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Metered efficiency, geogrids, and gasoline superusers.

David Roberts
Oct 3, 2022
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What? More transcripts so soon? Yes indeed.

Rob Harmon on how to scale up energy efficiency

Under MEETS, the utility purchases the efficiency and sells it on the retail energy bill to the building. It's just another form of energy serving the needs of the building. But rather than being harvested from a coal mine, burned at a coal plant, and delivered through the grid, the efficiency energy is harvested in the building and delivered through MEETS.

The tenants get a better and healthier building, but they pay the same amount. The building owner wants happy tenants, rental income, and a big boatload of cash infused into their building with no liabilities. Well, that's what happens. Now we have a building owner who might actually like what we're proposing in the efficiency community. And for the utilities, it gives them another resource they can buy and sell.

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Audrey Schulman and Zeyneb Magavi on how to replace natural gas with renewable heat

When we look at this aging infrastructure, there are really three ways to fix it. You can triage: repair leaks and attempt to stem the bleeding. You can replace the infrastructure and therefore address the safety as well. The third, which we're trying to move toward, is transition. Let's not put in last century's infrastructure; let's put in infrastructure for the next century.

We vision the gas infrastructure as a giant tree spread out across the state. What we want to do is replace the distal ends of that infrastructure — graft the GeoGrid onto that tree in modular bits, interconnecting over time. We give the gas utilities time to become thermal management utilities, where they're moving the wasted thermal energy from one site to the other, learning how to balance it, getting the customers used to this concept, so that we can all buy in and the system can be de-risked as we decarbonize the entire system over time.

Matthew Metz & Janelle London on gasoline superusers & smarter EV subsidies

We defined superuser as somebody who is in the top 10 percent of gasoline consumption in the US. Those folks account for about 42 billion gallons of gas. Although by definition they're the top 10 percent of gasoline consumers, they account for about 32 percent of all the gasoline. If you take it one step further, the top 20 percent account for about half of all the gasoline. Gasoline use is concentrated in these top tiers.

When we look at the map in terms of where superusers are concentrated, it looks kind of like a red and blue state map. The red areas are the southern part of the country and the Midwest. Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana are right at the top of superusers. That's where they're the most concentrated. Then along the coast they’re in the least concentration. That's the opposite of the EV map, where the EVs are really concentrated on the coast in the traditional blue areas and pretty sparse in red America.

Mabel, trying to get comfortable. (Photo: Jennifer Roberts)
Mabel, trying to get comfortable. (Photo: Jennifer Roberts)

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2 Comments
Emilio Luque
Oct 3, 2022

These transcripts are so, so useful for me (and a bunch of volters, I'm sure). Grateful for the huge effort, Mr Roberts.

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Stefano Salvadori
Writes Stefano’s Newsletter
Oct 3, 2022

Thanks David! Your newsletter/ podcast is the very best

Thank you for your incredible work

👏🙏

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