Explore every episode of the podcast Volts

Home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall are nice, but what about people who can’t afford them, or renters who aren’t allowed to install them, or people who just don’t want the hassle of dealing with a permit and an electrician? A company called Pila is selling small (1.6 kWh) batteries that simply plug into a normal electrical socket. They can serve as backup for a refrigerator or other appliance in the event of a blackout, but they can also “mesh” with one another to form a network, pair with rooftop solar, or participate in VPP programs. CEO Cole Ashman explains the value proposition.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:26 Lessons from Powerwall and Span

05:33 What Pila is and how it works

07:14 How long a fridge runs on one battery

09:28 Fire risk, LFP chemistry, and New York City

16:02 Why the price went up, and cost per kilowatt hour

19:55 Who is actually buying Pila

23:00 Financing models and free batteries

27:04 Do the bill savings add up?

32:05 Why utilities want small batteries in VPPs

36:58 Pilots with Holy Cross Energy and Brooklyn SolarWorks

41:09 Solar pairing and the Pila mesh network

47:14 Camping batteries and built-in storage

54:19 Utilities and visibility at the grid edge

55:58 Bidirectional outlets and the next five years

1:00:10 Clean energy as invisible infrastructure

Back in 2011, I wrote that fossil fuel interests had a much better media game than clean energy. My example was Frank Maisano, a media relations guy for coal utilities and the natural gas industry. Thirty years on, he’s still at it — still writing his newsletter, still connecting reporters to sources, still better at it than anyone on the clean side (sigh). So I’m finally talking to him about it: clean energy trade groups nobody in Washington fears, Trump’s daft efforts to kill renewables, the PAC picking off dirty-energy Republicans, permitting and data center fights, and the climate denial shop he worked for in the ‘90s. Spoiler: he regrets nothing.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:46 – What a DC media strategist actually does

09:50 – Republicans, Trump, and a narrow House majority

15:29 – Why tax cuts beat energy in the OBBBA fight

18:54 – Competing with China on AI without the electric stack

21:15 – Paying $4 billion to hand back offshore wind leases

28:07 – Red-state wind and the orders keeping coal plants open

32:52 – Clean energy trade groups and the building trades

38:41 – Gas as a bridge, and what longer term means

44:55 – Whether a half-gas trade group can serve clean energy

48:43 – A coherent clean vision against an incoherent coalition

51:14 – Do the green groups still scare anyone

55:18 – Permitting reform and the Whitehouse-Capito path

59:46 – Data centers, animal spirits, and the midterms

1:06:48 – The revenge PAC, and whether it is working

1:12:31 – Congress, the courts, and what Democrats could do

1:18:53 – COP, climate change, and the client he would turn down

Verrus is building data centers designed to address every objection the public has raised: they use batteries instead of diesel generators, which makes them grid assets that help hold down power prices; they use closed-loop cooling, which uses a tiny fraction of the water; their equipment is quieter; and as a bonus, they squeeze more servers into the same grid connection. Yet both of Verrus’s proposed sites, in Michigan and Oregon, are mired in fierce local opposition. In this episode, CEO Nelson Abramson walks through the engineering — and the politics that the engineering hasn’t quite solved.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:43 – Three decades in data centers

05:05 – What a Verrus data center looks like

07:39 – The medium voltage power plane

12:13 – UPS batteries vs. the big LFP battery

17:27 – Priority aware capping and provisioned utility capacity

22:31 – Why not buy the pieces off the shelf?

25:42 – Duration: what happens when four hours runs out

34:28 – Diesel backup and what customers ask for

37:15 – How flexible is compute, really?

42:37 – Noise, fans, and the sound studies

48:42 – Water use and the 12 million gallon question

52:19 – Industrial land and by-right zoning

56:07 – Public opposition, recall petitions, and community benefits

1:00:07 – Oregon, Salem, and the moratorium

1:03:56 – Ride-through, NERC, and losing the moat

1:07:11 – What V2 looks like

Jane Flegal has worked inside philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, industrial emissions policy at the Biden White House, and carbon-removal market development at Frontier; she's now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, writing some of the smartest climate policy analysis around. We cover a lot of ground: industrial policy versus market approaches, what the IRA got right and wrong, philanthropy's proper role, data centers and the case for an infrastructure fund, and behind-the-meter gas, among other things. This is a long one, and spicy!

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:11 – Flegal's thesis: building a clean grid fast enough to power growth

06:29 – Why she rejects degrowth

09:27 – The Roosevelt essay: climate as more than a market failure

13:30 – Why clean energy underuses its political muscle

15:24 – Industrial policy and the green spiral theory of change

20:40 – Was IRA the right approach?

22:12 – Lily Bermel's paper and the fight over what survived

23:21 – What she would have done differently under IRA

30:11 – Philanthropy, Silicon Valley, and what government is for

33:29 – The epistemic crisis inside environmental NGOs

39:09 – The abundance movement and what each faction misses

44:16 – What establishment Democrats get wrong on climate

46:06 – Why issue polling misleads

50:34 – Republicans and the Cold War analogy

52:47 – Data centers and the American Grid Infrastructure Fund

59:13 – Affordability politics and who pays for the grid

1:08:14 – Emissions, behind-the-meter gas, and flexible load

1:13:57 – The clean firm debate: storage plus transmission?

1:20:14 – Capacity markets, ERCOT, and the case for planning

1:24:32 – Utility incentives, public power, and affordability fixes

1:35:55 – Permitting reform and the land footprint asymmetry

1:41:05 – NEPA reform and the political window

1:48:21 – Where fresh policy thinking comes from

Zanskar argues that the US is badly underestimating its conventional geothermal resources — that there are far more undiscovered hydrothermal systems, and that each one can produce far more power, than people think. They think AI can help find those resources, and they have drilled three sites to back it up, including a “blind” discovery in Nevada with no surface signs and no prior exploratory wells. If they're right, terawatts of firm, carbon-free power are reachable with off-the-shelf drilling technology. Co-founders Carl Hoiland and Joel Edwards make the case.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:29 – Heat, permeability, and how resources have been found

04:49 – Why conventional geothermal stalled, and why the estimate is stale

09:22 – Applying AI to old exploration data

11:10 – The data Zanskar works with

13:09 – Models, field testing, and the feedback loop

15:02 – How much more resource is really out there

20:22 – Lightning Dock: reviving a written-off field

22:14 – What has changed in drilling technology

28:37 – Pumpernickel and the permeability question

31:08 – Natural permeability vs. enhanced geothermal

34:21 – Big Blind, the first blind discovery in 30 years

37:09 – Improving the models to keep getting better

40:51 – Financing exploration: the development capital facility

44:38 – The NV Energy PPA and data center demand

47:42 – The skeptical case and geographic limits

54:20 – Policy dependence and public lands

58:11 – What's next for Zanskar

Volts published eight conversations in August — with two Idaho state legislators, a grid cybersecurity expert, the architect of Uruguay's energy transition, an EV charging exec, and more — which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We've rounded up the highlights into a single hour. Enjoy!

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and how the best-of series works

01:59 – Saleem Chapman on why every market design fails ratepayers the same way

07:51 – Patrick Miller on Chinese inverters and commodity boards

12:22 – Ben Toews and Megan Egbert on how Idaho's housing bills happened

18:34 – Seth Cutler on why an IONNA site is technically a bakery

22:52 – Ramón Méndez Galain on getting every Uruguayan party to sign one plan

28:00 – Quinn Nakayama on why a utility would adopt something that saves money

34:16 – Varun Sivaram on workload tiers and who pays when flexing goes wrong

38:44 – Todd Tucker on the Defense Production Act precedent

44:20 – Closing note and what to send in

Disinformation about clean energy is showing up everywhere — online after every blackout, at county commission meetings about siting new projects, in regulatory dockets stuffed with fake comments. GoodPower, which combines a C3 education arm with a C4 advocacy arm, is trying to fight back with a network of thousands of content creators, rapid-response campaigns around storms and grid failures, and an AI tool that detects manufactured public comments. I talk with CEO Leah Qusba about what they've tried, what they've measured, and what actually works.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:06 – What the disinformation claims, and who spreads it

05:57 – From Action for the Climate Emergency to GoodPower

08:38 – Building a creator network in non-political verticals

14:17 – Competing with talk radio and Fox News

18:26 – Winter Storm Fern and the rapid response system

23:26 – Measuring whether a deployment actually worked

27:24 – Pre-bunking and the 80-county experiment

33:18 – Getting people off the couch and into the room

38:10 – AI agents and where human judgment sits

42:05 – Keeping the C3 and the C4 distinct

47:13 – Battery fires, Moss Landing, and talking to fire chiefs

50:54 – TrueVoice and manufactured public comment

56:13 – Whether AI will overwhelm the comment process

58:11 – The best messages that actually land

1:04:22 – Super PACs, budgets, and what comes next

Even as he has torn down climate policy, Donald Trump has normalized the use of more powerful & aggressive tools of economic statecraft, like equity stakes in private companies, new federal authorities, and sovereign wealth funds. The Roosevelt Institute recently issued a collection of 17 essays exploring how a future administration could use the tools Trump has assembled for decarbonization. I talk with Todd Tucker, editor of and contributor to the volume, about these new industrial planning tools.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:32 – Did Biden's green policy prove durable?

09:39 – The Defense Production Act and the Sable pipeline

14:59 – Whether to leave the DPA on the table

15:35 – Executive orders and the durability problem

19:01 – Whether the Supreme Court treats Democrats differently

22:03 – Executive power and a disempowered Congress

25:05 – Senate malapportionment and filibuster reform

29:43 – Court reform and the major questions doctrine

34:13 – Manufacturing vs. deployment

42:52 – Permitting, abundance, and theory of power

49:20 – Public ownership and the U.S. Steel golden share

55:22 – What state capitalism could look like for green ends

59:56 – Shelley Welton on utilities as planning tools

1:02:42 – Speed vs. deliberation before 2029

Typically, AI data centers are large, inflexible loads that the grid has to build around, which is one reason utilities take so long to connect them. Emerald AI has designed a “digital brain” that can ramp down, move, or delay computing jobs in a data center on demand, making a data center a flexible asset to the grid. I talk with CEO Varun Sivaram about how the software works, what flexibility costs the compute, why it beats just installing batteries, whether utilities can enforce it, and what it would mean for clean energy.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:05 – Temporal, spatial, and resource flexibility

06:26 – What Emerald Conductor touches on site

08:35 – Who decides which workloads can flex

10:55 – Who is liable when a job slows down

13:45 – Who actually signs the contract

14:49 – Larger and faster grid connections

18:02 – Enforcing the flexibility promise

19:05 – What broke in the demos, from bad nodes to slow telemetry

26:41 – What flexing costs the compute jobs

29:21 – Why not just use batteries, and the demand merit order

35:44 – Training, inference, and substation-scale data centers

40:23 – PJM, ERCOT, and legal enforceability

44:50 – Renewables, gas, and consumer bills

When it comes to innovative new grid technologies, every utility wants to be the third in line to try them. None of them want to be the first to take risks and iron out new processes. That's one reason grid-enhancing technologies, better software, and smarter internal procedures stay stuck in pilot purgatory, even as the industry faces the biggest buildout since rural electrification. PG&E's Quinn Nakayama and Microsoft's Hanna Grene discuss what's actually blocking utility innovation — and Quinn offers a novel proposal for paying someone to go first.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:44 – Why grid-enhancing technologies stall in the US

07:54 – Selling grid software into utilities: what goes wrong

11:08 – From a pipes-and-wires company to a technology company

12:38 – Pilot program hell and the last 30 percent

15:04 – Innovation as a bolt-on, and the three muscles

17:47 – The digital spine, data quality, and smart meters

23:56 – Org chart versus work chart

25:09 – Strategy, structure, people, process, technology

29:24 – Build, buy, and the ecosystem skill set

36:15 – Data leakage, shadow AI, and paying twice

41:12 – Why utility product cycles run five to seven years

46:27 – Human in the loop, and EPRI's SAFERai.power

49:06 – Advanced market commitments and the kingmaker problem

53:22 – EPIC, and whether software counts as infrastructure

01:00:05 – The CapEx incentive problem and final advice

1:04:34 – Digital Infrastructure as Capital Spend

1:06:53 – Final Advice

Ramón Méndez Galain helped Uruguay decarbonize its grid (today it’s 98% fossil-free) while keeping the utility public and letting private capital foot the bill. Now he’s trying to export the same playbook across the global South. We talk through how Uruguay pulled it off — the hydro “battery” for wind & solar “baseload,” the cross-party political deal, the market redesign — and what actually transfers to countries without the same advantages. We also discuss why, seven years on, no other country has followed Uruguay’s path.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:09 – From particle physics to a nuclear proposal

05:46 – Taking the job as energy secretary

07:00 – The 2008 crisis: drought, expensive oil, blackouts

09:26 – Getting every party to sign the same plan

12:51 – Why climate was not the lead argument

15:42 – Attracting private capital without privatizing

20:22 – What a public utility made possible

23:06 – Planning a grid where wind and solar are the base load

29:26 – Thermal plants as insurance, and the last 2 percent

32:36 – EVs, smart meters, and building an electrostate

37:33 – Why bills fell less than generation costs

39:46 – What transfers to other countries

44:15 – Optimum curtailment, Colombia, and Haiti

50:51 – The political work, and the argument against the dominant narrative

56:36 – The Global South and the NDC as development catalyst

As the U.S. EV market slows and federal charging support recedes, IONNA, a fast-charging network backed by eight major automakers, is still expanding. On Volts, CEO Seth Cutler makes the case that public charging is entering a new phase focused on reliability and customer experience, but the economics remain difficult, with low utilization and demand charges squeezing margins. With roughly 1,300 bays live and a target of 30,000, IONNA is testing whether a multi-brand network can offer a Tesla-like charging experience while building a sustainable business.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction: can public EV charging be as reliable as a gas station?

02:30 – Public charging’s four phases, and IONNA’s phase-four bet

08:17 – IONNA’s origin story

09:55 – Scale, footprint & site strategy

11:52 – Rechargery @ vs. freestanding: the two site formats

18:45 – Can DC fast charging make money? Unit economics

21:29 – Demand charges & why fast charging is expensive

23:57 – Getting power: permitting, interconnection & utilities

29:18 – Site design, amenities & the monetization question

34:14 – Regional site customization: the gas station turned bakery

36:35 – The charging experience: apps & Plug&Charge

39:03 – Reliability strategy & metrics

42:47 – Headwinds: the EV market downturn & policy risk

46:54 – Business model, profitability & the IONITY comparison

50:09 – Geographic rollout: the chicken-and-egg problem

54:07 – Competitive position vs. Tesla

56:37 – Closing: vision, fears & timeline

Last year I did a pod on Montana’s surprising burst of bipartisan housing legislation. Turns out Idaho was watching. This year its legislature passed six housing bills of its own (two others failed). Republican state Sen. Ben Toews and Democratic state Rep. Megan Egbert join me to walk through what passed, what didn’t, and what they gave away to get it done — plus the property tax cap that quietly works against all of it, and why duplexes turned out to be the red line.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and the Idaho housing package

02:43 – How each guest came to the housing issue

06:39 – Inside the interim housing study committee

09:05 – SB 1354, ADUs by right, and Dillon’s Rule

12:52 – The 5,000 to 10,000 compromise, and HOAs

15:03 – SB 1352 starter homes, manufactured homes, lot splits

16:28 – HB 706 and single-stair buildings

18:11 – The permitting shot clock and the 6-day rule

19:48 – Living with the compromises, and why counties were left out

22:54 – The two bills that died: duplexes and YIGBY

28:41 – HB 389, the property tax cap, and the growth undertow

34:41 – What the public understands about growth

37:23 – Regulatory reform on supply side vs. incentives for housing

43:59 – The February deadline and city resistance

48:52 – Horizontal vs. vertical density

56:03 – What comes next for the committee & Idaho housing

Could the US grid be brought down by Chinese hackers? To find out, I talked with Patrick Miller, who helped write the cybersecurity rules for the bulk power system and became the first person with federal authority to enforce them. We get into what's actually been hacked, why those "rogue devices" in Chinese inverters are less sinister than they sound, and why squirrels still do more damage than hackers.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:47 – What state utility commissioners get wrong about cyber risk

04:50 – Real attacks on the grid so far: Ukraine, Poland, and the US

06:57 – IT versus OT, and why grid devices are hard to protect

10:30 – The NERC CIP standards: scope, requirements, enforcement

17:40 – Distributed resources outside the CIP perimeter

20:54 – Dropping the threshold to 20 MVA, and federal jurisdiction

29:12 – Chinese inverters and the commodity board

36:09 – Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and China's intent

39:26 – Data centers as a new attack surface

43:19 – The trade-off between security and speed

47:44 – Cyber-informed engineering and analog safeguards

54:05 – AI on offense and defense

1:02:21 – Squirrels, balloons, and physical threats

1:04:24 – CISA cuts, CIRCIA, and harmonizing the rules

State legislatures are writing data center rules faster than they can verify the demand forecasts underneath them. Fifteen states accounted for 80 percent of data center electricity demand in 2023, a single hyperscale campus can arrive as 15 to 20 percent of a utility's demand, and the transmission to serve it takes five to 15 years to build. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts works through Climate Cabinet's Taming Data Center Turmoil series with Saleem Chapman, who leads the group's electricity affordability policy work, on why Georgia's regulated utility, PJM's capacity market, and ERCOT's competitive market each left ratepayers holding the risk, and what a state can require before it approves a project, while the facility operates, and after the deal is done.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:49 – How Climate Cabinet came to the data center fight

03:58 – Three things that make hyperscalers unlike past industrial loads

07:51 – Warning signals: forecast opacity, gas dependency, unconditional subsidies

13:44 – Siting near overburdened communities and the Memphis case

15:34 – State preemption versus local control

18:31 – The same failure pattern in Georgia, PJM, and ERCOT

23:52 – Why not just ban data centers outright

28:07 – The framework, and what to require before approval

34:54 – While operating: real cost pricing and on-call load flexibility

37:39 – Scenario-based planning and the utility incentive problem

39:37 – After the deal: new and matched clean energy

43:48 – Siting standards and performance-tied incentives

50:27 – Existing facilities and the threat to build elsewhere

55:41 – Which states are ahead, and step one for lawmakers

Volts published eight conversations in July on subjects with nothing obvious in common: an Arizona utility board election, Minnesota smart meters, land value taxes in Spokane, silicon battery anodes. Yet six of them arrived at the same constraint. What stops energy infrastructure from getting built in the United States is more often written into law than into physics. On this episode, David Roberts pulls one stretch from each July conversation into a single hour, with two Minnesota utility regulators, a Spokane city council member, a Hawaii state senator, a co-founder of a battery materials company, and more.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction: a new format for Volts

01:22 Arizona: winning the utility elections nobody watches

07:04 Minnesota: the smart meter data nobody uses

12:40 Spokane: how property taxes reward empty lots

17:31 Hawaii: the education gap in state energy policy

22:13 The data center backlash is a politics story

27:41 Why America can't build transit: procurement

32:41 Clean energy after the IRA: the glass debate

38:26 Silicon anodes: the other half of the battery

44:47 Closing: tell me if this worked

Materials in lithium-ion battery cathodes have continuously evolved since the 1990s, but anodes have stubbornly remained graphite. Now, finally, there’s some innovation on that side: silicon anodes, which engineers have struggled to master for a decade, are finally coming into wide commercialization. They enable up to five times the energy density of graphite anodes, charge many times faster, and are poised to revolutionize the battery market. In this episode, I talk with Rick Costantino, co-founder and CTO of Group14, which is selling a silicon-carbon composite material for anodes. They’re already selling to dozens of large battery manufacturers and expect silicon anodes to completely take over the market by 2030.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and the graphite anode problem

01:54 – Why silicon, and why it kept failing

06:26 – From pharma to batteries: Rick's path

09:24 – How SCC55 works: silicon in a carbon scaffold

14:38 – The payoff: energy density and charge speed

18:59 – A drop-in material, and scaling in South Korea

21:11 – Where the batteries go: phones, EVs, drones

24:29 – Cost versus graphite

26:20 – Cycle life, calendar life, and safety

31:26 – Supply chain and the silane bottleneck

36:26 – Pairing with LFP, DOE support, and phones

40:30 – Bringing the cost down, and competitors

43:27 – The five-year outlook

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) established substantial tax credits for wind and solar power. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) eliminated those tax credits. How much damage did that do to the overall trajectory of clean energy in the post-Trump world? A new research commentary argues that the damage was less than many had feared and that the road forward for clean energy is less about restoring those credits than about easing the permitting and interconnection constraints inhibiting renewable energy. Today I talk with author Lily Bermel about the modeling her commentary is based on and the somewhat controversial conclusions she draws from it.

Chapters:

00:00 The IRA, the OBBBA, and the case for optimism

03:25 OBBBA - Why Bermel ran the analysis

05:50 The headline numbers: 74, 71, 67

08:07 Decomposing clean: solar and batteries hold, wind takes the hit

12:14 The lag analysis, and the 'glass half full' perspective

15:27 2.8 gigatons, and losses you can't get back

18:01 The third scenario, and Trump I versus Trump II

21:49 What the model leaves out: manufacturing, LPO, loans

23:07 Interior's permitting campaign against wind and solar

27:22 The demand surge and behind-the-meter gas

32:15 Nuclear restarts, geothermal, and clean firm

35:31 Booms, busts, and the electrification wave

42:22Transmission, interconnection, and the ceiling

46:41 Tax credits versus permitting reform

51:46 Durability, polarization, and preemptive surrender

60:01 Can enough storage make renewables firm?

66:48 Grid utilization versus building new grid

70:52 Final reflections: 2021, and what Bermel would do with a trifecta

America once led the world in building transit and now leads the world in what transit costs, roughly three times the international average per mile, measured not against authoritarian megaprojects but against Italy, Spain, and Japan. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Will Poff-Webster of the Institute for Progress, who put together the new Transit Abundance Playbook, and Stephanie Pollack, former head of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and former acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. Their argument is that the costs are a policy choice: federal funding rules teach transit agencies to plan on a napkin and do the real work years later, to hire the lowest bidder over the one they know will deliver, and to defer to anyone holding a veto, while highways operate under looser versions of the same rules. As Pollack puts it, "if you hate transit, you should spend less on it." A surface transportation reauthorization bill is coming, and two of the playbook's proposals have already reached the House version.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction: why cars work against cities

03:25 Agency culture or federal law: where does the fix come from

11:31 Planning: how federal funding enforces bad habits

20:10 Overdesign: the Green Line stations and the frequency-first test

23:40 Buses: why every agency orders a custom fleet

26:53 Procurement: lowest bid versus best value

32:56 Veto points and Italy’s conference of services

39:56 Permitting: environmental review as a NIMBY tool

45:28 State capacity: why consultant brain took over

51:46 Labor costs, automation, and Section 13(c)

56:19 Is any of this politically achievable?

1:03:28 Final question: one reform each

Data center opposition has gone from nonexistent to organized in about two years, roughly 120 moratoriums across 38 states, and it does not track proximity: Gallup finds 70% of Americans oppose a data center near them, while only 8% of opponents live near one. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts joins Energy Empire hosts Jigar Shah and Jamie Nolan, along with Arnab Pal of Deploy Action, for a crossover conversation, and his argument is that everyone is solving the wrong problem. The hyperscalers could buy their way to consent for a rounding error, batteries in basements, solar on roofs, funded schools, lower bills, and they refuse, which David reads as a symptom of low social trust that no amount of better modeling touches. “This is not a technocratic problem that you can just solve with a few switches,” he says. Thirty-six governors go to the ballot this fall having to answer for it.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro: a Volts and Energy Empire crossover

01:25 Has the AI case been made? Energy vs. AI as the real revolution

04:23 The backlash by the numbers, and hyperscalers' botched PR

08:20 Animal spirits, low social trust, and the information environment

12:46 Enshittification, lost jobs, and why governors still want data centers

15:50 The local playbook: schools, bioswales, batteries in basements

17:18 Bespoke industrial rates without setting a bad precedent

22:33 How utilities earn: spend-to-earn, the distribution black box, efficiency

30:11 Gendering the grid: gas as firm, renewables as soft

37:57 NERC's level-three alert and the case for more batteries

39:29 Both/and: distributed capacity as serious supply

45:33 Abundance's missing half: state capacity, staffing, NEPA

48:55 The midterms: 36 governors and the politics of affordability

53:33 Hope vs. fear: the Mamdani lesson and the information environment

Most of the energy decisions that touch daily life in America get made in state legislatures, and the people making them are increasingly new to the job. In smaller states, a freshly elected lawmaker gets a pad of paper, no staff, and about 150 lobbyists at the door, then votes on billion-dollar energy budgets in a landscape where the technology changes faster than anyone can track. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Hawaii state Senator Chris Lee, co-founder of the Electric Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan network betting that education moves electrification faster than mandates: put lawmakers in front of working technology, connect them across state lines, and let affordability carry the argument where climate framing will not. As Lee puts it, "nine times out of ten, people just don't know what they don't know."

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:39 How electrification clicked: the 2008 iPhone moment

06:10 The education gap: why the initiative exists

11:35 Proxy staff and cross-state validation

15:44 What lands on the tours: eVTOL to the data-center win-win

20:51 Plain 'electrification': the bipartisan framing bet

26:28 Climate hushing and Hawaii's two-track proof

30:17 Policy that spreads: e-buses, heat pumps, RFPs

37:37 Utility business-model reform: Hawaii's PBR law

42:03 Affordability after the federal subsidies

45:22 Hawaii under pressure: LNG and the Lahaina grid

51:53 State power against federal hostility

55:19 The ten-year vision and the closing advice

Property taxes are two taxes stapled together: one on the land, one on whatever gets built on it. Put up an apartment building and the bill goes up. Pave the lot for parking and it stays low. It discourages building and rewards land speculation. The answer? Tax the buildings less and the land more. The idea of a “land value tax” goes back 150 years, but implementing it today involves navigating tricky constitutional issues. In this episode, I talk with Greg Miller of the Center for Land economics about the rationale for such taxes, and with Kitty Klitzke, a Spokane, Washington council member, about the difficulties of putting it in practice in a real city.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:22 Henry George and the case for taxing land

08:12 How property taxes work now, and what a split rate changes

11:26 Land value taxes and upzoning as complements

15:18 The Pennsylvania record and the reassessment problem

18:51 Vancouver, and why homeowners outlast the policy

24:03 Estonia, Singapore, and the Scottish Islands

26:53 Washington's uniformity clause and the building exemption

33:18 Kitty Klitzke on twenty years of Spokane infill

43:27 What Spokane needs from the state legislature

45:25 Single family homeowners and the Division corridor

48:34 The assessor objection

52:45 What the Spokane modeling shows

59:31 The plan for next session

1:01:44 Virginia, Kentucky, and cross-partisan momentum

Minnesota regulators Sydnie Lieb and Pete Wyckoff on why utility distribution spending — now a third of capital budgets and the biggest driver of rising bills — escapes the scrutiny the rest of the grid faces, and how to fix that.

00:00 - Introduction

04:23 - How distribution is regulated differently than generation and transmission

09:25 - Why distribution matters now: an aging system and the build-more incentive

14:00 - Contestable “mandatory” spending: undergrounding, DERMS software, capitalization

22:19 - Reliability standards and the cost of chasing 100 percent

28:42 - The MISO comparison: valuing a lost hour, and the scale of the numbers

35:12 - Non-wires alternatives: batteries, the Xcel project, and modeling gaps

40:31 - What regulators should require: AMI forecasts and beyond the prudence test

47:22 - The speed objection: does more analysis slow things down?

50:10 - Why spending caps and rate freezes are the wrong fix

52:40 - Spending more anyway, and recent Minnesota PUC disappointments

55:09 - Restructured markets: does the same logic apply?

58:38 - The vision of a well-functioning process and scaling it nationally

Following a stunning clean energy victory over right-wing donors on an obscure Arizona utility board, organizers are setting their sights on a much bigger prize: the state’s powerful utility commission. I chat with Charlie Fisher and Ning Mosberger-Tang about how they used disciplined messaging to overcome massive opposition spending and historically abysmal voter turnout. We discuss whether this localized ground game can scale to a massive statewide electorate and help build a durable, nationwide clean energy political machine.

You might have noticed that it’s kind of hot out there. And it’s only going to get worse: global demand for cooling is projected to triple by 2050. Finding a way to cool spaces and people without frying the planet is a crucial climate challenge. I’m joined by RMI’s Ankit Kalanki to unpack the hidden world of AC refrigerants and testing standards, the crucial distinction between lowering temperatures and dehumidifying, new AC technologies on the horizon, and the building and urban design changes that can take some of the pressure off.

In this episode, I talk with GM Energy executive Aseem Kapur about General Motors’ move into bidirectional EV charging and home energy management. We dig into the practicalities of turning hundreds of thousands of EVs into mobile backup generators, how to navigate a patchwork of 4,000 different utilities, and what it takes to get everyday consumers to see their cars as grid assets.

The UK has just released its seventh carbon budget, recommitting to the aggressive climate targets suggested by its nonpartisan Climate Change Committee. Can the Labour government actually hit those targets while keeping energy prices for the British people under control, even amidst a newly hostile political landscape? In this episode, I talk with the UK’s new climate minister, Katie White, about those challenges and more.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation has issued a historic warning about AI data centers. I chat with energy experts Colin McCormick and Doug Bryan about the unique electrical engineering challenges of giant computational loads that can abruptly drop hundreds of megawatts of power in the blink of an eye. We dive into the upcoming regulatory battle between hyperscalers and operators, the sudden rush for firm gas generation, and how software updates and battery storage could eventually make data centers a tool for grid stability instead of a liability.

Why is the latest fossil fuel crisis pushing the world toward rapid electrification instead of a drilling boom? To find out, I chat with Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie, hosts of the Polycrisis newsletter and podcast, about the concept of “polycrisis” and the global rise of manufacturing-heavy electrostates. We examine the massive global diffusion of cheap electrotech and discuss why American climate wonks need to look past domestic policy and start paying attention to international macroeconomics.

In the US, clean energy tends to get bogged down in red tape, but there’s one category that you can install immediately, with no one’s permission, because it plugs right into your wall outlet. This week, I chat with James McGinniss of David Energy about plug-in DERs — specifically, small batteries that commercial tenants can install without permits or landlord sign-offs. We explore the economics behind these micro-projects, look at how they aggregate into virtual power plants, and break down why this hyper-local approach could eventually outcompete massive utility infrastructure.

Why is clean electrification, the most exciting, dynamic, hopeful sector of the US economy, still such a 98-pound weakling in DC backroom fights? In this episode, I talk with investor and entrepreneur Steve McBee about Amped, his new effort to boost the industry’s political influence and give it a little swagger — by telling a more compelling story, getting better information to lawmakers, and pulling hundreds of billions of dollars in stranded capital off the sidelines.

Conventional punditry loves the narrative that woolly-headed progressive standards over-burdened federal climate spending and slowed everything to a crawl. In this episode, I talk with Betony Jones about her time designing labor policies at the DOE and what she learned from interviewing dozens of companies that received federal funding. We explore the difference between bad rules and weak administrative capacity, how the DOE successfully streamlined century-old Davis-Bacon compliance, and why creating high-quality jobs is essential for global competitiveness.

As affluent homeowners defect to heat pumps, the massive costs of maintaining America’s aging gas pipelines are being concentrated onto a shrinking base of customers who can afford it least. To understand how to prevent an impending utility death spiral, I talk with the Building Decarbonization Coalition’s Kristin George Bagdanov and Panama Bartholomy. We discuss the legal limits of a utility’s “obligation to serve,” the potential for gas companies to transition into geothermal thermal energy networks, and why the US has suddenly become the global leader in heat pump sales.

Are data centers and electrification going to break the US power grid, or are they the secret to making it cheaper for everyone? In this episode, I talk with Pier LaFarge of Sparkfund about Minnesota’s landmark decision to let Xcel Energy deploy batteries directly into local distribution networks. We look past the politics and map out how a battery-saturated system can socialize the benefits of load growth, ushering in an era of boringly reliable, low-cost energy by 2030.

Ben Eidelson and Anay Shah run the Stepchange podcast, which recently put out a magisterial four-hour (!) episode on the history of the US electricity grid. I talk with them about some of the colorful characters and stories involved, the big fights and broad lessons learned, and how the history echoes in today’s political and technological struggles.

Boiling water to make steam for industrial processes consumes an enormous amount energy around the globe, yet it has proven remarkably resistant to electrification. In this episode, I talk with Addison Stark of AtmosZero about why replacing the standard fossil-gas boiler requires an entirely new approach to industrial heat pumps. We discuss the engineering behind his high-temperature system, the challenges of scaling up, and the growing imperative to get free of global LNG markets.

Most people think that coordinating the behavior of thousands of distributed energy resources requires some kind of third-party middleman, like an aggregator managing a VPP. My guest today, veteran research scientist Bruce Nordman, believes there’s a better way: dynamic, time- and location-specific retail prices, communicated directly to consumer devices, which would cut out the middleman and leave more value with customers.

Today, coordinating a whole-home retrofit — or even just getting a heat pump — involves confusing research, a parade of contractors, and wildly varying quotes. It’s a broken system that practically pushes people to just buy another gas furnace. In this episode, I’m joined by Zero Homes CEO Grant Gunnison to discuss ways to improve this system for both customers and contractors.

Historically, investing in energy infrastructure has been the exclusive province of wealthy individuals and large institutions. But that’s changing, and my guest today is part of it. I’m joined by Energea co-founder Mike Silvestrini to discuss how his platform allows retail investors to back international solar projects with buy-in as low as $100. We talk about the unique risks and rewards of building microgrids in emerging markets and why an unapologetic, yield-driven approach might be the best way to do real good in the world.

In this episode, I sit down with financier Tom Steyer to discuss his 2026 run for governor of California. We dig into his pledge to cut the state’s notoriously high electricity bills by 25 percent, how he plans to break the stranglehold of investor-owned utilities through local competition and smarter grid utilization, and the delicate politics of pushing a climate-forward agenda when voters are primarily focused on the immediate cost of living.

The think tank Ember just released its yearly Global Electricity Review. In this episode, I chat with co-authors Nicolas Fulghum & Kostantsa Rangelova about the biggest stories in the global power sector in 2025. We geek out over the record-breaking scale of solar deployment, the game-changing role of batteries in shifting midday power to the evening, and the tantalizing possibility that India will not follow China’s coal-heavy development path and that global fossil fuel generation has finally plateaued.

Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer joins me to unpack the sheer madness of the current news landscape. We discuss the energy implications of the Iran war, the vexed politics of permitting reform, Microsoft’s retreat from carbon dioxide removal, the lessons of the IRA, the lingering pastoralism of the environmental movement, and much more.

Beth Bafford spent years designing Climate United, a revolving fund meant to push out $7 billion of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money to underserved communities. She had barely begun sending out grants when Trump shut the program down and rescinded all the money. In this episode, I talk with her about that experience, the ongoing legal fight to reclaim some of the money, and the central importance of finance in clean energy policy.

In this episode, I welcome back my old friend Jigar Shah to discuss the current hullabaloo around explosive electricity demand from new data centers. We dig into why its stupid for tech companies to build their own behind-the-meter natural gas plants, how this approach is wrecking equipment and destabilizing the grid, and a better, smarter, faster path forward.

There are some circumstances — think disaster recovery zones or forward military bases — that cry out for portable, reliable, resilient power. I talk with Lauren Flanagan about Sesame Solar’s self-contained nanogrids, which use solar PV, batteries, and hydrogen storage to provide energy that works around the clock in remote or inclement environments.

Why do climate funders prefer cutting checks for electric vehicles over fighting for dense, transit-oriented housing? I talk to Ben Holland, who recently interviewed major climate foundations about their anti-urbanism bias, and returning guest Caroline Spears, who is working to pass climate-friendly housing policy at the state level. We discuss why obsessing over easily quantifiable emissions reductions is blinding the movement to massive, tractable wins, and why ignoring zoning reform is no longer an option for serious climate advocates.

It can be stomach-turning, watching the Trump administration torch federal climate policy. But what if some of what's burning wasn't working particularly well to begin with? Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman of the Federation of American Scientists' Center for Regulatory Ingenuity make the case, not for defending or trying to rebuild the status quo regulatory regime, but for imagining something better.

The US power grid runs at about 50% capacity on average — built for its worst day, underutilized every other day. As demand surges from data centers and electrification, utilities are racing to build more infrastructure. But Ian Magruder, who heads the new industry-backed Utilize Coalition, argues there's a cheaper, faster path: better use what we've already built — it will enable faster growth and bring down ratepayer bills, potentially by billions.

In this episode, Dakota Gruener of Reflective walks me through her organization's new project, which maps the gaps in our scientific understanding of stratospheric aerosol injection — currently the leading candidate for directly cooling the planet. We get into what we don't know (including a factor-of-two disagreement on basic aerosol physics), who's already doing this without oversight, and the unsettling governance question of who controls the Earth's thermostat once humanity has grabbed it.

The explosive energy demand from data centers is breaking our grid, pushing desperate developers to build their own on-site gas plants just to get online. To figure out how we avoid locking in decades of new fossil fuels, I’m joined by Camus CEO Astrid Atkinson and Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins to break down their proposed alternative. We dig into how adopting flexible grid interconnections and clean, battery-backed “power parks” can meet this massive load growth without abandoning our decarbonization goals.