Volts community thread #28: Iran, Bend OR, balcony solar & more

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David’s Notes

1. 🙃 We are at war with Iran. Or maybe it’s not a war. Or maybe the war’s over. Maybe the war’s been going on for 47 years and now Trump has ended it by starting a giant bombing campaign that looks strikingly similar to a war. Maybe the true goal of the war is to undo the primary effect of the war. In MAGA world, all these things can be true, and none of them, at once — whatever makes Dear Leader look good in the moment.

In last month’s email, I wrote about masked, armed government thugs kidnapping people off the streets of Minneapolis. This month, I’m writing about a war in Iran. What will I be writing about next month? The mind, it boggles.

Everyone is claiming to know how this is going to turn out and what it means for global energy markets and all the rest. As for me, I have no idea and I don’t think anybody else does either. We won’t know what all this means until we’re looking back on it many years later.

I will say this, though: the case for independence from fossil fuels has never been stronger.

Have you ever met an angel?

2. 🏂 So there I am, in Bend, OR, visiting a friend for one last attempt at snowboarding. (The snow situation is … dire, friends. Dire.) The house where I was staying at was in one of those suburban-style developments that are all over Bend, with their winding streets, big lot sizes, and big single-family houses. As is my wont, I got chirpy about it on social media.

Yeah. Pretty chirpy. Several Bend residents took up arms to defend the city’s honor, including, uh, the mayor:

It turns out I was in fact wrong! Many such cases.

Thanks again to the Mayor Melanie for extending me more grace than I probably deserved — and for showing up with charts and graphs! (Be still my heart.) Visit Bend if you can, it’s great.

3. ☀️ Another balcony solar update courtesy of Bright Saver’s bill tracker: Virginia’s legislature passed a plug-in solar bill and it’s now awaiting the governor’s signature. That’s a semi-big deal: Virginia is data center ground zero and, like the rest of PJM, has seen electricity rates sharply rising in recent years. Affordability politics FTW?

As the victories pile up, you won’t be shocked to hear that utilities are starting to mobilize against it. Sigh. A bunch of other states still have bills in play, whereas Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico, Washington, and Wyoming have kicked the can to 2027.

Out front of Casa Volts, signs that Spring may spring again after all.

4. In Dec. 2023, I ran a podcast with a startup called Sublime that was making cement with no carbon emissions, by using electrochemistry in place of combustion. It is, in my 5+ years of doing this, one of the most exciting and promising technologies I’ve come across — one of the techs I most often mention to people to get them excited about the future.

If electrochemical approaches — to cement, to steel, to recycling — can be scaled up and brought down in price, the biggest and most “difficult to decarbonize” sectors will be solved. Heavy industry will be electrified. Smart policy would be plowing money into early-stage companies in this area. So this is just a huge, huge bummer:

And that was after job cuts at Boston Metal (electrochemical steel) just last month. Electrochemistry is having a rough go of it.

It’s all so excruciatingly short-sighted.

5. 🔌 Last month, I ran a podcast with RMI’s Joe Daniel about the increasingly widespread critique that US utilities are taking too much in profits. Here's a new Energy & Policy Institute report about the steadily-rising profits of utility executives, and an EPI calculator that will show you exactly how much of your bill goes to utility profit margins (instead of being invested back into the system):

SoCalEdison: 1, Volts advisor & SCE customer Sam: 0

(EPI’s David Pomerantz is also a past Volts guests — one of our all-time most popular episodes, about utilities lobbying with ratepayer money.)

6. ✅ Community comment(s) of the month: as you could hear in the “how to design a brand-new city” episode, I was rather charmed by Jan Sramek’s plan, and what do you know, he’s answering listener questions in the Volts comments section:

You’d think he was a normal dog.

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