Volts community thread #19

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David’s Notes

1. 🎤 Fewer mailbags, more WTFIH episodes
When I first proposed mailbag episodes, I envisioned answering fun, casual questions like “what’s the best Star Wars movie?” or “what’s your favorite city to visit?” Instead, insofar as people are asking questions, they’re asking thorny, difficult energy questions. But if I’m going to put in the time to research a good answer to a thorny, difficult question, I’m going to make a pod out of it, not put it in a mailbag. I barely have time to research the pods I do make!

The “what the F is happening?” episodes seem more useful and more popular so I’m dialing back the mailbags to free up more space for those and other experiments like them. Mailbags aren’t completely disappearing; you’ll still see one pop up from time to time.

Keep using this thread to ask questions, suggest episode topics, and connect with each other. Great questions might make it into a WTFIH episode, or I may just answer them directly in thread. And for anything outside my wheelhouse, odds are that someone in the Volts community has you covered.

📌 A reminder that paid subscribers can listen to full episodes of bonus content via the Substack website/app or by sending them to their preferred podcast player using these instructions.

Goobers on the grass.

2. I haven’t done a transmission episode in a while, but it remains true that we need lots more of it. See this report confirming its incredible benefits for ratepayers:

3. 🔫 The “build in red states so the IRA won’t be repealed” thesis has not proved out, to say the least.

I’ve asked several insider types why. The brutal truth seems simply to be that Republicans care more about keeping Trump happy by giving him his tax cuts than they do about anything else. They care a little bit about Medicare and Medicaid, they might fiddle with those cuts. They might join some Dems in raising a stink about the level of SALT deduction. But energy tax credits just aren’t a particularly high priority for anyone in the GOP. (One weird trick, etc.)

4. ✅ Community comment of the month: Eduardo makes a worthwhile point underneath our episode about CCAs, about PG&E’s ability to process information from smart meters:

The ability of utilities to gather and process distribution-level data is a subject of intense interest to this podcast — see this recent episode, and this one, and this one.

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