Volts community thread #21
Open to all free & paid subscribers.| www.volts.wtf
Landon Mossburg on beating lithium-ion on cost and safety with a grid storage system that has no moving parts.| Volts
I get frustrated at liberals' refusal to fight, and take it out on Giving Green's Dan Stein of all people.| Volts
Bill McKibben and Jamie Henn join me to discuss a new vision for climate activism focused on celebrating and accelerating the global solar boom.| Volts
Frank Rambo joins me to discuss the multi-billion-dollar utility practice of running expensive coal plants and the Trump administration's efforts to prop them up.| Volts
A conversation about "foreign entity of concern" rules with Jake Higdon and Isabel Munilla -- why they are needed and how Republicans are botching them.| www.volts.wtf
A diagnosis of the "sheer laziness" holding back the clean-energy movement.| Volts
Alon Levy explains how the US can build cheaper, better public transit by learning from the rest of the world.| Volts
Missy Stults explains Ann Arbor's novel plan to build a second, clean-energy utility alongside its incumbent.| Volts
Arc CEO Mitch Lee on building electric vehicles for lake sports.| Volts
On how plummeting battery prices make 24/7 solar power a reality today.| www.volts.wtf
A quarter of all energy humans use comes in the form of heat for high-temperature industrial processes. Industrial heat has long been considered "difficult to decarbonize," but a new class of thermal batteries promises to harness renewable energy to the task. I talk with one of the entrepreneurs involved.| www.volts.wtf
Jane Flegal and Jesse Jenkins join me to sift through the wreckage of the GOP's "Big Beautiful Bill" and debate what's next for climate policy.| Volts
Two Montana senators explain how they made housing reform work across party lines.| Volts
Quinn Nakayama on PG&E's push to innovate on flexible interconnection and smart electrification.| Volts
On turning data centers from a grid liability into a grid asset with Jeff Bladen of Verrus.| www.volts.wtf
Michael Grunwald joins me to discuss how to increase agriculture's output while reducing its carbon footprint.| Volts
Buffy Wicks and Scott Wiener explain how they're reforming CEQA, the California law that lets anyone with a lawyer delay housing projects for years.| Volts
On why Republicans just voted against their own districts.| Volts
The "Big Beautiful Bill" gutting the IRA, its impact on clean energy, AI, brain drain, and the lessons for Democratic policy.| www.volts.wtf
At long last, one of clean energy's OGs, Michael Liebreich, has come to Volts. He and I discuss his recent essays on five causes for pessimism about the net-zero transition, alongside five causes for optimism.| www.volts.wtf
Cory Doctorow describes how software platform technologies go wrong and what it might look like when our homes and vehicles are on those platforms.| www.volts.wtf
An enormous amount of wood is harvested from forests in the southern US to be burned in Europe as “renewable energy.” Now the industry wants to open more wood-pellet facilities in the Pacific Northwest. Rita Frost of NRDC and Brenna Bell of 350 PDX explain why that’s a bad idea and why wood pellets aren’t as renewable as they look.| www.volts.wtf
In this episode, Huffington Post reporter Alexander Kaufman traces the recent history of US building codes, a surprisingly compelling and twisty tale of efforts at reform meeting stiff resistance from builders and natural gas companies.| www.volts.wtf
Why are some clean-energy technologies on learning curves, coming down in cost, and other aren't? What is it about some technologies that make them prone to rapid learning? I talk to two scholars who have tried to puzzle it out.| www.volts.wtf
