Volts published eight conversations in July — with two Minnesota utility regulators, a Spokane city council member, a Hawaii state senator, a co-founder of a battery materials company, and more — which is a lot for anyone to listen to. In case you couldn’t catch them all, we’ve rounded up the highlights into a single hour, so you can hear what you missed and what you might want to return to. Enjoy!
We are trying a little something new this month at Volts.
I put out one to two podcasts a week, and each one of them is pretty long. And while I’d love to think that all of you listen to each and every one of them with tender loving care, I know that in reality it can be overwhelming, and you probably skip an episode here or there.
So what follows is a kind of highlight reel for the month, snippets from each episode for you to scan through to get a taste of what you may have missed. If any one of them grabs you can always go back and listen to the full episode. It’s right there in the feed.
This is a bit of an experiment, so I’d love to hear from you if it is useful. As always, I deeply appreciate all of you who pay for subscriptions. This newsletter and podcast, 100 percent audience funded. Your support is the only way I can do this work, and I am endlessly grateful.
All right, here we go.
Timestamps
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
Resources
People & Organizations
David Roberts (Substack - Bluesky)
Volts (Apple Podcasts - Spotify - YouTube - Instagram)
Charlie Fisher
Greg Miller
Center for Land Economics (Website)
Chris Lee (LinkedIn)
Jigar Shah (LinkedIn)
Energy Empire (Website - Episodes - Apple Podcasts - Spotify)
Will Poff-Webster (LinkedIn)
Institute for Progress (Website - Author page)
Stephanie Pollack (LinkedIn)
Lily Bermel (Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy)
Rick Costantino
Group14 Technologies (Website)
Company & Industry News
IRA clean energy gains mostly on track despite OBBBA, says MIT study
New report says Trump hasn’t squashed Biden’s clean energy buildout
Group14 opens factory to produce battery materials for flash charging EVs
Books & Articles Discussed
Related Volts Episodes
Forcing utilities to justify their distribution system spending
Want less sprawl and more urban infill? Try a land value tax!
The US is terrible at building public transit. Here’s how to get better.
Should we feel good about the trajectory of clean energy post-Trump?
Text Transcript
David Roberts: We begin in Arizona. Charlie Fisher and Ning Mosberger-Tang on winning utility elections that nobody is watching. Explain a little bit because I had trouble believing this when I was reading about it. It is flummoxing. I mentioned it in the intro, but explain a little bit about how the SRP election works. It sounds like it is transported from a different, earlier era of history. It’s wild to me that it still exists. Explain how these board members are elected and who gets to vote.
Charlie Fisher: Yes, you are right. It is from a different era. This system was initially established pre-statehood. SRP is unique because it was essentially created by a group of landowners, farmers, ranchers in the early 20th century. They came together, formed an association, and put their land up as collateral to convince the federal government to build Roosevelt Dam, which was our first big dam here in central Arizona. That was the beginning of the system. The fact that we still elect these folks on a system based on the early 1900s is clearly a problem.
The way that it works is there are 14 governing board members. Not to get too in the weeds, but there are two separate governing boards because SRP is technically two separate entities — water and power. For this discussion, we’ll just talk about the power side. The SRP district governing board is 14 members. On top of those 14 members, there’s an elected president and vice president. The president, vice president, and 10 of the 14 board members are elected on an acreage-based voting system, which, you mentioned at the top, means only eligible landowners have the opportunity to vote.
You have to own land in SRP service territory, and there are whole swaths of ineligible voting lands in SRP service territory. Just figuring out whether you are eligible is a challenge in and of itself. They are elected on four-year terms where half of the body is up every other year. The elections are held in April of even-numbered years when no one is thinking about elections.
David Roberts: The whole thing seems designed to absolutely minimize turnout. You don’t even know if you’re eligible to vote. You don’t know when the election is. These must have traditionally been tiny, tiny-turnout elections.
Charlie Fisher: Absolutely. Just to give you a sense, there are around 750,000 people who are eligible to vote in SRP elections. Looking back to 2022, when some grassroots climate and clean energy activists had started running and picking up seats, 6,972 people voted in 2022 out of 750,000 eligible for an entity that delivers water and power for over 2 million people in central Arizona. We knew that was the first problem we needed to solve — we needed to raise awareness and increase turnout.
David Roberts: Let’s talk then about how you do that. This is not a normal election. It’s not a normal voter base. A lot of the voter base doesn’t even know whether it’s the voter base or not. What was your strategy for targeting voters? You can’t just put ads on TV and stuff like that. This seems like a case where you really do have to go find people one by one. What was the strategy for increasing turnout?
Charlie Fisher: This was one of the most difficult questions for us, our team, our coalition to answer because it is so obscure. We did a huge amount of research into all of the eligible voters and did both qualitative and quantitative research to get as much data as we could on these folks: what is their voting history in other elections? We could really get a sense of who these folks are, what makes them tick, and what motivates them.
The other challenge was at what acreage, at what amount of land does your property not just become your home and the place that you live and your single largest asset, but become more of a business and a financial relationship. That very much changes the incentives of how you want to vote for SRP board members.
David Roberts: This is a big question I have. My gut says the more acreage you have, the more likely you are to vote for conservative candidates. But is that true? Does that hold?
Charlie Fisher: I can’t say for sure, but that was our theory as well: if you have 10 or more acres, and we set our threshold at one acre or less for a number of reasons. If you have more than 10 acres, you view your property as an investment, a financial, wealth-building tool rather than a place that you live. That was our first, and there was no hard science behind it, but we ended up deciding that if you have an acre or less than an acre, there’s a high probability that your home is where you live and that you will be persuaded and deeply affected by rising utility prices.
We looked at the districts that were going to be voting, the district board seats that were going to be voting in April, honed in on those ones, set our acreage cap at one, and then we talked to folks that we knew were good voters in other elections and were completely unaware that they even had the opportunity to vote in SRP.
David Roberts: Next up, Minnesota regulators Sydnie Lieb and Pete Wyckoff on where your utility bill actually goes. This is something that is shocking, I think, to listeners who are not familiar with this stuff. We spent a lot of money. This is not just true in Minnesota, but all all over the group. We spent a lot of money putting these advanced smart meters on homes and businesses all over the place. And we’re not using the data they’re producing in any meaningful way. And in a lot of times, the utilities won’t even tell you what that data is. It’s insane. Like we have the intelligence capacity out there. We’re not using it. It’s wild.
Pete Wyckoff: Or not.
Sydnie Lieb: It’s ridiculous. I mean, the way I describe it when I’m talking to people is I could be plugging in two electric vehicles in my garage and the utility would still assume that I was gonna get another one in the next five years based on whatever electrification load forecast they have. Because they’re not choosing to look at the data and go, this person’s already plugging in two EVs. They’re definitely not gonna increase the load at this location. Right. And they have that data and we’ve all paid for that data. And it is not that complicated to use it properly. So better forecasting and also allowing that forecasting to not happen behind a black box. The load forecasting needs to be able to have all kinds of interveners come into the process come into the regulatory space and say, We think your forecast is off by 10%. Or we think, you know, we think you’re going to get that much load, but we think it’s going to take 15 years, not 10. And if we do that, we can delay these investments. That’s the big one. I also think getting again back to the software side of things, the utility needs to do power flow modeling of their system. They need to understand where the constraints are. They need to, again, be bringing in better data from AMI to understand where they have a lot of DERs, where they have a lot of electrification happening, and how they can make all those things work together to better utilize the system. And then lastly, there’s a lot of folks talking about grid utilization and really excited about that. I feel really strongly that those folks are going to run into a brick wall when they try to implement what’s happening at the legislature. I think. Folks think that they’re gonna give the utility a seventy percent utilization target on their system. And then the utility is gonna come back and say, We looked at this, the system can’t be reliable at a 70% utilization factor. Trust us. Trust us. We’re not gonna talk to you about it. We’re not gonna let you talk to our engineers. Our engineers say it can’t be done. And that whole thing needs to happen a lot more transparently. And that needs to happen everywhere in the country where they’re trying to do grid utilization.
Pete Wyckoff: I think that’s our big theme here, or one of our big themes is show us the data. Show us how we as regulators can reproduce what you’re claiming. Right. The other thing that we haven’t really talked about is moving beyond this prudence test. So basically if they want to spend something in a distribution system, they come in to the and say, We put a new transformer here. Here’s the receipts. We got it from a reputable supplier. It works. And the system’s better than if we’d done nothing. So the analog there is most people think, you know, the FDA test to see whether a drug works well. No, they just test to see if a drug works better than nothing. So, so that’s the prudent test. Can you beat a placebo of doing nothing?
David Roberts: That’s a pretty low it’s a pretty low bar, especially in this kind of
Pete Wyckoff: What we really want, and back to the medical analog, and it’s only since Obamacare that that the government’s been looking at this at all is saying, Hey, there’s actually five things we could do for that medical condition. Which of them works better than the others? Right. And that’s what we’re asking. Not just did the thing you do actually happen? Show us the receipts and show us you got it, you know, not from some shady guy at the corner, but from a reputable supplier, right? But also was it The best thing you could have done if there were really five things you could have done.
David Roberts: Right, right, right. One of the questions I’ve had about all this is it just seems to me, not to, you know, I’m not in the habit of expressing sympathy for utilities, but in this case, like it just seems like forecasting distribution demand, distribution system demands has gotten wildly more difficult and complicated really rapidly. Like there’s all these new technologies coming on board in distribution systems as we’re talking about. And then there’s like, Data centers. We really have no, you I mean, you are now having to guess how fast our EV is gonna spread. How many people are gonna be charging at home versus here or there? How many people are gonna get solar panels? How many data centers are they gonna build in this area? How you know, there’s just like it just seems like the whole thing’s gotten a lot more difficult, which I guess goes to your point that like we need to make it more transparent how they’re doing this, but it is kind of like a much more complicated thing these days.
Pete Wyckoff: It’s much more complicated, but you know we have AI now and we have we have, you know, advanced in com computers and we have these smart meters and yes, it is much harder. It is a much more complicated thing, but we also have many more tools that if we decide to deploy and use them for getting on top of that complexity.
David Roberts: Then Greg Miller and Kitty Klitzke on land value taxes and why the tax code has it backwards. This was a twenty year process for me. But I think what I started to notice over the years is just like public policy, taxes can be kind of an unintentional source of social engineering. And so when we tax the value of a building, we disincentivize quality, we disincentivize good materials.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Kitty Klitzke: And we disincentivize maintenance.
David Roberts: So that’s why that gets to what the guy said to you before. The reason people now are building with cheaper materials and building cheap tiki tacky buildings rather than nice quality buildings is that they get taxed more the higher the value of the building they build, basically.
Kitty Klitzke: That’s surely a part of it. I think it also affects the way that things are financed. I don’t see raising the land value as the thing that we tax over the building as penalizing. I think what we’re doing is we’re actually changing the stakes. When we upzone and incentivize land, it increases the expectations for speculators, right? So I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone and You know, an area’s been recently upzoned. A landowner owns this huge piece of land. And I’m coming in and talking to them about why they need a street vacation so they can maximize the use of the lot, all these stories about what they’re doing. And so we do the street vacation, and then the land just still sits there for sale. All they’re trying to do is maximize the value of that lot. They had no intention of developing it because developing things is a lot of work. And so we’re raising the value. And keeping the stakes extremely low for someone who wants to speculate. They’re paying almost nothing in property taxes. But they’re slowly like building the value of this piece of land by us upzoning it, incentivizing it, and then maybe doing a little bit of administrative work. And the land just goes up hugely in value.
David Roberts: Right. So Spokane is raising the value of the land. Yes. And they are benefiting from it.
Kitty Klitzke: With very little risk, right? And meanwhile the neighborhood’s sitting there experiencing this vacant lot, like all the nuisances that come with that, whether it’s raccoons and stray cats or squatters and crime, we experience all those nuisances associated with that vacant lot that is usually in a prime location and it just sits there because they’re waiting for the person to pay the right price and they’re doing the minimal amount of work to get more money out of that. But when you take away the risk of higher property taxes and all of the things from the part of the building, we’re doing what we can to incentivize a higher quality building and make it easier to build that building. They don’t have to consider it in their finances, having their property taxes go up. So I think it’s kind of a virtuous cycle and Like that experience in Capitol Hill, this made it very real for me. These kinds of policy decisions that are very hard to change because they involve taxes. And I feel like there are a lot of boogeymans with taxes. Yep. But if we don’t get serious about what we’re doing wrong and what we’re truly incentivizing and disincentivizing with our tax system, the problem is just gonna continue to fester. I was in Peru the last few weeks and I noticed that There’s a lot of unfinished looking buildings everywhere. There’s rebar sticking out of the beams, tops of buildings and things. And someone on the bus I was on finally asked someone why this is. They don’t tax buildings that are incomplete as highly as complete buildings. And so people just don’t complete the building. You’ll see the two or three story window with rebars sticking out of the top floor. To imply that there’s going to be another floor someday. So please don’t tax me. And I think they were probably trying to make it easy for developers, trying to ease the burden on somebody who’s trying to build their building or their house. But what it’s resulted across the country from Lima to Cusco, these weird-looking, unfinished, substandard-looking housing that might be nice inside, but looks terrible from the street.
David Roberts: Yeah, tax policy is full of unanticipated consequences.
David Roberts: Here’s Hawaii State Senator Chris Lee on electrification and the people who actually write energy law. Honestly, the thing I’m most curious about from you, the thing I’m you know, the thing I don’t really have direct visibility or access into is just what is the state of knowledge or the state of education among state legislators generally? Are they like they coming to this just sort of as blank slates? And do you find that there are divisions along partisan lines or age age lines or rural urban lines? Like who knows what? What is the kind of the level of education you’re starting with here when you encounter these people for the first time?
Chris Lee: Yeah, you know, so I’m not here to crap on anybody, but I think across the country fair to say, and I this was me too, when I first got elected, right? You have a ton of people who go through months of campaigning. Sorry, this is like unpacking, you know, peeling back the political skin on this whole thing to take a look at what’s what’s ticking on the inside. First of all, I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t run for office not wanting to do good. Nobody like sacrifices their time and family and personal privacy and probably, you know, 10 times higher paying jobs out in the private sector to do this stuff unless they really care. That said, you go through like, you know, six months or a year of campaigning, trying to get to know everything and then promise the world. And you get elected and you’re like, oh shit, like I don’t actually know what to do. And so I would say there’s a lot of great intention, a lot of great people on both sides of the aisle. But a lot of that gets filtered through, you know, the standard evening news, like sound bites and political polarization, all that stuff. But at its core, people are looking for real solutions. And especially at the subnational level, right? It’s very different than national politics and what you’re seeing on CNN and everything else. People are connected. And so you’re walking door to door in your own communities in most cases, in the states around the country and in the legislatures and at cities and everything. And those folks, unlike you know, the president or Congress, who I think everybody’s mostly been given up on as as real agents of change can actually make a difference at that local level and you’re expected to. You’re expected to fill the potholes, you’re expected to fix the schools, you’re expected to deliver on cheaper power or other things. And so that’s where there’s this desire to do something. And I think when you’re coming in, it, you know, it takes, in my experience, and that with I think a lot of my colleagues who I’ve heard talk about this too across the country, it takes probably five or six years to get up to speed to understand the lay of the land for policy, what’s working, and especially in the energy space, and even transportation space where you have like complex regulatory parameters and investment cycles and all these things that are just not….
David Roberts: It’s all changing really quickly too.
Chris Lee: Yeah, I mean, i the world today, even even you know, since I’ve been around, or even like five years ago, is drastically different than it is today. And so you gotta be on top of that. And that’s where I think there’s a disconnect because you’ve got industry and investors and technology advancing at such a rate that… what’s happening a year ago, right, is in many cases like not even relevant, much less like understood by folks. So we’re trying to close that gap. I think that is the single biggest thing holding back any sort of progress on not only like electrification, but just stuff in general these days.
David Roberts: Yeah. Well, one of the questions I had was people come into these state legislatures, they don’t have a lot of staff. You know, these are not necessarily like super well funded offices. And so I’m wondering how much of what you’re doing here with EII is just kind of serving as kind of proxy staff, just you know, just a source of information and analysis that these people can tap into.
Chris Lee: Yeah, you know, it’s it’s crazy. In some states, I’ll give you a couple of examples. Like I you know, the big ones, right? Texas, California, New York. I mean, they’ve got a lot of staff and everything, but smaller states like Vermont and others where you have folks, the same folks making the same decisions on billions of dollars of budgets and all that stuff, have no staff, no office, no capacity whatsoever. You’re basically elected and you know, you’re handed like a pad of paper, like good luck.
David Roberts: From there, over to Energy Empire with Jigar Shah and Arnab Pal on the data center backlash. I think a huge piece of this, and this is what I think is the central problem for our side, which is full of technocrats, is there is a large element of just sort of animal spirits to this. People feel like rich, powerful people are running rampant. They don’t have to follow any rules. They don’t face any accountability. This feels like they’re betting our future. It might work out, it might not, but none of them will be hurt by it if it doesn’t work out. Just another classic example of, like, they’re not gonna pick up the pieces if this all falls apart, or if the, if the demand doesn’t show up, or if, you know, a bunch of empty warehouses get built. They’re not gonna be hurt. There’s a lot... There’s a huge element of this, of just people feel like the wealthy and the rich and the powerful are just out of control, accountability is dead, and this is something they can grab onto and sh- and control. Like, this is the only piece of that they have any control over, so they’re grabbing onto it and blocking it. I don’t th- I mean, I think a lot of it is not any sort of rational calculation or empirical calculation of the effects or, you know, calculations about decarbonization or anything else. It’s just, like, this is a place where I can throw myself in the gears and stop the wealthy elite from just rolling over us. So, and again, like, that’s their fault that people feel that way.
Arnab Pal: And look, so I 100% agree with that, and I think right now people feel like they can’t control the political system. They, their vote may not matter as much as it did in the past, so their ability to block projects at the local level is their version of a vote. But you guys were talking about this being a communications issue. Like yeah, probably, but I really think it’s just a trust issue. And I think no matter what the tech industry said, like even if they came out and said, “We’re gonna help everyone, we’re gonna build schools, we’re gonna build this 100% clean, and we’re gonna bring down your bills,” which is what I think we all would wanna advocate for, I think the vast majority of the public would be like, “Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.” And-
David Roberts: Yeah, I, I, I trace everything, I mean, anybody who’s followed me for any time online knows I trace everything back to low social trust. This is sort of, you know, you talk to social scientists, they say you wanna do anything good collectively, you have to have social trust. The less you have, the less you can do, and it is coupled with our diseased and degraded information environment. So nobody feels like they can get a straight story. Everybody feels like everybody’s talking their own game. Nobody knows what’s really going on, so, like, this is just something concrete. It’s something that they can grab onto and not feel like the world is this impenetrable chaos controlled by forces out of their, you know, beyond them.
Arnab Pal: And the trust issue, I think, is backed up by the numbers. So only 8% of data center opponents actually live near one, and 70% of Americans oppose to a data center near them, which is what Gallup shows, and the Searchlight Institute found that 54% would oppose one within five miles. I, I guess what we’re trying to figure out here is, like, I think our technocratic industry is like, “Well, here’s how we figure out a way to do this without emissions, and here’s how we bring people in.” Like, are we solving for the right problem, or should we be solving for something else?
David Roberts: Well, I mean, maybe, maybe Jigar has a different perspective, but I think they’re trying to solve those problems ‘cause those are the kind of problems they know how to solve. Like, and this is, this goes beyond data centers. This is a larger social and political problem, is how do you solve the degraded information environment? How do you solve low social trust? How do you get your hands around these animal spirits, this vague, free-floating miasma of discontent and anger? I don’t know how to solve that. The tech guys don’t know how to solve that. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it seems like solving that requires many, many years, many fundamental reforms that don’t seem anywhere in evidence. This is not a technocratic problem that you can just solve with a few switches or paying a little extra for this or that. This is a bigger problem in our politics, so, you know, they kind of are trying to solve what they know how to solve.
Jigar Shah: Yeah, I mean, I, I do think that part of the problem with this, I think as you know, is that we sit here today in 2026 and we don’t have universal healthcare, right? We were promised that Obamacare was gonna work. As somebody who was on, like, you know, the exchanges for a while, like, that sucks. It sucks even more now, right? And so, you know, like, things ... What did, what did you call it in your podcast? The enshitification- ... Sort of everything, right?
David Roberts: Yes.
Jigar Shah: And so…
David Roberts: And there, so anybody who loses their job risks ruin, and here comes an industry, comes along saying, “Hey, we’re gonna destroy all your jobs. Let us build these data centers so we can do it.” What did they expect to happen from that?
David Roberts: Also this month, Will Poff-Webster and Stephanie Pollack on why this country can’t build transit.
Stephanie Pollack: So let’s take a step back, ‘cause I’d actually like to convince some of your listeners that procurement is actually not technical. It’s the most important thing. Because agencies don’t build, right? They oversee others building.
David Roberts: Hmm.
Stephanie Pollack: Procurement is how you buy the team that’s gonna deliver your project. So again, if we do the house renovation thing, procurement is how you would pick your general contractor or your plumber or your electrician.
David Roberts: Mm-hmm.
Stephanie Pollack: And if you were renovating your house and you talked to a couple different companies, you would definitely think about price, right? But you would also, like, check their references, and, like if someone told you they didn’t do what they promised or they took two times as long or they changed the price four times in the middle, even if their initial price was low, you’d never hire them, right? You’d pay a little more upfront, and you’d get what you wanted. In public procurement, in many areas, but particularly in transit, mostly we make them take the low bidder. So even if they-
David Roberts: By law.
Stephanie Pollack: By law, federal and sometimes state. So even if you’re looking at this bid and you know this company and they screwed up the last project they did for you, but they come in $100 less, you have to pick them. Other countries-
David Roberts: And if, and this just creates the obvious incentive for these bidders-
Stephanie Pollack: Companies that are really good at figuring out what the right number is.
David Roberts: Right.
Stephanie Pollack: So, and in other countries and in some states, they actually literally choose not to use federal money because of the procurement rules. They use what’s called value-based procurement. You’re trying to get the best value for your money, and that doesn’t always mean the lowest cost. So we actually had to go to the state legislature in Massachusetts to get permission for the MBTA to use value-based procurement. And just to give a quick example of the difference it makes, and we talked before about how communities care about these projects and they want them to be nicer and they want other things. So with the Green Line, there was a very expensive parallel community path for cyclists and pedestrians, and there were just parts of the Green Line where building it was gonna be really expensive, and we tried and we couldn’t figure out how to do it within this cap, which was set by, honestly, the governor and the board said, “We’re just not gonna spend more than X billion dollars on this project.” So the way we did the procurement was not just that we said, “Tell us how you’re gonna build it,” but we also said, “Here’s the cap. Here’s stuff you have to build, seven stations, a maintenance facility. Here’s three things the community has asked for. Whoever can build the most of those three things and stay under the cap is actually gonna win.” And the winning bidder figured out how to build all three extra community desired amenities within the cap, even though the staff couldn’t do that, right? So you can, you get way more for your money if you switch from a mindset of least cost to a mindset of best value.
Will Poff-Webster: And concretely, most states require lowest bid procurement or something where you’re allowed to consider the expertise of the contractor or the past work of the contractor, but only for a small percentage of the total bid, and most of it still has to be on price. And so our author, Anthony Potts, says anytime the federal government is putting money into a transit project, they should require that the state exempt the transit project from lowest bid procurement and allow best value, like Stephanie was able to do on the Green Line. And then Alon Levy also writes a piece about how we should know how much transit components cost, and we should, have unit-based procurement where you’re able to do procurement based on the cost of each foot of concrete, and you just add up the number of feet of concrete you use rather than having a massive lump sum up front that can be adjusted for reasons that no one can really understand, and then the transit agency is on the hook for some change order coming from the contractor. And the transit agency wants it built, so they just pay them off and, and pay for that change order.
David Roberts: I mean, you’d like to states to change these laws. I mean, ultimately, wouldn’t you, rather than doing exemption after exemption, it’d be nice if states came in and, and reformed this.
Stephanie Pollack: So the good news is that states are actually reforming procurement on highways, on bridges. Colorado has pretty much switched all of its infrastructure bidding to best value instead of low cost. Utah has been a national leader. And they actually have to choose between accepting federal money and then following the federal rule, and using their legal state mechanism for a smarter procurement.
David Roberts: Ah.
Stephanie Pollack: We should never, never penalize a state that is doing innovative things on procurement by making them follow federal law.
David Roberts: After that, Lily Bermel on where clean energy actually stands now that the IRA is gone. one of my questions I had about all this is it seems like there’s been a real effort to spin this report as a positive in the most positive way possible. So like for instance, you talk about this 2.5 year time lag for solar and batteries. Talk, first just say what you mean by that.
Lily Bermel: Sure. I think, yeah. One, first thing I’ll say is the report represents a really specific framing, and the result is very positive. So I wouldn’t say that it’s spin, for one. But number two, on the two and a half year lag, what I did there was, was really wanting to figure out how far behind the current trajectory is compared to what the IRA would’ve put forward. So I was trying to think of creative ways to do it, and I thought of this concept of, of what I coined a lag analysis. And basically what that does is it looks at a given year, so say 2031, and it looks at how many gigawatts of energy will be deployed. So for solar, the Energy Innovation model shows about 333 gigawatts of solar will be deployed. At what point, how many years later, will OB3 reach that time period? And it’s, it’s only two and a half years later. And so for me, again, when I was doing this research, that was much smaller than I thought. And so that doesn’t even equal two and a half years worth of capacity or deployment lost because it’s still being deployed at about, you know, 75% of that high level. It’s just looking at the total levels of deployment and at what point in time will you reach that milestone.
David Roberts: Yeah. Well, this gets a little bit at what I mean, which is that 2.5 year number is the, is the per year average over the 10 years. But if you look, like the report says, by 2035, we’ve lost a cumulative 44 deployment years—
Lily Bermel: Mm-hmm
David Roberts: On clean capacity and 56 deployment years on generation. And like if you look at wind, even the per year average on wind is 11.5 years deployment, all of which sounds to me bad. You know what I mean?
Lily Bermel: Yeah.
David Roberts: Like, like another way of looking at this is we got 30% less of the clean energy than we would’ve gotten and 25% or like even more, like 33% less of the emissions losses, and that seems bad to me. Like those seem like big numbers to me, I guess.
Lily Bermel: Yeah. I mean, you’re right. It’s bad. Any energy lost is bad, and that report does not hide that in any way. Page one, it talks about how Trump’s policies are leading to less clean energy, less investment, fewer jobs, canceled projects, all the like. And so on the lag, right? That was, that was my honesty that, and rigor in the analysis that those lags compound and they add up every single year.
David Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. And they get, and they get bigger and bigger over time is the thing.
Lily Bermel: They get bigger. And just as you asked earlier about the 74% number, you know, how, why is that rosy when wind sucks? It’s, it’s the same thing on this side. Like wind is clearly the laggard and the down weight in all of these numbers, and then at the individual technology level, solar and batteries fare far, far better than wind.
David Roberts: Yeah, and it’s also worth saying, I think that when you, there’s 2.8 gigatons of CO2 is the difference between these two cumulative 10-year difference—
Lily Bermel: Yep ...
David Roberts: Between these two scenarios, and that’s also a lot. And that’s... And, and unlike clean energy progress, you can’t, you know, I’m not telling you anything, you can’t get that back. Like, it’s a cumulative, it’s a cumulative measure how much is in the atmosphere. So all of which is just, this is just me arguing for my natural pessimism, arguing for the glass half empty perspective. Like, it just seems to me like ev- your analysis shows, and as you say, it doesn’t hide it, it says it right in the analysis, that these are big, these are big hits, basically. Even if not as bad as some people might have thought or feared, they are big.
Lily Bermel: Yeah, I’m glad you pointed out that 2.8 gigaton number. That’s the amount of emissions that the current policy scenario will see over a 10-year time period. And actually, right before this, I did the math. That’s equal to about two, like, 2024 sized worth of power sector emissions. So that’s just in the power sector. And again, I focus on that, that 10-year window because to me, it, it highlights that urgency of like, this is real. These losses are real. It’s tangible. You, you know, you can calculate it or estimate it. And it’s also the window that policy can do something about it. Like, this is not 2.8 gigatons that automatically happen the moment they signed the piece of paper for OB3.
David Roberts: Right.
Lily Bermel: This is something that right now, you know, permanent reform negotiations can address, and that next Congress will have the opportunity to address, and the next administration will as well.
David Roberts: Right. None of, none of these are locked in. Yeah, we should, we should say that. None of these numbers are locked in. They’re, they’re out to 2035, so-
Lily Bermel: Exactly ...
David Roberts: We could, we could change this reality.
Lily Bermel: Exactly. And I think one more thing I’ll say about the framing is that any person in the climate community know- knew that the IRA was not enough to get us to net zero by 2050, and it put us within a stone’s throw distance of it, which was really exciting and invigorating. And so, you know, when you know that what is this glass that we’re measuring, it’s, it’s the current compared to the prior, what we have now versus what we thought we had and what made us really excited, and the glass is, is pretty full, more full than we thought. You know, of course there is so much more to do. We don’t just wanna fill up the glass. We wanna do way better than that.
David Roberts: And to close it out, Rick Costantino of Group14 on the half of the battery nobody thinks about. So if you listen to Volts at all, or if you follow clean energy at all, you probably know that batteries are everything. Everything is batteries. If you have a problem, throw a battery at it. That is practically the slogan of my podcast. And so we’re gonna talk about batteries today, a battery innovation, a very exciting battery innovation. So I think the place to start is, I think most people know batteries these days, or batteries typically are an anode and a cathode, and an electrolyte in between them. They’re sending ions back and forth. When you charge and discharge, you’re sending ions back and forth from the anode to the cathode. And I’ve been following battery chemistry innovations for a while now. I’ve written about a bunch of ‘em. I’ve done podcasts on a bunch of ‘em. Maybe you’ve heard, you know, they started, like Tesla is using nickel magnesium cobalt. There’s lithium ion, there’s lithium iron phosphate. Lot of different chemistries you may have heard about flying around. But what you may not know is that all of that innovation, all of those varieties, are cathodes. Those are all cathode materials. The anode, basically since lithium ion batteries were invented back in the early 1990s, have been made of graphite, and that is, that was true then, it’s true today. So to start with, Rick, why don’t you just tell us what is the role of the anode, and why has it been so resistant to change and innovation?
Rick Costantino: Okay, great. That’s a great setup. And yes, batteries are, a lot of our joy and a lot of our frustrations, and we’re trying to improve them. And so like you said, last 50 years, lithium ion batteries have really been using that same, you know, anode, that graphite anode. And, the bottom line is that it, that it works. It’s what was started originally. It’s a very ubiquitous material, and it works, it works very, very reliably. And at the time it seemed like a very logical choice, you know, to pair. And over the last, you know, about 50 years or so, there’s been lots and lots of advancements in the battery except for that anode. We’ve been using that same graphite chemistry, you know, for this whole time. For this whole while though there’s been an interest in developing, you know, new anode materials, and particularly silicon, which is, which is basically the new, the new material that Group14 and other companies are developing as this, as the anode. it’s quite difficult. Those challenges have been met recently with technology. But until now, it really hasn’t been possible to commercialize those types of batteries.
David Roberts: Yeah, so silicon has been... People have been talking about silicon anodes for a decade now. I’ve followed on and off. There have been lots of attempts that have not really gone anywhere. Maybe start by talking about the challenges of making silicon work, why it’s been so hard to make it work.
Rick Costantino: Sure. One thing I should mention is that the cathode is what brings in your amount of energy, brings in lithium ions, right? And as you mentioned, you’re sort of bringing the cathodes, bringing that lithium from the cathode to the anode back and forth again, and of course, electrons are going the other way. So your energy density of your battery depends on how much cathode you can bring and how much lithium you can get in the cathode. And so the reason people are interested in silicon as a new anode material is because you can store a lot more of the cathode. So basically, you know, in your battery, your anode takes up a lot of the volume. So if you can have a more powerful anode that has a much higher capacity for absorbing, you know, the lithium atoms, you can shrink, you know, your anode. So imagine shrinking your anode, so now you can make your cathode bigger, so you can bring in more lithium into the battery. So people are interested in silicon and other, you know, anodes that have a higher energy density that can actually store more lithium than the, you know, than graphite can.
David Roberts: 10 times, as I, as I understand it. Graphite’s made of carbon. I think it’s like 1 atom of silicon can hold 4 lithium ions, where it takes, like, 6 carbon atoms to hold a single lithium ion, something like that. You can hold a lot more lithium ions with a single atom of silicon.
Rick Costantino: That’s right. It’s about 10 times the capacity on a mass basis. And, you know, the way that graphite works, if you kinda remember your old carbon, structures, you know, you know, graphite is carbon, and it’s a particular form of carbon where it’s in layers. And the way that graphite takes up lithium is that it can intercalate between those layers. And so but there’s only so much lithium that you can store. It’s very, it’s a very reliable way to store it, but it’s a very limited way that you can store it. But with silicon, it actually forms an alloy with the lithium, so it’s, so not only does it store more, about 10 times on a gravimetric basis or also volumetric basis, but it also can, it can absorb and give up that lithium much more rapidly. Now it’s basically thermodynamic. It wants to exist in that alloy state, so it’s not really a matter of kinetics and sort of pushing carbon layers out of the way. It’s about forming an alloy that nature naturally wants to form.
David Roberts: But when silicon absorbs lithium, it swells. This is, as I understand it, the big problem, and if you have an anode that’s swelling, you’re eventually cracking your battery, you’re ruining your electrolyte, et cetera. This has been the challenge, right?
Rick Costantino: That’s right. That’s been the key challenge, for silicon for a long time. It does, expand quite a bit, about 400, about 4 times its, you know, volume when it absorbs lithium ‘cause it forms this new phase. Lithium, it has to go somewhere, it has to form this form, this lithium silicon alloy. And so every time that it absorbs that lithium, it decreases the volume. The consequence of that is that it has a bigger interface. And so, you know, there’s something around that material called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, and you want that to be very stable. And if that’s constantly growing and shrinking, it can actually, you know, crack over time, and it can, it can form separate kind of particles, and that could absorb more and more lithium irreversibly that you can’t exchange back and forth each time. And this can also, you know, cause shorts in your battery. So silicon has been a great material to, you know, charge and discharge once, but to have it in a recycled battery has been, has been quite a challenge.
David Roberts: And that’s it for July. If any one of these conversations grabbed you, go listen to the whole thing. As I said, this was an experiment. I genuinely don’t know whether a thing like this is useful, so tell me. Drop a comment. Send me a note. Be honest. If people like it, we’ll keep doing it. Thanks as always for making this possible. See you next time Thanks everybody.
