress in a short period of time. As I talked to those involv...

In May 2019, I wrote in Vox that “ one weird trick can help any state or city pass clean energy policy .” Spoiler: the one weird trick is electing Democrats. My home state of Washington elected a whole mess of Democrats over the last several cycles and it is paying off handsomely. Without much national attention, the last few years have seen Washington quietly put into place the most comprehensive...

(Hey Volties! The following was going to be a column on Vox, but they decided they wanted something newsier, so I’ll be doing something about Biden’s pledge over there, soon. In the meantime, enjoy this writeup of a fun new paper, or listen by clicking play above. We’ll get back to Battery Week next week.) Climate change can sometimes seem like an intractable problem, so it is useful to remember p...

(If you would rather listen than read, just click play above.) Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Battery Week! We’ve talked about why lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are so important and we went through a basic primer on how they work . Today, we’re going to get into the competition within the broad lithium battery family, among all the different kinds of batteries that use lithium and exchange ch...

(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 ki...

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 variet...

(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...

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...

(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 cha...

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...

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...

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 m...

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 t...

(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 differ...

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 nation...