Volts

Latest Episodes:

Volts podcast: Will Toor on Colorado's burst of clean energy policy Jan 01, 2024

Show notes

In this episode, Will Toor of the Colorado Energy Office shares about the state’s ambitious climate agenda and the array of energy policies they’ve been passing under a Democratic political trifecta.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Washington, DC, is a slow-motion nightmare right now, but out in the states — at least the states that Democrats control — climate and clean energy policy is still happening. A few weeks ago, I covered the fantastic policies recently passed in my home state of Washington (see also my podcast with Washington legislator Joe Fitzgibbon). Today, we turn our gaze to Colorado.In 2018, Democrats gained a trifecta in the state — the governorship and both houses of the legislature — for the first time since 2013. They promptly got busy passing a vast array of clean energy policies: reform of electric utilities, support for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, new restrictions on oil and gas production. During this year’s legislative session, Gov. Jared Polis released a comprehensive roadmap to 90 percent statewide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and the state legislature tackled clean buildings, industry, environmental justice, reform of state transportation agencies, reform of natural gas utilities, and on and on. To discuss this flurry of activity, I turned to a man who has been involved in Colorado politics since the previous century: Will Toor.Toor was mayor of Boulder from 1998 to 2004. From 2005 to 2012, he was Boulder County Commissioner. During all that time he was also board chair at the Denver Regional Council of Governments, where he led efforts on climate policy. He then became director of the transportation program at the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, until 2019, when the newly elected Polis appointed him to run the Colorado Energy Office.Toor has had a hand in shaping Polis’s energy agenda from the beginning, and he has been closely involved in negotiating bills through the legislature. He helped walk me through Colorado's sector-by-sector approach to emissions, what the state has accomplished so far, and what might be next for it.Listen, enjoy, and if you appreciate work like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Volts.As a bonus, here’s a picture of Toor in 2003, as mayor of Boulder, hosting visiting scholar Noam Chomsky.Text transcript:David RobertsAll right, with no further ado, Will, welcome to Volts.Will ToorThank you.David RobertsSo I've been following states and climate policy for a long time, and it seemed like a few years ago, Colorado just kind of burst out of the gate at a full gallop and has been going really strong now for two sessions of the legislature. So maybe just by way of starting, tell us some about the political developments of Colorado over the last five years that put all the pieces in place that allowed this burst of activity.Will ToorYeah, really, I think what happened was that in 2018, we both elected a new governor, Jared Polis got elected governor on a platform of, among other things, 100% renewable electricity by 2040 and bold climate action, and we elected a Democratic Senate. We had had a Democratic House, but had not had a Democratic Senate since 2014. And so the combination of having a governor who was committed to climate action and a House and a Senate that were aligned and the fact that there was just kind of a pent-up demand for action on climate and clean energy really set the stage for a kind of monumental legislative session in 2019.So that year we had, depending exactly how you count it, something like 15 major bills on setting climate targets, modernizing our utility regulation to set our utilities on a pathway to at least 80% greenhouse gas reductions by 2030. A bunch of bills on electric vehicles, a bunch of bills on energy efficiency. We had a major oil and gas reform bill. One of the things that's a little unusual is that Colorado is a major oil and gas producer that is actually acting on climate and clean energy. And Senate Bill 181 completely rewrote the regulatory structure for oil and gas in Colorado.Then last year was a little bit quieter because of the pandemic that kind of shut down our legislative session partway through, although there was still lots of action at the Public Utilities Commission and the Air Quality Control Commission. But then this year has really shaped up to be another year where that kind of pent-up demand for action really came out at the legislature.David RobertsWell, I want to get into some of the specifics of the legislation, but just as a background political question, because I'm curious. Do you have a supermajority of Democrats or does Colorado — do you need a supermajority to sort of override Republican objections or sort of like, what's the disposition of the state Republican Party on all of this? Are they just irrelevantly sitting on the sidelines, or is there some engagement? What's the degree of Democratic domination, I guess, is what I'm asking.Will ToorSo, there's a large Democratic majority in the House. In the Senate, it's a much narrower majority. For 2019 and 2020, it was actually a one-vote margin, 18-17. After the 2020 elections, it's now a 19-16 margin. I would say that some of the issues have been bipartisan, but the vast majority of votes on clean energy have been primarily Democrats. There is one Republican in the Senate who is a very strong advocate for clean energy and climate action, Senator Kevin Priola, who has actually been a sponsor of many of the pieces of legislation. Where the Republican Party, I think, has had an impact has been often helping to shape some of the pieces of legislation in ways that may make them work better for their communities.They often represent rural parts of the state, and there's been a lot of interest in trying to make sure that we're moving forward on climate action in ways that can work for rural Colorado in addition to the urban part of the state. We had one major bill this year on funding our just transition effort for coal communities, and that was a very bipartisan bill.David RobertsRight, I bet.Will ToorYeah.David RobertsSo one thing that happened this year, I think prior to most of the big bills, is the governor issued his roadmap. This is a sort of roadmap whereby Colorado can reach its goals. So tell us what the targets are and sort of what is the roadmap, what was the purpose of the roadmap?Will ToorYeah. So this really came out of that 2019 legislative session. One of the pieces of legislation that moved forward for the first time created legislatively adopted GHG targets for the state of a 50% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 and a 90% reduction by 2050. And the governor asked the energy office to convene the other major state agencies that were engaged on this — our Department of Public Health and Environment and Transportation and AG and Natural Resources — and do both a technical analysis and a stakeholder process to basically develop the strategic plan for how are we actually going to achieve the targets that we had adopted?We worked with Energy and Environmental Economics, E3, a consulting firm that's done scoping plans for a number of states over the years, and really developed a plan that was very much focused on what was achievable in each one of the major emitting sectors in the state. So transportation, electricity generation, the oil and gas industry, residential and commercial fuel use, and industrial fuel use and process emissions. Those really dominate our emissions as a state. And we developed sectoral targets and near-term action steps for each one of those areas.David RobertsRight. Maybe it would be helpful, I think, to tell listeners what is the share of each of those, like, what are the big categories to the little categories of emissions sector-wise.Will ToorSo, interestingly, if you look at transportation, electricity generation, the oil and gas industry, and then fuel use sort of combined in buildings and industry, each one of those is fairly similar. They're each around a quarter of our emissions. Transportation is the largest single source, but by a pretty small margin.David RobertsAnd it just edged ahead recently. Right. Which is the same thing that happened nationally.Will ToorYeah, basically, electricity has been decarbonizing faster than any other sector, so it used to be our largest, especially because Colorado has traditionally been a heavy coal state. Oil and gas, it depends a little bit on how you count things. So the way that we count it, the emissions of methane from the upstream oil and gas industry are one category, and then the combustion emissions that they have from the processing of oil and gas actually fit within our industrial sector. If you put those together, oil and gas would actually be the largest single source. So there's different ways that you can parse it.But the way that we generally parse it is transportation is the biggest, followed by electricity, followed by oil and gas, and then industrial and buildings.David RobertsOkay, well, let's start with electricity, because in some ways it's kind of the most straightforward. I think the policy instruments are sort of the most well understood. The road ahead is well understood. So what are the big things Colorado is doing on electricity? I know. Obviously getting rid of coal has got to be step one, right? Or at least phasing it down.Will ToorYeah. So essentially, again, coming out of 2019, we had an interesting sort of legal and regulatory structure where our largest single utility, Xcel Energy, which accounts for more than half of the generation in the state, had a voluntary commitment to achieve 80% by 2030. And we worked with them to write it into statute. So, they were legally required to submit a plan to the Public Utilities Commission to achieve 80%.David RobertsJust them or all utilities?Will ToorWell, the way that we structured it, they were legally required. Other utilities weren't technically required, but we gave a broad grant of authority to the state Air Commission to regulate them, but said that if they submitted a plan to the Public Utilities Commission that would achieve 80% by 2030, then they would have a safe harbor from additional air regulation until 2030. We then went out to every utility and said, "wouldn't you rather just do this on your own terms rather than us have to create a mini clean power plan for the state?" And essentially all of the utilities said, well "yeah, that works for us."And so we're in a place where for other utilities, they have all voluntarily come forward with plans. We've since passed legislation that actually puts an additional regulatory piece in place. And so there's now legislation that says that if any utility did not come forward with a plan, the Air Commission within nine months would have to adopt rules requiring them to get to 80%. But we're in a place where all these plans are just moving forward and it's been pretty remarkable to see our second largest utility, Tri-State Generation and Transmission is a G&T cooperative who provide the electricity for most of the rural co-ops in the state.David RobertsRight.Will ToorThey are historically very coal heavy.David RobertsYes, I was going to ask. They're legendarily problematic in all states.Will ToorYeah. They not only owned multiple coal power plants, they actually, in some ways, were a vertically integrated coal company in the northwestern Colorado. They owned a coal mine and had mine mouth power plants. And in the past, you know they were funders of climate denial at the national level. Their prior CEO was kind of legendary for a conference where he stated that, to sort of pull from the NRA, "you'll pry our coal plants out of my cold dead fingers." That completely changed in 2019. So that CEO was still the CEO when I started this job. When I came in with Governor Polis in January of 2019, by April they had new leadership.That new leadership came in to meet with me to talk about "how can I work with the Governor's office to help meet his clean energy goals." And by January of the next year, Tri-State had adopted a plan to close every coal power plant they have in Colorado and New Mexico to reduce in-state emissions 90% by 2030. And they have since submitted a plan to our public utilities Commission that would achieve 80% reduction in emissions serving retail loads. So, including the electricity they're importing from Wyoming and Arizona. Xcel recently filed their clean energy plan, and they're exceeding the minimum requirement.They're proposing approximately an 85% reduction. Our municipal utilities, one of them adopted a plan to get to 80%, another a plan to get to 90%.David RobertsHow much of all this is just going to be shutting down coal plants? I mean, I guess it's kind of the low hanging fruit. Is that the bulk of where most of this is coming from?Will ToorYeah, it's basically shutting down coal plants, adding a whole bunch of utility scale wind and solar, and a fair amount of distributed generation, adding a fair amount of battery storage, and backing it up with gas combustion turbines. There is a little bit — we have one utility, somewhat smaller, rural utility, but it's very progressive, Holy Cross Energy, who are committed to 100% carbon free by 2030. And they're doing a lot that's focused on demand flexibility, and a lot more on storage. But at the large scale, it's really shutting down coal, replacing it with renewables.David RobertsAnd renewables have gotten crazy cheap in Colorado specifically. Right? I mean, cheapest I think.Will ToorYeah, we're lucky in that we have both a good solar resource and a good wind resource. Back in 2018, a whole lot of heads turned when Xcel did their all-sources solicitation, and they were getting back bids for wind that were coming in at under two cents a kilowatt hour. And they were getting solar with storage for under three cents a kilowatt hour. And that's a lot of what's enabled this transition, is the fact that you have all these legacy coal plants that cost four, four and a half cents a kilowatt hour for operations and maintenance.It becomes a pretty easy decision to replace that with two cent a kilowatt hour wind.David RobertsWell, this actually raises another thing that happened to utilities in Colorado, I think it was this year, but they're all going to join organized markets, RTOs. What's the story there?Will ToorYes, so there was legislation this session, Senate Bill 72, that is really going to push the state towards an organized market. It both creates a transmission authority and encourages a larger buildout of transmission, not only within the state but also connecting to larger markets. It effectively requires that by 2030, our utilities join organized regional markets. It's not an absolute requirement if our public utilities commission were to find that it wasn't in the public interest or that it would somehow get in the way of meeting our clean energy goals. So it's not a 100% requirement, but given the fact that it should give us greater access to wind to the east and solar to the west, and more of an ability to average renewables over a larger area, it certainly seems very likely that it will move forward.David RobertsWhat RTO would they be joining?Will ToorSo the bill does not specify. You can look east towards the SPP market or you could look west towards ultimately Cal-ISO.David RobertsDo you know if there are, I don't want to get on a diversion, but if there are other western states that are — because this has been talked about for ages, trying to get a western market started, do you know if other states are as close as Colorado to ki…

Full show notes at the publisher

There is no "moderate" position on climate change Jun 30, 2021

Show notes

Perhaps the most politically difficult aspect of climate change is that, after decades of denial and delay, there is no longer any coherent “moderate” position to be had. To allow temperatures to rise past 1.5° or 2°C this century is to accept unthinkable disruption to agriculture, trade, immigration, public health, and basic social cohesion. To hold temperature rise to less than 1.5° or 2°C this century will require enormous, heroic decarbonization efforts on the part of every wealthy country. Either of those outcomes is, in its own way, radical. There is no non-radical future available for the US in decades to come. Our only choice is the proportions of the mix: action vs. impacts. The less action we and other countries take to address the threat, the more impacts we will all suffer. Politicians who hamper the effort to decarbonize and increase resilience are not moderates. They are effectively choosing a mix of low action and high impacts — ever-worsening heat waves, droughts, floods, and hurricanes. There is nothing moderate about that, certainly nothing conservative. For years, climate scientists, advocates, and activists have been trying to get politicians to understand this about climate change: that indifference and inaction are not neutral. Every day that goes by, more damages are baked in and getting the problem under control is more difficult. The cost of preventing future impacts is tiny relative to the cost, in lives and money, of adapting to them. The only way to conserve what Americans love in this country is to act aggressively to limit carbon emissions, commercialize clean-energy technologies, and wind down fossil fuel production — and help other countries to do the same. To do less means to conserve less, to accept more loss. Has the Democratic Party taken this message to heart? We’re going to find out in coming weeks. I’m going to describe some political forces that threaten to limit or constrain Democrats’ climate ambitions in favor of “moderation” and then take a closer look at the political drama going on in DC these days around infrastructure. We’re about to get an unusually clear test case of Democrats’ commitment to climate policy.The right is creating a new “other side” in the climate debatePretty much every demographic outside of hard-core conservatives is concerned about climate change and wants to address it — most notably young people, who aren’t exactly flocking to the GOP these days. A few people on the right are belatedly and begrudgingly recognizing this fact and its electoral implications.Lisa Friedman of The New York Times brings news of a budding Republican climate caucus. The story is hilarious and sad and worth reading, but here is the nut of it:“There is a recognition within the G.O.P. that if the party is going to be competitive in national elections, in purple states and purple districts, there needs to be some type of credible position on climate change,” said George David Banks, a former adviser to President Trump …So, at least some Republicans think science denialism is no longer working and the party needs “some type of credible position on climate change.” The question is, what is the minimum viable position? What’s the least they can do while appearing to do something?Here is the party’s opening gambit:A package of bills [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy [R-CA] introduced on Earth Day championed carbon capture, a nascent and expensive technology that catches carbon emissions generated by power plants or factories and stores them before they escape into the atmosphere. It also promoted tree planting and expansion of nuclear energy, a carbon-free power source that many Republicans prefer over wind or solar energy.Friedman rightly notes that these policies would do very little to reduce emissions. But she also calls them “limited government, free-market policies,” which is a bit of right-wing spin we ought to reject. Carbon capture is entirely dependent on government subsidies and regulatory support. So is nuclear power. So is large-scale reforestation. These are all the very opposite of limited government.What unites these proposals is that they can plausibly be said to address climate change in some way or another, but they do nothing to limit or otherwise inconvenience GOP donors, especially fossil fuel companies. In fact, carbon capture can be viewed — and likely is viewed by Republicans — explicitly as a bid to protect fossil fuels from climate policy.Remember, the problem for which Republicans are solving is not climate change but the need to be seen as having “some type of credible position” on climate change, enough for suburban voters to reassure themselves that the GOP is not unreasonable on the issue — that there are once again two legitimate sides. Science denial looks ugly and extreme. But rhetoric about “small-government solutions” that are more sensible than the “tax and spend” Democratic alternatives? Well, that’s as soothing and familiar as warm milk. It might be possible for Democrats, if they were united in their message, to properly expose this Republican climate PR as the fraud it is … but they are not united in their message. Manchin is helping position fossil-friendly policy as “the center”The majority of the Democratic Party, both voters and legislators, is on board with an ambitious (if still insufficient) climate plan. But on this issue, as on all others, Democrats need total unanimity — it’s all 50 senators voting together, or nothing passes. So attention tends to focus on the most conservative Dems, the swing votes, and their words carry added weight. Republicans want to pretend that climate change is just another pollution problem and the solution is for fossil fuels to clean up a little bit. They want to pretend that “innovation” can keep fossil fuels going forever.Democrats need to expose that as nonsense, but they can’t, because Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is out there saying, “You cannot eliminate your way to a cleaner environment. You can innovate your way.”Republicans want to pretend that coal can be saved, that it can somehow find a way to compete in a decarbonizing world. Democrats need to expose that as nonsense, but they’ve got Manchin out there whining that his fellow Democrats are “unfairly targeting” coal.Republicans want to pretend that decarbonizing the electricity sector by 2035 (Biden’s timeline) is impossible. Democrats need to expose that as nonsense, but they’ve got Manchin out there “concerned” about Biden’s “aggressive” timeline. Republicans want to pretend that climate isn’t a threat to the financial system. Democrats need to expose that as nonsense, but they’ve got Manchin out there scolding big banks for adopting zero-carbon goals. Democratic leadership has to tiptoe around all this stuff, because everyone needs to keep Prince Manchin happy. The result, though, is that in the eyes of the media, the majority Democratic Party consensus on climate change (as reflected in Biden’s climate plan!) becomes “the left” in a debate with Manchin in “the center.” Are Democrats going to allow that to happen? The dynamic is going to come to a head around the infrastructure bill. Let’s take a look at the maneuvering taking place right now.The bipartisan infrastructure plan is not a climate strategyFor weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been open about the fact that Democrats are pursuing a two-track strategy on infrastructure legislation. A bipartisan Senate “gang of ten,” including Manchin, is working on a bipartisan bill; whatever doesn’t make it into that bill will go into a bill meant to pass through budget reconciliation (which only requires 50 votes). This has always been a tenuous strategy, but it was apparently unavoidable, because Manchin and his crew of centrists refused to proceed straight to reconciliation. They were determined to do the bipartisan dance that has eaten up the past few weeks. Last week, the bipartisan group presented an outline of a plan. It would involve $1.2 trillion total spending — about half of the $2.25 trillion in Biden’s infrastructure plan — and just $579 billion in new spending. Democrats fought off Republican efforts to impose a special fee on electric vehicles and raise the gas tax to pay for the bill. Republicans fought off Democratic efforts to pay for it by rolling back Trump tax cuts. They’re still not sure how they’re going to pay for it. As for climate, the plan has … some stuff. There’s $73 billion for power system infrastructure (HVDC lines!), which is, the White House claims, “the single largest investment in clean energy transmission in American history.” There’s $49 billion for public transit, $66 billion for rail, $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers, and another $7.5 billion for electric buses. It’s better than nothing, and more than a Republican Congress would offer. It’s a small down payment on the investments in clean energy infrastructure that will be needed in the future. But it’s not a climate plan. Not even in the ballpark. A real climate plan will include a reconciliation-friendly clean energy standard (CES), clean energy tax credits, a civilian climate corps, investments in frontline communities, and the rest of the climate commitments in Biden’s jobs plan. That’s where the reconciliation bill comes in. Of course, climate isn’t the only issue competing for inclusion in that bill. At this point, every Democratic interest group is lining up to have its priorities included. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has put together a $6 trillion bill as an opening gambit. Politico captures the conventional wisdom: “The dollar amount … is likely to shrink as moderates weigh in. At the moment, it appears impossible that all 50 Democrats would get on board with such a large figure.”Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are typically seen as the ones with leverage, since their votes will be needed for any reconciliation bill. And they are already making noise that the Democratic plan is too big. Something blah blah deficit something. But there’s a twist. Progressives throw their weight aroundProgressives have been trying to exercise a little leverage of their own. They are insisting that the bipartisan bill not be passed on its own, without being linked to the reconciliation bill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said, “It has to be one deal and not two deals.” Sanders said, “It's going to be either both or nothing.”They want an “ironclad” pledge from Schumer that both bills will get a vote before they commit to the first. And so far, Schumer has said he is committed to doing both. "One can't be done without the other,” he said.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been similarly categorical:No, really.This message extended all the way to the top. Even as he introduced the bipartisan package, Biden said:I expect that in the coming months this summer, before the fiscal year is over, that we will have voted on this bill, the infrastructure bill, as well as voted on the budget resolution. But if only one comes to me, [if] this is the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.Republicans immediately pretended to be surprised and outraged by Biden’s commitment to pass both bills. Some of them threatened to bail on the bipartisan package. In response to the faux outrage, Biden clarified that he was not threatening a veto or linking the bills. It is entirely possible — some might even say thuddingly predictable — that Republicans were never negotiating in good faith and that the whole point of the exercise was to waste time and foster division among Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wants to prevent a reconciliation bill. The bipartisan process was a way to blunt Democrats’ momentum and slow things down. I expect he will be perfectly willing to blow up the deal if it no longer serves that purpose. The question is what Manchin and Sinema will do if their bipartisan deal falls apart. At that point, both they and the progressives on the other side of the coalition will face the same stark choice: find a reconciliation bill that can get 50 votes … or get nothing, and be known forever as the people who tanked Biden’s presidency and denied Democrats their only chance for structural change in a decade. The stakes are incredibly high. Schumer is promising a “unity budget” that will bring Democrats together, but strains are showing already. Exactly what and how much climate policy will be in the reconciliation bill will be hashed out in coming weeks. A campaign (from the Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action) called “No Climate, No Deal” has been endorsed by a dozen Democratic senators and 38 reps. But it’s not clear what minimum threshold counts as enough climate to get their vote. This is where the battle between climate “moderation” and climate realism is going to be fought. Manchin will be angling to blunt the parts of Biden’s climate plan that directly displace fossil fuels. But those are the most important parts.It will be up to progressives to walk a tightrope, rejecting false moderation and insisting on an appropriately ambitious climate plan without tanking the deal entirely. Finding unity and holding it together against what is certain to be a full-on right-wing assault is a fraught undertaking, to say the least.The pressure in DC to do less, to compromise and scale back, is insidious and inexorable. But this is the moment of truth for climate change in US politics. If big stuff doesn’t happen now, it’s not going to happen for a long, long time. No climate, no deal. 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/subscribe

Full show notes at the publisher

Volts podcast: Saul Griffith and Arch Rao on electrifying your house Jun 28, 2021

Show notes

In this episode, Saul Griffith (co-founder of Rewiring America) and Arch Rao (founder and CEO of Span, which makes smart electrical panels) discuss the need to electrify US homes, the challenges standing in the way, the kinds of solutions that will ease the process, and much more.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Saul Griffith and Arch Rao, June 28, 2021 (PDF version)David Roberts:Those of you who have been reading or listening to Volts for a while know that I am fairly obsessed with clean electrification, which involves shifting all the things we do now with fossil fuels over to electric equivalents (while cleaning up electricity supply).One important nexus of electrification is the residential sector. US homeowners are in a position to electrify their power supply (with solar panels), their heating and cooling (with heat pumps), and their transportation (with electric vehicles). How can we induce millions of them to make the decision to electrify, starting today? How can we make it cheaper and easier for them? To discuss that and related issues, I was excited to connect with two of the smartest people working in this space. The first is analyst, inventor, tinkerer, and entrepreneur Saul Griffith, who will be familiar to longtime readers — I've cited his work numerous times, especially his most recent work with Rewiring America, which advocates for rapid electrification. There is probably no one on earth with a better understanding of the US energy system. (He’s got a book on electrification coming out in October.)Griffith is a backer of and investor in a startup called Span, which makes smart electrical panels that offer homeowners fine-grained control over all their individual appliances, lights, and devices (via an app on their phones, of course). The founder and CEO of Span, my other guest, is Arch Rao. Rao was the project lead for Tesla's Powerwall home battery before leaving to start Span, so it goes without saying that he is intimately familiar with the technical and economic challenges of home electrification.Welcome to Volts, Saul and Arch! Saul, I want to start with you. We're going to talk about home electrification today, and just by way of setting context — it's pretty easy to make the case that home electrification is fun, it's cool. But what is the case that it is necessary, and not only necessary, but necessary quickly? Set the bigger picture for us.Saul Griffith: There's a few components to that. Let's start with the climate component: the urgency. There's a concept called committed emissions — that is the emissions that a machine that exists today will emit while it lives out its lifetime. So if you bought a petrol or gasoline car last year, it'll keep burning gasoline for another 20 years; if you bought a natural gas furnace last year, it'll keep burning natural gas for 25 years; a hot water heater, 15 years; an oven burning natural gas, another 12 years. So those are committed emissions, the same as a new coal plant opening last year would go on operating for another 50 years. We now know that if all of the machines that exist on the planet today live out their natural life, the committed emissions of those machines take us to about 1.8 degrees Celsius, over three degrees Fahrenheit of warming. So the practical reality is every time any of our machines fails or needs to be replaced, we need to upgrade it with a zero-carbon option. And the only real zero-carbon option that has emerged is electrification, and that's electrification of our heat with heat pumps, of our vehicles with electric vehicles, and then tying that all together and balancing the grid.David Roberts: Right. And what chunk of emissions comes from residential? Saul Griffith: Historically, we put emissions into sectors: residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation. The residential sector is responsible for 10 or 15 percent of total emissions, by that measure, but it's actually much higher than that because in reality, you make the decision about your car and your home. And when we electrify our cars, they're going to be charged at home. And then today, as it stands, a huge amount of our economy in the U.S. — close to 10% — is used to find, mine and refine fossil fuels, so that's the pipelines and the trains moving coal. And that's all filed under industrial emissions. So if you wrap up your pro rata share of that in your household, you wrap up the electrification of your vehicles, the decisions you make around your kitchen table are actually about 40 or 42 percent of our total emissions. In our small businesses and offices, what's traditionally known as the commercial sector, it's about another 20 percent. As I like to say now, there's two types of emissions. There's a small number of big machines, and there's a large number of small machines. The small number of big machines is a few hundred coal plants and a few hundred LNG terminals and a few hundred oil tankers, but the real game in town is the 200 million vehicles, the 128 million households, the 70 million natural gas furnaces, etc. That's the large number of small machines, which is what we need to electrify when we electrify the household.David Roberts: And it’s individuals in charge of those decisions. One objection I hear to home electrification is that, from an household point of view, the boring stuff like insulation and weather-sealing is a better value. What's your general response to that? Saul Griffith: I don't think that's true. It’s empirically wrong. Retrofits like the envelope and ceiling can be very, very expensive, because you have to remove walls, you have to stuff new insulation in those walls. I just got a quote on doing that for my house, which is in a mild climate but is nevertheless freezing. It was about $28,000. That would give me a small efficiency win in this house, of maybe 20 percent less energy use, whereas buying the heat pumps to heat the house is about a $2,500 project. They will lower my energy for heating the house by two-thirds compared to how it's currently heated. So the big efficiency win in this house is the heat pump. Arch Rao: Just to expand on that, we have to be looking at technologies that change the outlook for us, not just looking back, but looking ahead. Things like fundamentally changing how we heat our homes or how we think about cooking and heating our water supply are the big game changer here.David Roberts: Following up on that: Span makes these smart electrical panels. What's the pitch that intelligence is important, or a necessary component of this, versus just dumb-appliance replacement?Arch Rao: That's a very good question. Often people have to be walked through the second-order effects that a solution like the Span panel can have for your home and your carbon footprint. A very useful analog, perhaps, is: in order to enable faster adoption of electric vehicles, we have to think about building charging networks, where we are working to deploy a large number of charges around the country and around the world. It's kind of similar. The electrical panel has a critical place in the electrical grid infrastructure, especially for your home. Without thinking about data controls and intelligence flowing in and out of it, it is very hard to envision a future state where switching over to electric appliances is practical or inexpensive. Anecdotally, when you think about replacing your water heater or your home heating system, it doesn't happen outside of an event. You have equipment failing, then you think about upgrading it, and when that decision point arrives, the cost and the timeline for upgrading your electrical system is often not compelling. It’s too much for any homeowner to take on, so they end up adopting the easiest solution, which is often calling somebody on Yelp and saying, “Hey, please replace the water heater with another natural gas water heater.” They're then locked into those committed emissions, like Saul said, for the next decade or more. So that's one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is, when you think about the continued adoption of electric appliances — be it electric vehicles, electric induction cooktops, or self-generation storage solutions like solar and batteries — the electrical panel, which is what everything connects into, is insufficient from a capacity standpoint. What we're allowing for is a smarter electrical panel that gives you controls and visibility down to every appliance and makes it easier to lock in these electric appliances and also potentially avoid the cost of upgrading your incoming service.David Roberts: The idea is that Span will juggle the loads and the timing, to smooth out the demand curve so you don't have these spikes where you might need bigger hardware.Saul Griffith: So the average US household today has two cars in the garage that burn petrol or gasoline or diesel, and it has natural gas heating, and it uses about 25 kilowatt-hours per day of electrical energy. If you electrify both of the vehicles in that household, you'll add about another 25 kilowatt-hours per day to the load of that house. And if you electrify the heat, you'll add about another 20 kilowatt-hours. For the majority of U.S. homes — and this is true around the world, when we electrify for purposes of decarbonizing, or for purposes of having a quieter, cleaner car, or because you're trying to improve the respiratory health of your children, because you don't want to burn fossil fuels inside your house — you're going to double or triple the loads in that house. The other phenomenon that is happening — and where I'm dialing in from today, in Australia, is an incredible example of this — rooftop solar is now providing 5 cent per kilowatt-hour electricity in Australia. Australia got the right mix of regulatory environment, politics, financing, that there is no way the grid will ever provide electricity to you as cheaply as solar. That will be true in the US — it is starting to be true, but it's going to be very, very true by 2022 or 2023. And then you're going to want to run your hot tub when the sun is shining, and you're going to want to charge your car battery when the sun is shining. That needs coordination, and it needs a computer, and a brain. What we're trying to avoid is having both cars on a type-two charger running at the same time as your oven, at the same time as your stove, at the same time as your hot tub. And with a small amount of intelligence coordinating those loads, there's actually quite a big economic win — it means that the total retrofit that we need to do is much smaller.Arch Rao: Thinking about it from the bottom up as well, the home electrical grid is built very much like traditional electrical infrastructure. You think about the worst case scenario, you try to build out capacity to support a very low likelihood scenario of these EV chargers, the heat pumps, your induction cooktop, and all of the different appliances in your home being powered on at the same time. That rarely ever happens, or in fact never happens, right? To be able to manage these, you need a solution that sits at the nerve center of your electrical system. That's really what Span does.David Roberts: It’s quite analogous on the household level to the larger grid: you're just peak shaving. You're installing some intelligence to avoid big peaks and valleys, right?Arch Rao: There’s an elegant comparison to be made here with fractals. We're moving into systems where your edge of grid looks more and more like the grid — you have generation, storage, you have different types of loads. So all these things we talked about, in terms of energy efficiency — reducing your consumption, which is a concept that's existed for decades now — is just not going to buck the curve quickly enough. If people want to continue to have the conveniences they have today, the solution is to electrify, to power it with known, available, increasingly lower-cost renewables.David Roberts: A lot of the promise of intelligence or software in buildings is that grid managers will be able to interface with the grid edge and coordinate and co-optimize it with central generation, so that everything works well together. A lot of what Span offers is: here's what you the owner can do; you can set this, or if this happens, you can turn this down, and turn this up. Over the years, I have picked up a real skepticism about how much we can expect people to do. Even if it's directly in their self-interest and super easy, people generally, as a behavioral matter, will not do things. In thinking about Span, what's the balance of user control versus what’s automated? Do you think about that a lot? Arch Rao: We do think about that a lot, actually. At the homeowner level, what we've zeroed in on is, monitoring without controls is not valuable. We're not just offering customers information and hoping that they'll change. Alongside that, controls without intelligence is not scalable. Ao we have to work toward solutions that take the human out of the loop, which means doing nuanced but subtle things within a home that don't impact your everyday life, but at the same time, are the right thing to do in terms of power flow management. So the solution is at the home level, but you want to take the homeowner out of the everyday decision-making process. The second part of it is, as we deploy more and more of our systems, we are seeing the benefit of the fleet level. In fact, we've already signed on a few utility partners that are looking to give this away to their customers or significantly rebate it, because the panel, given where it sits, is the natural intersection point between the grid operator and the home. Everything that you source power from, sink power into and store power in, all naturally connects, which means you can have a single gateway, so to speak, that can monitor and control everything at a fleet level as well. Whether it's an EV charger, from any brand, make, model, or company, or whether it's a smart thermostat, all of these can be monitored and controlled to a single gateway.David Roberts: To what extent are grid managers controlling things through Span now? Or does that need some sort of extra signoff from the homeowner?Arch Rao: Te're thinking about this as an opt-out model. We recently announced a program with Green Mountain Power, and another one with Silicon Valley Clean Energy here in California, where the customers are by design enrolled into some form of load monitoring and demand management. This doesn't preclude them from overriding those requests, but now the utility is given access to a piece of technology that allows them to control water heaters and EV chargers and space heaters, etc.David Roberts: Is Green Mountain giving them away? Arch Rao: That's right, the first part of their program is, they're offering 100 systems to customers in their territory — some that have batteries, some that have EV chargers, some that are just getting a panel up because they're getting an electric appliance — to understand what the benefit will be. The plan is, as we demonstrate successfully that this has value to both the homeowner and the grid operator, to scale this up. They have around 200,000 homeowners. There's another interesting benefit to this, which is that there are still a number of utilities in the US that are filing for rate cases to adopt smart meters — but frankly, smart meters are not really that smart. They’re communication radios. Our panel gives the energy company or the utility a lot more visibility at the whole home level and at the circuit level. So imagine by d…

Full show notes at the publisher

Long-duration storage can help clean up the electricity grid, but only if it's super cheap Jun 09, 2021

Show notes

Here at Volts, I recently spent a week … OK, a month writing about batteries, which store energy for electronic devices, electric vehicles, and, at least for short periods of time (four to six hours), the power grid.Lithium-ion batteries are extremely good at those tasks — and they’re getting better, and cheaper, all the time.But here’s the thing: a net-zero-carbon grid is going to need storage that lasts a lot longer than six hours. It’s going to need durations of up to 100, 300, 500 hours or more, and it’s going to need them cheap. Lithium-ion batteries just aren’t going to work for that. What will work? Good question! No one really knows yet. Whatever it is will require substantial research, development, and scaling, and possibly some good geographical luck. We can’t know yet what technology or technologies might win that race, but we do have a good sense of what they need to accomplish, thanks to some new research in Nature Energy from a team at MIT (along with Jesse Jenkins, who used to be at MIT but is now at Princeton). Their findings on long-duration energy storage (LDES) are daunting and somewhat deflationary. In a nutshell: LDES needs to get extremely cheap before it will play a substantial role in a clean grid — cheaper than almost any candidate technology today, and cheaper than any geographically unconstrained technology is likely to get any time soon. Let’s start with some background on the need for LDES.Renewables on the grid need firmingThe cheapest large-scale renewable energy sources are wind and solar, but wind and solar are variable. They come and go with the sun and the wind, and as you may have heard, the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing. We cannot turn them on or off, up or down.The supply of wind and solar energy will not always match the “demand curve,” i.e., the level of electricity demand throughout the day. As more and more wind and solar are added to the grid, there’s more and more need for flexible resources that can fill the gaps when supply doesn’t match demand.Today, those gaps are overwhelmingly filled by natural gas power plants, which are 100 percent “firm” in that they can be turned on at will and run as long as necessary. As the grid is decarbonized, however, fossil fuel plants (at least those without carbon capture) will be phased out of the electricity system and wind and solar penetration will increase. As that happens, other resources will be needed to firm the system. There are four basic options.* Transmission: connecting larger geographical areas raises the chances that sun or wind will be available somewhere within them.* Low-carbon (“clean”) firm generation: the MIT team’s paper lists “nuclear, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy, geothermal, or hydrogen and other fuels produced from low-carbon processes.” (The first three items are anathema to some climate activists, but they may end up being necessary.)* Negative emissions technologies (NETs): technologies that permanently bury carbon dioxide can offset emissions from firm fossil fuel plants. * Long-duration energy storage (LDES): technologies that can store enough energy, for long enough, to displace firm generation. (Note: natural gas power plants are much cheaper than any of these options, save perhaps some transmission. There will be no market or pressure for any of them unless there are policies that require reduced greenhouse gases.)NETs are likely to stay expensive and transmission can only do so much, so the real fight is likely to be between clean firm generation and LDES. The new research is an extremely detailed modeling look at the role LDES might play in a decarbonized energy grid — how much clean firm generation it might displace and how much it might reduce energy system costs.The LDES “design space”The researchers took an interesting and (to me at least) somewhat novel approach. The problem with trying to study LDES is that a bunch of incredibly heterogenous technologies are claiming that mantle, with different mechanisms and different performance characteristics, at different levels of development and commercialization, competing for different market niches. It can be difficult to compare them or to say anything meaningful about them as a class. So instead of focusing on particular technologies, the researchers modeled different combinations of performance characteristics. Specifically, they used a high-resolution model to represent five separate LDES technology parameters:1) energy storage capacity cost (using a bathtub as an analogy, think of the cost of increasing the size of the tub); 2) charge power capacity cost (cost of enlarging the faucet); 3) discharge power capacity cost (cost of enlarging the drain); 4) charge efficiency (how much water is lost when filling the tub), and 5) discharge efficiency (how much water is lost when draining the tub).Here’s how they went about it:We modelled a total of 1,280 discrete combinations of these cost and efficiency parameters encompassing performance levels that are consistent with projections for existing LDES technologies found in academic peer-reviewed studies as well as domains that are currently infeasible but that could be the focus of technology development efforts in the future. Furthermore, we evaluated the technology design space for LDES in multiple power system contexts encompassing different wind, solar and demand characteristics and different assumptions regarding the availability of firm low-carbon technologies.They present the results in two basic contexts: a Northern Grid representing average New England conditions and a Southern Grid representing Texas. The methodology was complex but the goal was simple: to determine which LDES performance characteristics would do the most to displace clean firm generation and reduce system costs for a net-zero-carbon grid. First we’ll look at which parameters made the biggest difference and the aggregate impact they could have. Then we’ll take a quick tour through current LDES techs to see which might make the cut.What LDES needs to be able to doThe basic question is how much clean firm generation LDES can displace in a model optimizing for total system costs. Here are a few basic findings:1. Of the five modeled technology parameters, the two that enable LDES to have the biggest impact are energy storage capacity costs (the cost of increasing the size of the tub) and discharge efficiency (how much water is lost draining the tub). The other three parameters don’t matter nearly as much. A good benchmark for energy storage capacity costs are lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Last year, BNEF’s annual battery price report had the average capacity costs of LIB battery packs at $137 per kilowatt-hour (down 89 percent from 2010), projected to hit $100 by 2023. Dan Steingart, a materials scientist and co-director of Columbia University’s Electrochemical Energy Center, told me he thinks LIBs are eventually going to get down “somewhere between $45 and $60 per kilowatt-hour.” (To be clear: that’s extremely aggressive and optimistic.)2. That gives some context to the next finding: not until it hits $50/kWh will LDES even begin to see meaningful deployment or declining costs. Not until $20/kWh will they reduce system costs by 10 percent. And “to deliver more significant savings in electricity costs (>10%), storage technologies must exhibit costs in the $1-10/kWh range and discharge efficiencies greater than 60%.”That pretty much rules out LIBs. It also, as we’ll see later, rules out quite a few of the technologies currently claiming the mantle of LDES.3. What’s more, across the full design space modeled, the very best LDES could hope for is to reduce system costs 50 percent; the best existing LDES techs could do is 40 percent. And in a system with more clean firm options available, the max is 20 to 30 percent.4. What’s even more, not until LDES capacity costs get down to $10/kWh could it displace all firm generation — if firm generation includes only nuclear. If it includes other clean firm generation with lower capital costs and higher operating costs (like natural gas with CCS or hydrogen combustion turbines), then LDES would have to get down to $1/kWh to displace it all. 5. What’s even more more, the modeled cases where LDES displaces the most clean firm generation involve storage durations of 100 hours or more, up as high as 650 hours (concentrated in 100 to 400 hours). 6. As No. 4 suggests, aside from energy capacity costs, the single factor that most influences LDES’ ultimate deployment has nothing to do with LDES tech at all — it’s the cost and availability of other clean firm options. If only or mainly nuclear is available, LDES has a much better shot. If other forms mature and get cheaper and more widely available, LDES will have a harder time. 7. LDES has a harder time on the Northern Grid, and an even harder time on the Northern Grid under scenarios of high electrification. (Electrification in the cold northern winters means a huge winter demand peak, which renewables struggle to meet.)So, what have we learned? LDES needs to store huge amounts of energy for cheap. Though it will run only intermittently, it needs to discharge energy efficiently. And it needs to be capable of durations of well over 100 hours. Even if it meets those requirements, it will likely displace less than half the clean firm generation required to run a clean grid. That said, reducing systems costs by even 10 percent represents billions of dollars in savings, so it’s nothing to sniff at.Let’s take a quick tour through the technologies competing in the LDES space.The varieties of LDES and their chances of successEnergy wonks are aware of the need for more and better options in the LDES space. ARPA-E has a DAYS (Duration Addition to electricitY Storage) program intended to spur development of energy storage technologies capable of anywhere from 10 to approximately 100 hours duration. But this new research reveals that LDES will need to run much longer than that, and for dirt cheap. Can any of today’s technologies measure up? Let’s run through the four broad categories of competitors. Electrochemical storageThere are two big electrochemical contenders. The first is flow batteries, which I wrote about in a previous post. They have the advantage of being able to scale energy storage and power capacity separately, which theoretically opens the door to very high energy capacity for fairly cheap. Unfortunately, the most common varieties of flow batteries (vanadium redox and zinc bromine) have energy storage capacity costs in the hundreds of dollars per kWh, which means they probably won’t cut it as LDES. (As I wrote, flow batteries are aiming for that awkward mid-duration storage space and getting squeezed on both sides.)Another electrochemical option (an alternative flow battery tech) is liquid metal batteries, which I also wrote about previously. A company called Ambri is building a 250 MWh demonstration project with liquid metal batteries in Reno, Nevada. In this paper, researchers demonstrated an “air-breathing aqueous sulfur flow battery” with $10-$20/kWh energy capacity costs at 100+ hours duration. That wouldn’t entirely displace firm generation, but it could theoretically get to 10 or 20 percent system cost reductions, which is no small thing. Chemical storageChemical candidates mainly include hydrogen and hydrogen-derived fuels like ammonia and syngas (e.g., synthetic methane). This is something of an odd category, since the result of all these processes is a fuel, which operates just like natural gas, as firm generation. You can see chemical storage as a direct substitute for, or a form of, clean firm generation.The cheapest forms of chemical storage rely on specific geological features for storage, like compressed hydrogen in caverns and porous rock formations. Energy capacity costs range from $1 to $5/kWh for hard rock caverns all the way down to around $0.5/kWh for some depleted gas or oil fields. The problem with chemical storage is that, while energy capacity costs are low, there’s lots of infrastructure and conversion processes involved in making hydrogen, storing it, capturing CO2, combining hydrogen and CO2, and then burning the resulting fuel in combustion turbines. This gives chemical storage high power capacity costs and low round-trip efficiency. Lots of work needs to be done to bring down costs, particularly of electrolysis and fuel cells, for making and burning hydrogen respectively. Mechanical storageThe oldest and still most common form of large-scale energy storage is pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES), whereby water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher one and then run back down through turbines to recapture the energy. (PHES accounts for about 99 percent of the US grid energy storage market.)Most PHES installations today are built for diurnal cycling (every six to 24 hours) and have energy capacity costs in the hundreds of dollars per kWh, which makes them unsuitable for LDES.Some PHES projects with particularly large reservoirs can get over 100 hours of duration at energy capacity costs in the $20 to $30/kWh range, which combined with their relatively high round-trip efficiency means they can probably eat into some clean firm generation at the margins. But those sites are even more geographically limited than PHES generally.The other viable mechanical LDES technology is compressed air energy storage (CAES), which is just what it sounds like — use energy to compress air, then use the pressure of the compressed air to run a turbine and generate electricity. In the best locations, with access to large saline aquifers, CAES can get down in the $1/kWh range with hundreds of hours of capacity; costs rise in less ideal sites (e.g. salt caverns). Like PHES, CAES is geographically limited (and might compete in some sites with compressed hydrogen storage).There are many other forms of mechanical energy storage out there, everything from pushing rocks uphill on a train to lifting rocks with a crane to spinning a flywheel, but none of them yet have energy capacity costs low enough to make them eligible as true LDES.Thermal storageThere are numerous ways to store electricity as heat. The most familiar is concentrated solar power using molten salt, but capacity costs for that technology remain prohibitively high and round-trip efficiency prohibitively low for it to serve as LDES.There are also (less developed) proposals to store heat in ceramic “firebricks” for electricity or heat applications, with energy capacity costs potentially as low as $5 to $10/kWh and round-trip efficiency over 50 percent. A process called pumped thermal energy storage using reciprocating heat pumps also shows great promise. Thermal storage remains an intriguing area of study, in part due to its usefulness as both direct heat and electricity.Here’s a roundup from the MIT team’s paper of all the LDES technologies and their projected future costs:The ultimate potential of LDESAs I said, the research is not explicitly framed this way, but the results strike me as fairly deflationary toward LDES. The low costs and long durations required rule out several existing technologies and set incredibly ambitious targets for others. And even if LDES meets those targets, it won’t erase the need for clean firm generation — at best it will take a good chunk out of it and reduce overall system costs a few dozen percent. That’s not nothing, but it’s not a silver bullet either. Here’s a visual from a seminar Jenkins gave at Stanford:Just a few things to note about this graph. The colored boxes are different LDES technologies — the solid lines indicate geographically unconstrained options and dotted lines indicate those that are geographically constrained. You’ll notice that all the options in the $1/kWh box have dotted lines, and aside from CAES, they’re all chemical. There are…

Full show notes at the publisher

Volts podcast: Adam Jentleson on how to make the US Senate work Jun 04, 2021

Show notes

Long-time readers know that I am a veteran hater of the US Senate, the graveyard of good ideas and progressive policies. America’s upper chamber is one of the world’s least productive and most ridiculous legislative bodies, its dysfunctions matched only by its boundless self-regard. Don’t get me started.Instead, get Adam Jentleson started! Now there’s a guy who has earned his ire at the Senate. As a senior aide to Democratic leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016, Jentleson saw up close and personal how the institution’s antiquated rules (especially the filibuster) can be weaponized against reformers. He shared what he learned in a book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. I didn’t want to have Jentleson rehash the book — it has been favorably reviewed and he has been on every podcast under the sun to discuss it — but I was quite interested in his thoughts on the current Senate standoff. Are Democrats going to let the filibuster prevent them from keeping their promises, improving people’s lives, and getting reelected … again? Are they going to allow a small handful of conservative Democratic senators to squelch a once-in-a-decade chance at legislating … again? Can that still be prevented, and if so, how?Basically, I asked him to explain Joe Manchin to me. Enjoy.(Anthony Cheng)David RobertsHey there, welcome to Volts. I'm your host, David Roberts. Lots of people these days feel a deep scorn and antipathy toward the US Senate, one of the most dysfunctional and ridiculous legislative bodies in the world. I very much include myself in that number. But few people have done as much to earn their antipathy as Adam Jentleson, who worked in the bowels of the Senate as a Deputy Chief of Staff for Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016 – the fateful final years of Obama's two terms. Jentleson got an up close and personal look at all the ways that the rules of the Senate are stacked against reformers, especially the filibuster. He shared what he learned in a new book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. I know that this newsletter is supposed to be about clean energy; I have not forgotten that, I promise. But US democracy is falling apart around us, and it's got me rather preoccupied. So I thought it would be nice to talk to Jentleson, not so much about this in its ugly past, although we will touch on that a little bit, as much as its current politics. What's going on there today, and what can we expect? Basically, I want him to explain Joe Manchin to me. So with that, welcome to Volts, Adam.Adam JentlesonThank you so much. It's great to be here.David RobertsSo as we speak, just a few minutes ago, we found out that the Senate Republicans are in fact expected to filibuster the creation of a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. This seems like a straightforwardly reactionary move. You know, as I look back on the last few uses of the filibuster, they seem straightforwardly reactionary. You go back a little further to the 60s and 70s, and it was used in pretty straightforwardly reactionary purposes then. Has the filibuster always been a straightforwardly reactionary tool? Or is there anything that a Democrat could point to and say, “Look, it works for us too!” or “Look, there are reasons for us to support it going forwards.” Has it ever worked for Democrats?Adam JentlesonWell, I’m going to give you a yes and no answer there. I think the filibuster was reactionary from the very beginning. It was conceived of as a reactionary tool. It was not supposed to exist – it didn't exist for the first half century or so of the Senate's existence. It came into existence largely to empower, not vulnerable minorities to protect them from being trampled by the mob, but rather to increase the power of already powerful minorities, who wanted to have even more power, and in most cases, to stop the marching progress of the majority.The number one powerful minority that the filibuster was invented to protect was slaveholders in the antebellum period. We could talk about this more, but it was first just this talking filibuster, and there was no super majority threshold. I think something that's really important to understand, that is easy to get lost because of our bias towards the new, is that the Senate was a majority rule body for most of its existence for 200 plus years. It was really only recently that the super majority threshold, this idea that things need 60 votes to pass, started to become frequently used at all. So all that is to say, that it was reactionary in its invention.David RobertsSo is it fair to say that all this stuff about protecting the rights of the minority and ensuring the small states have a voice and all that is sort of reverse engineered? The original Senate preceded those rationales?Adam JentlesonThat's right. I mean, a lot of it is just straight up b******t, but some of it is linked to a grain of truth. It is true that the framers wanted the Senate to be one of the checks that they put in place to protect from untrammeled majority rule. But it was the existence of the Senate that was supposed to be a protection against untrammeled majorities.David RobertsIt’s already minoritarian in its very structure.Adam Jentleson Exactly. First of all, the decision to have a bicameral legislature instead of a unicameral legislature was one of these checks. Having three branches of government that act as checks on each other was another one of the checks. And then the Senate itself in its entire democratic structure, having every state get the same number of senators was another check. And then other ones, like having senators be elected to longer terms – six years instead of two, having a higher age requirement, and having to be responsive to a broader statewide constituency, instead of just a district. These were all the ways in which the Senate was supposed to play this role as what people talk about as a cooling saucer. So when people talk about protecting the minority, you know, they're linking back to this, this grain of truth. But, you know, as you say, it was never supposed to be as anti democratic as it is now. And what people are talking about today is an entirely different vision of this Senate. And it is a vision where the minority has a veto over the majority, which is not what the framers intended at all. So I just wanted to say, this is the way in which it's reactionary. It hass been used for these purposes, it has primarily been a weapon to preserve white supremacy. It has occasionally come into use for progressives and for Democrats – one of the most famous filibusters was an anti war filibuster in 1917. That actually led to the creation of the rule that is now the rule that imposes a supermajority threshold. But if you look at it on balance, there's just no comparison. It has always been a tool that is far more powerful, and has had far more effect, for the right than for the left. That’s just the nature of the thing.David Roberts I sometimes hear Democrats say, “Well, there was that one time George W. Bush wanted to drill in Anwar,” and the Democratic Senate filibustered that. So really, it helps everyone?Adam Jentleson You can pick out a few examples over several dozen years. Sometimes, an article pops up by someone defending the filibuster, and they all go the same way, which is, you know, the Democrats should remember that the filibuster helped them. Here's one example. And there are many others. Are there?David Roberts Yeah, name three more!Adam JentlesonYeah, exactly. You know, they usually can't even get to three to make a pattern. I mean, it's just there's no question that it’s the case. The other thing is, if you pull that thread, and you start talking looking at it from a structural perspective, some of these things don't even pan out. For instance, in 1969 and 1970, there was an actual real effort to get rid of the electoral college that was very nearly successful. David RobertsFor the same reasons that we hate it today or for different reasons?Adam JentlesonI mean, it was slightly different. Between 1888 and 2000, no president ever got elected by winning the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. And then in 1968, they sort of had a brush with the dangerous potential of the Electoral College. So all through the 20th century, the Electoral College was basically an afterthought, because whoever won the popular vote always won the Electoral College. And it was like, “Oh, you know, what's the margin? It's interesting,” but it didn't really factor into people's calculations as much as it does today. Landslide elections were a lot more common back then, because partisanship was looser, all these things. So in 1968, George Wallace ran as an Independent, and he got a surprisingly large share of the vote. He came very close to denying either Nixon or Humphrey an electoral college majority. So, after the 1960 election, both Republicans and Democrats were like, “Well, s**t, we shouldn't do that, again. We need to make sure that Wallace can't get momentum.” And so there was a bipartisan effort to get rid of the electoral college. I mean, people forget, but you know, Nixon beat Humphrey by I think it was 0.7 percentage points. It was a very close election and Wallace almost spoiled it. So Birch Bayh led an effort to pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college, and this was at a time when constitutional amendments actually used to pass. They just passed the 25th amendment a few years earlier, and Birch Bayh had led that effort. So this was actually a thing that happened. He had about 30 states that were ready to ratify it if it had passed. It passed the house, overwhelmingly. It came to the Senate, and he appeared to have the votes to pass the amendment on a two thirds basis, but it was filibustered. It's a little complicated because you already needed two thirds to pass this because it was a constitutional amendment. So the filibuster didn't necessarily raise the threshold for the number of votes that it required to pass this constitution amendment to get rid of the electoral college, but it did complicate the situation and sort of threw a monkey wrench into it. That eventually managed to be the thing that denied Bayh the number of votes he needed. So all that is to say, if the filibuster hadn't existed, you talk about George Bush and Anwar in the early aughts, we probably would have gotten rid of the Electoral College in 1970, and George Bush would never have been president. So I know that was a long lead up, but there's your punch line. This is the point, right, is that structurally, it is a tool that advantages conservatives over liberals and progressives: it is a tool that makes it easier to stop things. And we are the side that by and large is the side that is more invested in passing big changes. And so that's why it benefits them more than us.David RobertsI'd love to talk more about the history sometime, especially some of the stories you tell about, blocking civil rights bills. One of the things you say in the book that I think is not popularly appreciated, is that the US people – Americans – were ready for Civil Rights way before any laws got passed, because they kept getting filibustered. Like, there was majority support in America to move ahead on civil rights. Long before politically, we were capable of actually doing it. I think people look to things that happen in history, more than they look at things that didn't happen. But if you put on the lens of things that didn't happen and look through American history, it is a tragedy after tragedy, and many of them have the filibuster at the root of it.Adam JentlesonThat's exactly right. We like to tell ourselves this narrative that, perhaps there was a reason we didn't pass civil rights until 1964 – maybe the country wasn't ready for it. Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader at the time, gave this famous speech paraphrasing Victor Hugo, saying “stronger than any army is an idea whose time has come”. But the thing was, America was ready to pass Civil Rights decades before they did. Gallup had anti poll tax bills and anti lynching laws polling in the 60 and 70% range as early as the 1930s and 1940s. There were actual bills that were passing the House that came over to the Senate that had majority support in the Senate; they had presidents of both parties ready to sign them in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. And the only reason the Civil Rights bills didn't pass in the 1920s, and 30s and 40s was because of the filibuster. So if you step back and contemplate the amount of human suffering that was caused by this 30 year delay, it's staggering to think about it. And it makes you a little bit less sanguine about the delay that the filibuster has imposed.David RobertsNo kidding. Well, let's talk about the current mess. So, you know, those of us who lived through the Obama years, have it seared on our memory, that, that he sort of legendarily had a couple of years, not even really two full years, of majorities in both houses of Congress, and then lost the Senate. And then, Mitch McConnell decided before he ever took office, as a matter of course, just to filibuster everything. Obama came into office on this wave of hope, and it's a new world and we're turning the page, we're going to do big things, and he wanted to be a historic Reagan-esque President and etc, etc, etc. Instead, he was pretty effectively bottled up, pretty effectively contained to a pretty modest presidency. And Democrats got punished, got their asses kicked at the ballot box, because as Mitch McConnell cannily perceived, if they can't get anything done, the public doesn't know it's the filibuster. They don't know what's going on. They barely know anything. All they see is a bunch of fighting, and finger pointing and nothing happening, and they blame whoever is in charge, and so they blame Dems. So basically, McConnell pulled off what is, if you can overlook the evil of it, a really incredibly savvy and effective strategy against Obama. When, last year, Biden came in with majorities in both houses, every Democrat who took to a microphone assured us “We remember what happened to Obama. We are not going to let that happen again, we cannot waste time. We know that the only reason people will vote for us in 2022, or 2024, is if we do things for them, and they're not going to care about the process.” So we're not going to let this happen again. Then they sort of passed the COVID relief bill through reconciliation, and Manchin voted for it. And it kind of seemed like, “Oh my god, maybe they did learn the lesson, maybe they are just gonna start doing stuff.” Then we drove into the mud pit. And here we are in the mud pit, doing exactly to a first approximation what happened last time, which is Republicans wasting time on bad faith negotiations, just running out the clock, and then in the end, blocking everything anyway. So did Democrats learn that lesson? Are we replaying this whole thing all over again? I mean, I've heard Schumer say so many times now, “We won't let that happen,” but it seems to be happening. So how do we square that circle? Is it happening all over again, or am I being too pessimistic?Adam JentlesonI think the jury's out. It's hard to unlearn lessons, and there's reasons that the time ran out on Democrats in 2009 and that they got played the way that they did. It's hard to change some of the fundamental things about the way business is done in Washington. It's hard to reorient senators…

Full show notes at the publisher

Rooftop solar and home batteries make a clean grid vastly more affordable May 28, 2021

Show notes

(If you’d rather listen than read, just click Play above.)Energy nerds love arguing over the value of distributed energy resources (DERs), the rooftop solar panels and customer-owned batteries that are growing more popular by the day. There’s a fight in California right now over the value of energy from rooftop solar, just the latest skirmish in a long war that has ranged over numerous states. The conventional wisdom in wonk circles is that the value provided by DERs is not sufficient to overcome the fact that the energy they produce is, on a per-kWh basis, much more expensive than that produced by utility-scale solar, wind, and batteries (residential solar is roughly 2.5 times as expensive as utility-scale solar, according to NREL).For that reason, many wonks view DERs as a kind of boutique energy and argue that public funds are better spent on utility-scale energy. Turns out: no, that’s wrong. Some groundbreaking new modeling demonstrates that the value of DERs to the overall electricity system is far greater than has typically been appreciated. The work didn’t get the attention it deserved when it came out in late December, so I want to spend some time with it. First, though, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about.The misguided battle between centralized and distributed energyTo understand the difference between centralized and distributed energy, it’s important to understand the distinction between transmission grids, the high-voltage power lines that carry electricity over longer distances, and distribution grids, the nests of low-voltage power lines (strung from the familiar brown poles) that carry electricity to local consumers. If the transmission grid is the interstate highway system of electricity, distribution grids are the local road systems that branch off those main trunks. Centralized energy generally refers to utility-scale power generators (or energy storage) hooked up directly to the transmission grid: coal or natural gas plants, wind farms, solar fields, grid-scale battery stacks, what have you. The big stuff.Distributed energy consists of anything that generates, stores, or manages electricity on distribution grids: rooftop solar panels, ground-mounted “community solar” arrays, consumer batteries, electric vehicles, building energy management software, and the like. (And then there’s truly distributed energy, in the form of off-grid installations that don’t connect to any larger grid. We won’t be getting into that today.)To paint in broad and somewhat crude strokes, advocates for centralized renewable energy tend to view advocates for distributed energy as crunchy pastoral proto-hippies who can’t handle modernity. They note that utility-scale energy is cheaper and capable of powering highly energy-dense modern economies, whereas distributed energy is expensive and diffuse. Advocates for distributed energy tend to view advocates for centralized energy as corporate capitalists in thrall to perpetual growth. They note that distributed energy brings a range of benefits, from resilience and independence to savings on avoided infrastructure, whereas utility-scale energy tends to do greater damage to landscapes and concentrate economic power.Like many disputes in the energy world, this one has hardened into an identity battle, which is annoying and unproductive, since the answer, like with so many other disputes, is both-and.Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that advocates for distributed energy have been at something of a disadvantage to date. It can be devilishly difficult to quantify the benefits of DERs, so a lot of the discussion gets into hand-wavey intangibles.It can be especially difficult to quantify the benefits of DERs to larger grid systems, because energy modeling to date has effectively ignored distribution grids (which represent about a third of US spending on electricity). It has treated them purely as load, as demand to be satisfied, rather than as active, flexible participants in grid management. Until now! Or, until a few months ago anyway. In December, energy modeler Christopher Clack (a familiar name to Volts readers) and his team at Vibrant Clean Energy (VCE) debuted a new way to model the energy system that takes into account DERs and the services they provide. They used it to study the effect of DERs on the electricity system and the results are summarized in “A New Roadmap for the Lowest Cost Grid.” (Full technical report here; slideshow presentation here.)Spoiler: the cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant. The practical implication is that going all out on DERs is to everyone’s benefit, up and down the electricity supply chain, from utilities to consumers. It is difficult to exaggerate just what a revolutionary change this represents in energy modeling and how much it turns conventional wisdom on its head. By making distribution grids visible to their model and co-optimizing those grids with the transmission system, the team at VCE uncovered a source of grid flexibility that could save a decarbonizing electricity system some half a trillion dollars through 2050. That’s real money. (If you want to take a deep dive into the material, check out this interview with Clack on Chris Nelder’s Energy Transition Show. It is gleefully nerdy; I cannot recommend it highly enough.)The cheapest energy scenario is clean and distributedAt the heart of VCE’s work is Clack’s state-of-the-art modeling tool: Weather-Informed energy Systems: for design, operations and markets planning (WIS:dom). It allows resolution down to two-mile square areas and makes dispatch decisions every five minutes. It takes into account granular weather data stretching over decades, climate impacts, policy, all forms of generation, storage, transmission, and on and on. VCE boasts that it “leverages 10,000 times more data points than traditional models.”For this study, WIS:dom was augmented to better understand and represent distribution grids, so that it could bring transmission and distribution systems together in one system and co-optimize them. It was given better information about the costs and capabilities of DERs and more options; for example, instead of spinning up a new generator to meet peak demand, it could draw on distributed solar and batteries. No one to Clack’s knowledge has done this before, so there was a lot of experimenting to get it right. “I had to spend a lot of money and time and resources upgrading the model to include this, with a lot of failures along the way,” says Clack. “That's why I'm confident that we did it first, because I spent a lot of time trying to find someone else that had done it, so I didn’t have to do the hard work.”The modeling question was: if a high-resolution optimization tool is given DERs as an option, will it choose to deploy them? If so, how much?The broader social question was: can DERs help lower the overall costs of a clean electricity system? If so, by how much?The paper presents four core scenarios (which were run across a range of geographies):* BAU (business as usual), which includes existing policies and mandates but otherwise lets economics drive dispatch decisions; it deploys WIS:dom in a way that mimics traditional models;* BAU-DER, which does the same but uses the augmented form of WIS:dom, with greater visibility into distribution systems;* CE (clean energy), which models a system that reduces power sector carbon emissions 95 percent from 1990 levels by 2050; WIS:dom mimics traditional models;* CE-DER, which models a 95 percent reduction but uses the augmented form of WIS:dom.To skip straight to the results: if you make DERs an option for the model, it deploys an absolute boatload of them (spending about $10 billion extra over the first 10 years), and by doing so substantially reduces overall system costs. BAU-DER is $301 billion cheaper than BAU (the blue line above), which means we would save money from day one by deploying more DERs even if we didn’t care about climate change. CE-DER is $473 billion cheaper than CE (the green line), which means DERs will make the decarbonization of electricity much less expensive than doing it all with centralized renewables and storage. And here’s the kicker: CE-DER is $88 billion cheaper than BAU (the red line), which means, economically speaking, we’d be better off reducing electricity emissions by 95 percent using DERs than continuing with the status quo. (And this is all just the pure economics — it leaves out the enormous health savings and environmental justice benefits of reduced point-source pollution.)Whether you’re concerned about climate change or not, whether you want to reduce emissions or not, whether you care about the health and resilience of local communities or not, deploying DERs brings down system costs. It’s the fiscally responsible thing to do.Now, note the shape of the red line above (and to a lesser extent, the green line). Scenarios that decarbonize using DERs are a smidgen more expensive for the first 10 years or so because they use those early years to deploy an enormous quantity of DERs. The US currently has about 98 gigawatts of rooftop solar and less than a gigawatt of distributed energy storage installed. Through 2025, CE-DER deploys an additional 75 gigawatts of distributed solar and 27 gigawatts of distributed storage; by 2035, it is 200 and 90, respectively. (By 2050, it is 247 and 160.) That is an absolute DER building binge, starting now.After that early period of heightened investment, though, savings begin to skyrocket as DERs pay off in system benefits. DERs make everything else on the grid work betterFor the entire history of electricity up until about five minutes ago, grid operators viewed electricity demand as an exogenous variable, a set figure they had to meet with supply, not something they had much control over.The key to the value of DERs is that they make electricity demand more controllable. With energy generation and storage scattered throughout distribution grids, grid operators have a way to move energy around, both geographically and temporally, without firing up more power plants. They can absorb extra energy if there’s a dip in demand or produce extra energy if there’s a spike. The overall effect is to smooth out the “demand curve.” Look at the thick black line on the top right graph below — that’s the distribution demand curve throughout a representative year:Now note the same black line on the bottom right graph. By satisfying the little demand peaks with distributed solar and storage, the demand for utility-scale energy is leveled off. Here’s a graph that shows a “load duration curve,” which reveals how high demand is, for how often in the year, and how DERs affect it:As you can see by the sharp spike on the left, there are relatively rare periods of extremely high demand (peaks). The problem is that the current electricity system has to be sized to meet those peaks, even if that means many power plants end up idle most of the time. Clack says that today, roughly 20 to 25 percent of generation capacity on the grid — some 300-350 gigawatts — covers around 3 percent of the energy load each year. (This, in a nutshell, is why electricity systems everywhere are so overbuilt.) The light blue-shaded area on the curve shows the reduction in demand that DERs can provide (the dark blue on the right is the increase in demand). Not only can DERs “shave the peak” by an average of 17 percent nationwide, they can reduce the demand for utility-scale energy for 80 percent of the hours of the year. They make the load duration curve more level as well. These demand-leveling effects bring four big benefits:* First, if you don’t have those big peaks in demand for utility-scale energy, then you don’t need that 20 to 25 percent of capacity that only runs during peaks. Not building those plants, or shutting them down early, saves lots of money.* Second, a more level demand curve means that all generators on the system will run more consistently, with fewer ramps up and down, at closer to their full capacity, helping to maximize their value. * Third, a more level demand curve means that transmission congestion will be reduced and transmission assets will be more efficiently utilized. (In one of my Transmission Month posts, I discussed “energy storage as a transmission asset.” This is the same idea, on a broader scale.)* Fourth, DERs offer the system the option to shift demand to meet variable supply, rather than always forcing it to shift supply to meet demand. Shifting demand is often much cheaper. These benefits explain why CE-DER is so much cheaper than CE, and even than BAU. They explain why, even though rooftop solar may cost more than centralized solar on a per-kWh basis, its value is greater.Infusing distribution systems with DERs allows grid operators more stability and more options — including more renewables. DERs enable more utility-scale renewablesWind and solar are cheap, but they are variable. They come and go on their own schedule, outside of our control. There will be times — seconds, minutes, hours, sometimes weeks and months — when wind and solar dip and something else is needed to fill the gaps. Conventionally, this role is played by dispatchable generators that can be turned up and down at will — these days, mostly natural gas plants. Given that most natural gas plants, at least those without carbon capture, will have to be phased out in a decarbonized system, there’s a hunt on for “firm” zero-carbon alternatives — think nuclear, hydro, natural gas or biomass with carbon capture, or geothermal. But VCE’s modeling shows that a big chunk of that role can be played by DERs, which Clack calls a “firming agent on the load.” By bringing demand more under grid operators’ control, DERs virtually eliminate curtailment, or discarding of renewable energy due to temporary oversupply, through 2045. Just as they allow transmission to be used more effectively, they allow us to consume more of the energy generated by existing utility-scale renewables.They also prevent the familiar problem of “value deflation” — more wind and solar energy at particular times and places competes with existing wind and solar energy from the same times and places — by giving grid operators a whole series of time- and location-specific demand knobs that they can turn up or down at will to better accommodate renewables. By preventing value deflation, DERs will allow for more new renewables on the system (and the retirement of more thermal and fossil generation). That’s why the CE-DER scenario builds more utility-scale wind and solar than the CE scenario. CE-DER builds 800 gigawatts of utility wind, 800 of utility solar, and 200 of utility storage, whereas CE builds 60 gigawatts less wind and 50 less solar (though slightly more batteries). By enabling renewable energy to be moved around, DERs unlock more of it — with, again, enormous public health benefits that are not captured in the model. Put technically, as Clack told Nelder, “the model says that distributed [solar] and storage in some combination ends up being higher value than the differential in the [levelized] cost of utility-scale solar and distributed solar.”Put more colloquially, though it will require enormous upfront investment in the coming decade, laying a quilt of DERs over the nation’s distribution systems is the best thing we can possibly do to enable the rapid emission reductions we will need in the decade after. DERs are not a boutique version of, or a distraction from, utility-scale renewables; they are a necessary complement, an enabler and accelerator. DERs will mean more jobsVCE did some analysis est…

Full show notes at the publisher

Volts podcast: Will Wilkinson on libertarianism, pluralism, and America's political crisis May 26, 2021

Show notes

I have been reading Will Wilkinson’s writing since I was a baby blogger, way back in the early 2000s. By then, I had already left behind the libertarianism that gripped me in college, but Will was still a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. I disagreed with him about many things, but I always found him rigorous and engaging.Over the years, I’ve followed as he’s moved from Cato to the center-right Niskanen Center (where he got canceled) to, now, the Progressive Policy Institute, where he is a senior fellow. In the process he left behind libertarianism for “liberaltarianism” and now some some kind of synthesis that doesn’t quite have a name but lands in the vicinity of social democrat, with an emphasis on small-d democracy.And of course, like everyone who’s anyone, he has his own newsletter: Model Citizen.There’s something nice about following a mind you admire as it tries to work its way toward higher and better understanding — it is so rare these days to witness anyone change their minds about anything — and there’s something especially nice when it ends up converging with your own thinking. I feel much more confident about things I believe when Will articulates them.Both Will and I have come to spend less time thinking about what might be the correct or optimal political philosophy and more time thinking about the workaday challenges of pluralism and democracy: how people of different cultures, ethnicities, genders, beliefs, and personalities, whose disagreements and conflicts are unlikely ever to be entirely resolved, can live together in relative peace.All of which is to say, I’ve wanted to talk politics with Will forever. We got around to it a few weeks ago and now I’ve finally got the thing produced. If you're in the mood for almost two hours of nerdy talk about Ayn Rand, rationalism, freedom, social insurance, the relationship between markets and government, and the perils of pluralism, strap on those headphones and travel along. (Note: several times in the pod I say “non-zero” when I mean “non–zero sum,” which bugs me now, but what can you do.)VOLTSD: Hello, welcome to volts. I am your host, David Roberts. Today I'm excited, as I have as a guest Will Wilkinson who is currently a senior scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute, which is sure to be of some amusement to those who have followed Will's career which began at the extremely different Cato Institute. So rather than try to explain Will’s whole history, which we're going to get into, I'll just say that I've been reading Will’s work for years now, and have been following his intellectual and political journey that he's been on, which has paralleled my own in a lot of ways. And so I thought I would talk with him about that journey, and about where he's ended up, and how we move forward in American politics from now. So we're taking on all the big questions today. So thanks for coming, Will, we appreciate you being on. WW: Thanks, Dave. I'm ready. DR: So before getting into the meat of things, just start by telling us a little bit about where you're from and how the story of Will Wilkinson that ended with you being a young, teenage Ayn Rand enthusiast, what's the what's the origin story?WW: Well, I was born the child of a poor sharecropper. Just kidding. That's, yeah, that's The Jerk. which describes me pretty well.I grew up in a little town in the middle of Iowa - Marshall town - it’s a small city of about 27,000 people. It's the county seat. So that makes it locally important. And it's exactly the same size as it was when I grew up there, which is interesting, because the composition of the population is very different today, but I moved there when I was five, because my dad had taken a job as the chief of police. So my entire childhood my dad was the chief of police in my hometown. My mother was a nurse for a large part of my childhood, she stayed at home, but she also worked as an obstetrics nurse and a home health nurse when I was a little bit older. I’ve got two older sisters. You know, go Bobcats. I don't know, what do you want to know about?DR: It's so American. Well, it's a small town, the chief police dad, the nurse Mom, it's, you know,WW: It's like, I really liked encyclopedia brown books because his dad was a police chief and his mom was a nurse. I grew up in a John Cougar Mellencamp song, I even would suck down chili dogs outside the Tasty Freeze, for real. So, one of the things that I find interesting, and I've been working for a long time on a book proposal of a version of this density divide paper that I wrote a couple of years ago. And I've been using my hometown as a model of things that have changed in the economy and how that's affected where people settle. And I didn't know when I was a kid that I was enjoying peak Marshalltown, Iowa; it was as good as it ever was in its existence. And it was as good as it was ever going to be. You know, it was a really healthy, vital little town with small manufacturers. The schools were great, you know, just like an incredibly active civic life - great little league, flag football, all of that stuff. And, you know, most of it's gone now.DR: All things that seem to be sort of dying out.WW: Not the Little League Baseball, that's not gone. But I mean most of the manufacturing is gone, and the average level of education in the town has gone down. One of the main employers was a place called Fisher Controls, which makes governors and valves. They employed a lot of engineers and a lot of lawyers, people like that. And they really downscaled their presence in Marshalltown. We also used to have a big Maytag air conditioning plant, a bunch of different stuff, which employed executives and hired lawyers and employed accountants and people with college degrees. Most of that stuff has gone, along with the good manufacturing jobs for, for people without college degrees. And so we've got mostly shitty manufacturing jobs in food processing.drvolts 5:11 It's gone from a 90s John Cougar Mellencamp song to like a 2010s John Cougar Mellencamp song.Will Wilkinson 5:18 Yeah, it's gotten a little, it's getting a little darker. But it was, it was a lovely place to grow up. Really. And, it was a conservative place. You know, my dad is a cop, which is a conservative-ish profession. My mother was actually a more political person and she was very conservative. For some time, she subscribed to the Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum newsletter, and that was just kind of background in my childhood. It's not like our family was very political. My dad was one of those old fashioned public servants who thought it was extremely untoward to ever express a political opinion. Because his job was to look after the safety and security of the whole town, and everybody needs to believe that you're working for them. And you can't take sides, right, so he wouldn't even tell us what his political opinions were at the kitchen table.DR: Funny. WW: Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of ethos really has changed in law enforcement.drvolts 6:23 To say the least. Well, let's start with both of us. You have told this story of before you were sort of an enthusiastic libertarian as a teen and ended up entering the professional, libertarian world. I also had a brief period of enthusiastic Ayn Rand enthusiasm, and libertarianism. And we're going to talk about how you move past that, but I want to just take a moment to take seriously what it is about libertarianism that attracts a certain type of young man, like we were. Mostly men, mostly white - not exclusively. Let's take a moment to take the attraction seriously; what was it about it that clicked so hard for you and made such sense for you at that moment?Will Wilkinson 7:29 You know, it's really hard to say exactly what it is. And I'm very wary about the fidelity of memory. But what I remember, it's actually kind of weird, how I ended up being a libertarian. I grew up a member of the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a sect of Mormonism. I won't explain that unless you want it explained. And I went to church camp every summer for several weeks. And I've always been a weird person. I mean, I've always been a bit of a free thinker. And one day, at a campfire, you know you'd sing all the campfire songs, these silly songs at first, and then you get into the more serious songs, Kumbaya and all that s**t. And then campers are invited to get up and give testimonies, and mostly you get up and talk about how God is awesome and how your life has been touched and blessed and so on and so forth. You know, the RLDS, they're now known as the Community Christ, they're not they're not Community of Christ. They're not evangelical. You know, praise Jesus, speaking in tongues sort of things, it's actually pretty sedate. People would give their testimonies and I love singing with a bunch of people. I feel like that's what I miss most about church,drvolts 9:02 It's the best part of church.Will Wilkinson 9:04 I love it, I find it so nourishing to the soul. That is probably one of the reasons why I'm desiccated and bitter. We'd sung all the sweet campfire songs and I was filled with the spirit of love and community and I got up and I really wanted to tell people how much I loved them and I got up and said, you know, I don't really know about this God stuff. But I love all you guys. I think this is great.drvolts 9:40 The secular humanist credo!Will Wilkinson 9:44 Yeah, my mother was my Sunday school teacher and I don't know what it is in my personality. I've got a weird combination of just rigorous logic, this kind of relentless rationality about “does this make sense”? And also this drive to please and to be a good trooper for the cause. And so I legitimately wanted to be like the best, you know, quasi-Mormon that I could possibly be. And my mother would be teaching me the Bible or the Book of Mormon. And I would just relentlessly cross examine her about, “okay, so if this happened…” and then things don't make sense. And I would end up cornering her by accident, because I was just inquiring, like, well, how does this make sense? And she'd end up crying, because we're good. And then I would feel so terrible, because that wasn't my intention. But that kind of instinct came out in that campfire. And the funny thing that came to that was like, after, you know, the next day, one of the counselors, some middle aged dude wearing sandals with socks, came up to me and said, “Hey, you know, Bill”, I went by Bill. And he says “I think there's this book you'd really like”, and I said “yeah?”, and he's like, “yeah, it's called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand”.drvolts 11:19 Mike, your quasi Mormon camp counselors turned you on to Ayn Rand.Will Wilkinson 11:23 Yeah, and he was kind of conspiratorial and I didn't really know why. But I was like, “okay”! So that summer I was maybe 15 or 16. I picked up Atlas Shrugged. And, you know, it's the fattest book, it’s 1200 pages or something like that. Anyway I dipped into it. And I was like, “this is a slog”, and just set it aside. Fast forward a couple years, after my freshman year in college at the University of Northern Iowa, I ended up being a tour guide at the Joseph Smith historic center in Nauvoo, Illinois, giving tours of Joseph Smith's house. And, I thought “Oh, this is gonna be a long summer”. There's nothing in Nauvoo, Illinois. It's not really a town. It's this abandoned kind of ghost town. All the Mormons lived there, and they left. There's this big historic site. And I was like, this is gonna be boring, so I need to bring the biggest book I've got. So I brought Atlas Shrugged, and it while giving tours of Joseph Smith's house. And I spent all summer reading it. You know, when you're a tour guide, you'd get the first shift and you'd open up the visitor center, and you'd kick back at the desk, and might be an hour, two hours before anybody comes in. So you'd sit back and read your novel. And I was riveted by it, I totally got into it. I decided I didn't believe in God, by the end of the book, and the thing is, I was clearly never going to really believe in God - I just don't have the god gene. I went back to college, for my sophomore year, and ended up reading The Fountainhead, and it really resonated with me. The thing that was really captivating to me was the critique of altruism, believe it or not. My church is this sweet-hearted, cosmopolitan, internationalist, “all humans are one”, vaguely social justice-y, even when I was a kid. It’s a really liberal form of Mormonism (comparatively). But everything is about service. Everything is about doing things for other people. And in my Midwestern milieu, and that overall service Christianity you're not supposed to stick your head up, you don't want to look like you've got a big head or you're better than other people. My dad would always say, “don't don't get too big for your britches”, that kind of thing. What I found in Ayn Rand was permission to be awesome. That's really what excited me down to the core of my being. This argument, this justification for just f*****g going for it. Be the best version of yourself that you can be and you don't have to f*****g apologize to anybody. You don't have to justify it to anybody. You just be awesome.drvolts 14:56 Right? It was the Uberman aspect you saw in yourself. Nobody who reads these things is like, “Oh, I suddenly realized my cousin is extraordinary” it's always “Oh wait, I'm extraordinary, at last I can tell the world”. WW: Yeah, it's never, “I'm Eddie Willers” - that kind of pathetic viewpoint character, who's supposed to typify the average guy. We're all John Galt. Everybody who reads The Fountainhead is Howard Roark. But it was really transformative for me and I don't think in a bad way, because it's not really the Ubermensch stuff because I was never interested in lording power over others or crushing people under foot on my ascent to the peaks of Promethean glory or whatever. I just thought it was amazing that it was okay. That if I wanted to just do it for myself - if I had aspirations, if I wanted to be a great artist, I should try to be a great artist, right?drvolts 16:11 Well, that's a much more noble set of motivations and residences than I can claim. I was about the same age and it was one of the few times I was in my college library, literally just browsing the philosophy section, because I had sort of like a young man's interest in philosophy. Where did you stumble upon this? It's called Marable College in some small town, Tennessee. It had 800 students when I went there, so there's no reason anyone ever would have heard of it. But I stumbled across this book called The Virtue of Selfishness. And I was like, oh, tell me more. Tell me more. So I ended up reading all of Ayn’s non-fiction, and even in my peak Rand enthusiasm I could never abide her fiction. I still can't read a paragraph of it. It's so bad, but, but for me, it was less “I can be extraordinary, I can do what I want. I don't have to apologize to him.” For me, it's just like, “I can be left alone and don’t have to mess with anybody else.” Nobody messes with me, nobody owes me anything. I don't owe anybody else anything. I think a certain kind of young man, especially with that rationalist streak that you're talking about is often coupled with a certain degree of emotional illiteracy. Or let's say the way young men are s…

Full show notes at the publisher

Volts podcast: Sunrun CEO Lynn Jurich on the promise of electrification May 21, 2021

Show notes

It is now widely agreed among energy wonks that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to, as I like to put it, electrify everything. That means cleaning up the electricity system while shifting other energy uses — especially transportation and buildings — off of fossil fuels, onto electricity.

When it comes to electrification, one technology in particular sits at the nexus, helping to decarbonize the electricity system, vehicles, and buildings all at once. I'm speaking, of course, of the humble solar photovoltaic panel, a technology that has defied predictions for decades, getting cheaper and cheaper, spreading faster and faster.

But the spread of solar panels is just the leading edge of a much larger, more important shift to electrified homes and communities. As I've followed electrification and all its implications, one of the people I've learned the most from, in conversation and through her writing, is Lynn Jurich.

In addition to being an insightful observer of the US energy system, Jurich also happens to be the co-founder and CEO of America's largest residential solar company. Sunrun has been around since 2007 and seen some ups and downs, but lately it has been all ups. The company adapted relatively quickly to the pandemic shutdown, invested heavily, and had a banner year in 2020.

Then, to top it off, it bought Vivint, its leading competitor, for $3.2 billion. It is now sitting at the top of a burgeoning residential solar market, with a valuation of some $22 billion.

I talked with Jurich about her new deal with Ford, the reason US residential solar costs twice what it costs in Germany, the ways distributed energy can help the grid, and the next steps for electrification.

Thanks to her for coming on and to you for listening. If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber.

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/subscribe

Battery Week: everything in one place May 19, 2021

Show notes

As you might have gathered from the name, when Battery Week began … a month ago, I did not anticipate it going on quite so long. Since it has dragged out a bit, I thought it might be helpful to pull everything together in one place.

If you click play above, you will find a lithium-ion battery megapod: all the battery pieces read aloud, plus the podcast with Chloe Holzinger, strung together into one three-hour-long beast.

Links to all the pieces:

* Why lithium-ion batteries are so important

* A primer on lithium-ion batteries: how they work and how they are changing

* The many varieties of lithium-ion batteries battling for market share

* Competitors to lithium-ion batteries in the grid storage market

* Volts podcast: battery analyst Chloe Holzinger on possible futures for lithium-ion

As always, thank you for reading and listening. If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Volts.

Forest says Happy Spring!

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/subscribe

Volts podcast: battery analyst Chloe Holzinger on the possible futures for lithium-ion May 17, 2021

Show notes

Welcome back, my Volts friends, to the Battery Week that never ends. (Just kidding — this is the last of it.) For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries, specifically, lithium-ion batteries: how they work, why they have taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future.Even with as many PDFs as I’ve read, I'm still learning every day just how much I don't know. I'm not going to lie: I still have the Wikipedia page for lithium-ion batteries open in a tab.So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with someone who actually knows what they're talking about. To that end, I was happy to chat with Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst at IHS Markit. (At least, that’s what she was when I spoke with her, and how I introduce her on the pod; since then, she’s become an Investment Associate with The Engine, a venture capital firm spun out of MIT.)Chloe keeps up with lithium ion batteries for a living, so I was eager to talk with her about the growing market, the raw materials that make up batteries and their possible supply problems, the coolest new innovations in batteries, from solid state to liquid metal, and much more. She was generous with her time and I learned a ton. Enjoy.David Roberts Hello, everyone, this is Volts and I am your host, David Roberts. For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries, specifically, lithium ion batteries: how they work, why they have taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future. Even with as many PDFs as I have under my belt now, I'm still learning every day just how much I don't know. I'm not going to lie, listeners, I still have the Wikipedia page for lithium ion batteries open in a tab. So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with someone who actually does know what they're talking about. To that end, I am joined today by Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst with the clean energy technology and renewables team at IHS Market, a research and analysis firm. Chloe keeps up with lithium ion batteries for a living. So I was eager to talk with her about the growing market, the raw materials that make up batteries and their possible supply problems, the coolest new innovations in batteries, from solid state to liquid metal and much more. She was generous with our time and I learned a ton. So without further ado, let's get to the conversation.Welcome, Chloe. Thanks for coming on Volts.Chloe HolzingerThanks, David. Thanks for having me.David Roberts All right, let's start maybe just a little bit by telling us how you ended up in the battery area studying batteries, analyzing batteries in the battery market. It's a strange niche field; how'd you end up there?Chloe Holzinger Yeah, I sort of fell into it by accident, as so many people do. I got my undergraduate degree in Marine Chemistry and my master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and happened to find the one startup in the Boston area that was developing batteries for underwater applications. So I joined them as employee number six, got a patent, and worked for them until they got acquired by a defense contractor. I then hopped over to the market intelligence field, where I've been covering the broader next generation battery technology area, and the various end applications for batteries. And I've been here ever since.David Roberts How long has that been? How long have you been immersed in batteries? Chloe Holzinger Total, including the startup experience, is probably about five years.David Roberts It's been an active time in that field! Let's just briefly talk about what lithium ion batteries are and where they came from. I think everybody's heard of them. At this point, they've kind of gotten a lot of hype, but maybe tell us when they entered the market, their market development and why they're kind of reaching this crescendo of hype right now. Chloe Holzinger Sure. So I can provide a very brief history here. Lithium ion batteries were kind of invented separately at different stages by different companies. If I remember correctly, Kodak did some innovation on actual tape casting, which is the process that's used to actually make lithium ion batteries. Some of the core lithium ion battery technology itself was actually developed at Exxon way back when; they just kind of sat on that. Then some other different key breakthroughs were also developed at different corporations; I think Sony was one of them as well. I may apologize if I got any of that wrong. But they really were initially commercialized for the consumer electronics industry. Then smartphones and computing power got much better, laptops became more commonplace, they were able to eventually make the jump from consumer electronics and these small applications, to electric vehicles, whether you're talking about a Tesla or Toyota hybrid, lithium ion batteries have been pretty crucial. And now we're seeing them used in all these different kinds of electric mobility applications, as well as the grid storage space.David Roberts What was the first time they showed up in an electric vehicle? Because, just intuitively, the leap from a laptop to electric vehicle seems like a pretty far leap. Who had that idea and made that happen the first time? Chloe Holzinger You know, I don't actually know the exact history, but various people have been trying to make electric vehicles for a really long time. It's just before they were trying with lead acid batteries. So there were a few electric vehicle prototypes in Jimmy Carter's time, and they obviously didn't really go anywhere. As much as people have lots of lots of opinions – and I certainly do as well – about Elon Musk, you got to credit Tesla for really making the electric vehicle really sexy and popular again. David Roberts Is it fair to say that Tesla, back in the Roadster era, which I guess was like 2008 or 2009, that that's kind of what kicked off the current frenzy of development? Or do you think it was inevitable?Chloe Holzinger I think both. I think Tesla was really there. Right place, right time, right idea, which is a pretty tough combination to come up with. I think regardless, you're seeing electric vehicles really rise in all different parts of the world and different companies really leading the charge. And it's such an integral part of decarbonizing transportation and industry. You know, if it wasn't for Tesla, I'm sure it would have been some other company. But it happens to be this particular American company that really got it started here in the States at least.David Roberts So, what's so great about lithium ion batteries? Let's just, just briefly kind of look at the chemistry in the materials. We had lead acid batteries, we had nickel metal hydride, nickel cadmium batteries; batteries have been around. So, at the sort of the chemistry level, what is it about lithium ion batteries, that's so great, that has allowed them to colonize these markets?Chloe Holzinger I could wax poetic about lithium ion batteries. A lot of what I do in my various market roles is talk about all these other non lithium chemistries that people are trying to develop. And there really isn't a better alternative to lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles. Lithium ion batteries are exactly the right combination of energy density, it has good enough cycle life, which means that it has a fairly good battery life, it has great power density, it's able to charge in a reasonable amount of time, you know, all of these different factors. There are certainly some safety issues, but they're pretty safe. All of the other different kinds of battery chemistries out there, they have various strengths and weaknesses, but they're really unable to compete on all of those fronts for a vehicle application. You have these various different grid alternatives like flow batteries, some of which use vanadium or zinc. Those are really big and heavy; they are not light enough, simply, for a vehicle application. Lead acid batteries – you replace your lead acid battery every few years or so in your car. It doesn't have a great cycle life; it certainly doesn't have a strong enough energy density in order to fully electrify a car with a reasonable all electric range. There's really just no competition with lithium ion batteries for mobility applications.David Roberts Does that have something to do with lithium itself, just as a material? I mean, is lithium itself the secret sauce?Chloe Holzinger In some ways, yeah. If you'd whip out your handy dandy periodic table that I know everybody carries around with them, lithium is towards the top [left] of the periodic table, which means that it's one of the lightest elements.David Roberts So it's top left, I'm checking here. It looks like it's the [third] lightest material. Chloe Holzinger It is, and right below lithium should be sodium. I haven't completely disappointed my chemistry teachers. Even if you go to that one row below lithium, that's a much bigger atom, and that bigger atom means that the energy density of that battery system is going to be smaller: you're going to have less ion exchange per kilogram of material. So the lightness of the lithium atom or element or ion is definitely a part of what makes lithium ion batteries superior to so many other different battery technologies. There are a few other different arguments here–there are some batteries that are multi-valence, in that they exchange a couple electrons instead of one electron, but those are still extremely early on in their development.David Roberts Well, let's talk about the lithium ion battery market then. So you said, they sort of grew and completely ate consumer electronics, and then have jumped up and basically now dominate EV's, I think. So what's the sort of lay of the land on lithium ion – where they're being used, what's driving all of this development and innovation?Chloe Holzinger It's really the electric mobility space. Lithium ion batteries today are definitely good enough for an all electric vehicle, as we're clearly seeing. There are a few different factors that are driving further innovation in this area. So first is that automakers really want to be able to rely on this lithium ion battery value chain for the long term. There are a variety of different questions; whether or not they're valid is another point, but there are a lot of doubts about whether or not various key metals are able to scale up their production to meet some of these astronomical projections that automakers have around electric vehicles. Some of the crucial ones are nickel, cobalt, and lithium. There's a lot of innovation right now around developing technologies that are more robust against some of those fluctuations in key metals’ supply, demand, and pricing.David Roberts I know they're expected to grow; every chart you see has the line shooting up into the right. But in terms of scale, compared to current nickel or cobalt demand for batteries, are we looking down the road at 2x, 10x, or 100x? When people are daunted about the scale of these metals, what do we mean by scale exactly? What are these projections?Chloe Holzinger I think right now, for scale, all electric vehicles are 2 to 3% of annual new car sales. Automakers are saying that they're going to go all electric by 2035 or something, and California wants to ban ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles by 2050.David Roberts Washington actually just said no new ICE vehicles sold after 2030.Chloe Holzinger Yeah, I mean, that's even more aggressive. And so to even meet that kind of target, you're talking some pretty dramatic scale ups of these upstream industries. In the lithium industry, lithium ion batteries were something about 30% of the total lithium market before electric vehicles took off, when it was really just consumer electronics. Today, 65%-67% of all lithium products go into lithium ion batteries, with the remainder being like glass and pharmaceuticals and all of these other kinds of niche applications. The lithium industry is really being driven by the lithium ion battery market. The nickel and cobalt industries are a bit different. But that's just [?????]David Roberts Is this driving prices up? I mean, with all this new demand for lithium, has price become a problem yet, just for the raw material?Chloe Holzinger No, not for any of the raw materials really. But right now, cobalt is really both the most expensive battery raw material, and the most well known to be sustainably problematic, whether you're talking about the human rights issues or the mines themselves. There's been a lot of coverage on the issues with cobalt mining.So there's been this effort over the past several years to move away from cobalt, because of these primarily price and sustainability reasons, but also because there are simply better technologies out there than some of these high cobalt chemistries. There are a ton of different battery chemistries and a ton of different lithium ion battery chemistries. And there are strong advantages to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt on the energy density front, on the cycle life front for some chemistries; there's just a wide diversity of chemistries out there that really make it possible for automakers to pick and choose what types of lithium ion batteries they really want to use for which models.David Roberts Let's get into some of those variations and I'm curious about the sort of variations in chemistry and also sort of like what performance sort of advantages and disadvantages come with us with these different chemistries. So, the two sort of dominant chemistries, right now, or what have been for a while are NMC and NCA. NMC has nickel, manganese, and cobalt with its lithium, and NCA has got cobalt and aluminum. Both those notably involve cobalt. I know there's been some effort just within those categories to sort of change the proportions and shrink cobalt. Who's doing that, and what does that involve? What do you lose by losing cobalt, and what do you need to compensate?Chloe Holzinger Pretty much everybody's working to reduce the amount of cobalt in these batteries. The NCA technology is really almost exclusive to Panasonic and Tesla, and they're currently really the only NCA mass producers. So NCA batteries are therefore used predominantly by Tesla for its electric vehicles, and they're not used at all in grid energy storage systems.David Roberts And that's because they're extremely high energy density right? Is it something to do with the aluminum?Chloe Holzinger Yes, they are very high energy density, and the Tesla Giga factories have been struggling to keep up with Tesla demand for a few years now. So even if there was demand for NCA batteries and energy storage systems, there just isn't supply for that. For Tesla in the NCA chemistry, they've been able to reduce the amount of cobalt in their batteries from 20% to 10% now. So they've been able to significantly reduce the amount of cobalt in those systems. For NMC, you know, this is the most commonly used cathode formulation in lithium ion batteries today. And as you noted, there are many, many different NMC formulations with varying ratios of those key nickel, manganese and cobalt components. This is where, to your question, it gets very interesting, in terms of varying the amount of cobalt. The early versions of NMC had equal amounts of nickel to manganese, cobalt, or NMC111. And the technolog…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected