Volts

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeDenmark gets a large share of its power from wind and other renewables and has cut its emissions roughly in half since 1990, but independent analysts doubt it will hit its 70 percent target for 2030. Kristian Jensen, CEO of Green Power Denmark and a former Danish minister of taxation, foreign affairs, and finance, argues the next stage is electrifying how Denmark uses energy: heat, transport, and industry. I talk with him about district heating and heat pumps, EVs and vehicle-to-grid, municipally owned grid companies and hourly power prices, biomass, carbon capture, power-to-X, solar’s “fields of iron” backlash, a grid oversubscribed with data center requests (an October 1 agreement has since put most data centers at the back of the queue), and whether the country’s political consensus will hold.Chapters00:00 – Introduction: Denmark and industrial symbiosis02:44 – Is the 70% target for 2030 out of reach?06:24 – Carbon capture and storage, and the peatlands lag09:57 – Why electrification has lagged: biomass and wood pellets14:45 – Few batteries, many interconnectors16:48 – Data centers and the grid-connection prioritization bill21:34 – Municipally owned grid companies24:32 – Smart meters, hourly prices, and thermal batteries28:40 – The solar backlash and local ownership35:04 – Agrivoltaics and biodiversity37:24 – District heating: heat pumps, geothermal, and finance43:24 – The EV transition and vehicle-to-grid47:45 – Road pricing and fiscal room50:07 – Power-to-X and eSAF54:21 – Can Denmark build enough clean power?57:12 – Will the political consensus hold?

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeThe proposed bipartisan federal permitting bill is 417 pages filled with extremely consequential provisions that have left the climate community some mix of excited, infuriated, and confused. In an attempt to bring some clarity, I asked Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures, a veteran of Senate permitting fights, to walk through what’s in it. We cover the blockbuster transmission reforms, the rule making data centers pay more than their share of grid costs, the wins for geothermal, and the fossil carve-outs. Then we get into NEPA reforms that render the act toothless, limits on state water permits, and the permit-certainty sections that have lawyers worried about “forever permits.” And finally: whether it restrains Trump, why Democrats shouldn’t wait for a better deal, what the modeling says about emissions impacts, and Daniel’s odds of passage. This is a long one, folks. Buckle up.Chapters:00:00 – Intro: the bipartisan permitting bill04:15 – Why permitting reform matters12:23 – Agency staffing and capacity16:59 – Past permitting attempts20:26 – Transmission 1: planning and federal backstop28:28 – Transmission 2: who pays and grid upgrades38:17 – Data centers 1: paying more for grid access43:20 – Distributed energy and geothermal49:06 – Oil, gas, and mining provisions57:06 – Data centers 2: will they go off-grid?1:00:19 – NEPA 1: courts can’t halt projects1:08:57 – NEPA 2: the main objections1:17:10 – State water permits1:23:35 – Endangered species1:27:37 – Permit certainty 1: limits on revoking permits1:36:43 – Permit certainty 2: lawsuits and damages1:48:12 – Politics 1: Trump’s wind blockades1:52:57 – Politics 2: why not wait for a better deal?1:58:33 – Politics 3: elections, courts, and modeling2:10:57 – Politics 4: next steps and odds of passage

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.volts.wtfVolts published seven conversations in September, which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We’ve rounded up the highlights into less than an hour. Enjoy!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeHome 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 Introduction02:26 Lessons from Powerwall and Span05:33 What Pila is and how it works07:14 How long a fridge runs on one battery09:28 Fire risk, LFP chemistry, and New York City16:02 Why the price went up, and cost per kilowatt hour19:55 Who is actually buying Pila23:00 Financing models and free batteries27:04 Do the bill savings add up?32:05 Why utilities want small batteries in VPPs36:58 Pilots with Holy Cross Energy and Brooklyn SolarWorks41:09 Solar pairing and the Pila mesh network47:14 Camping batteries and built-in storage54:19 Utilities and visibility at the grid edge55:58 Bidirectional outlets and the next five years1:00:10 Clean energy as invisible infrastructure

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeVerrus 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 – Introduction02:43 – Three decades in data centers05:05 – What a Verrus data center looks like07:39 – The medium voltage power plane12:13 – UPS batteries vs. the big LFP battery17:27 – Priority aware capping and provisioned utility capacity22:31 – Why not buy the pieces off the shelf?25:42 – Duration: what happens when four hours runs out34:28 – Diesel backup and what customers ask for37:15 – How flexible is compute, really?42:37 – Noise, fans, and the sound studies48:42 – Water use and the 12 million gallon question52:19 – Industrial land and by-right zoning56:07 – Public opposition, recall petitions, and community benefits1:00:07 – Oregon, Salem, and the moratorium1:03:56 – Ride-through, NERC, and losing the moat1:07:11 – What V2 looks like

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeState 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 – Introduction02:49 – How Climate Cabinet came to the data center fight03:58 – Three things that make hyperscalers unlike past industrial loads07:51 – Warning signals: forecast opacity, gas dependency, unconditional subsidies13:44 – Siting near overburdened communities and the Memphis case15:34 – State preemption versus local control18:31 – The same failure pattern in Georgia, PJM, and ERCOT23:52 – Why not just ban data centers outright28:07 – The framework, and what to require before approval34:54 – While operating: real cost pricing and on-call load flexibility37:39 – Scenario-based planning and the utility incentive problem39:37 – After the deal: new and matched clean energy43:48 – Siting standards and performance-tied incentives50:27 – Existing facilities and the threat to build elsewhere55:41 – Which states are ahead, and step one for lawmakers

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeMaterials 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 problem01:54 – Why silicon, and why it kept failing06:26 – From pharma to batteries: Rick's path09:24 – How SCC55 works: silicon in a carbon scaffold14:38 – The payoff: energy density and charge speed18:59 – A drop-in material, and scaling in South Korea21:11 – Where the batteries go: phones, EVs, drones24:29 – Cost versus graphite26:20 – Cycle life, calendar life, and safety31:26 – Supply chain and the silane bottleneck36:26 – Pairing with LFP, DOE support, and phones40:30 – Bringing the cost down, and competitors43:27 – The five-year outlook

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribeAmerica 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 cities03:25 Agency culture or federal law: where does the fix come from11:31 Planning: how federal funding enforces bad habits20:10 Overdesign: the Green Line stations and the frequency-first test23:40 Buses: why every agency orders a custom fleet26:53 Procurement: lowest bid versus best value32:56 Veto points and Italy’s conference of services39:56 Permitting: environmental review as a NIMBY tool45:28 State capacity: why consultant brain took over51:46 Labor costs, automation, and Section 13(c)56:19 Is any of this politically achievable?1:03:28 Final question: one reform each