Volts

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Do small residential batteries make sense? Sep 23, 2026

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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

Home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall are nice, but what about people who can’t afford them, or renters who aren’t allowed to install them, or people who just don’t want the hassle of dealing with a permit and an electrician? A company called Pila is selling small (1.6 kWh) batteries that simply plug into a normal electrical socket. They can serve as backup for a refrigerator or other appliance in the event of a blackout, but they can also “mesh” with one another to form a network, pair with rooftop solar, or participate in VPP programs. CEO Cole Ashman explains the value proposition.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:26 Lessons from Powerwall and Span

05:33 What Pila is and how it works

07:14 How long a fridge runs on one battery

09:28 Fire risk, LFP chemistry, and New York City

16:02 Why the price went up, and cost per kilowatt hour

19:55 Who is actually buying Pila

23:00 Financing models and free batteries

27:04 Do the bill savings add up?

32:05 Why utilities want small batteries in VPPs

36:58 Pilots with Holy Cross Energy and Brooklyn SolarWorks

41:09 Solar pairing and the Pila mesh network

47:14 Camping batteries and built-in storage

54:19 Utilities and visibility at the grid edge

55:58 Bidirectional outlets and the next five years

1:00:10 Clean energy as invisible infrastructure

How energy politics work inside DC Sep 18, 2026

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.volts.wtf

Back in 2011, I wrote that fossil fuel interests had a much better media game than clean energy. My example was Frank Maisano, a media relations guy for coal utilities and the natural gas industry. Thirty years on, he’s still at it — still writing his newsletter, still connecting reporters to sources, still better at it than anyone on the clean side (sigh). So I’m finally talking to him about it: clean energy trade groups nobody in Washington fears, Trump’s daft efforts to kill renewables, the PAC picking off dirty-energy Republicans, permitting and data center fights, and the climate denial shop he worked for in the ‘90s. Spoiler: he regrets nothing.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:46 – What a DC media strategist actually does

09:50 – Republicans, Trump, and a narrow House majority

15:29 – Why tax cuts beat energy in the OBBBA fight

18:54 – Competing with China on AI without the electric stack

21:15 – Paying $4 billion to hand back offshore wind leases

28:07 – Red-state wind and the orders keeping coal plants open

32:52 – Clean energy trade groups and the building trades

38:41 – Gas as a bridge, and what longer term means

44:55 – Whether a half-gas trade group can serve clean energy

48:43 – A coherent clean vision against an incoherent coalition

51:14 – Do the green groups still scare anyone

55:18 – Permitting reform and the Whitehouse-Capito path

59:46 – Data centers, animal spirits, and the midterms

1:06:48 – The revenge PAC, and whether it is working

1:12:31 – Congress, the courts, and what Democrats could do

1:18:53 – COP, climate change, and the client he would turn down

How to build a more flexible, quieter, less obnoxious data center Sep 16, 2026

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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

Verrus is building data centers designed to address every objection the public has raised: they use batteries instead of diesel generators, which makes them grid assets that help hold down power prices; they use closed-loop cooling, which uses a tiny fraction of the water; their equipment is quieter; and as a bonus, they squeeze more servers into the same grid connection. Yet both of Verrus’s proposed sites, in Michigan and Oregon, are mired in fierce local opposition. In this episode, CEO Nelson Abramson walks through the engineering — and the politics that the engineering hasn’t quite solved.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:43 – Three decades in data centers

05:05 – What a Verrus data center looks like

07:39 – The medium voltage power plane

12:13 – UPS batteries vs. the big LFP battery

17:27 – Priority aware capping and provisioned utility capacity

22:31 – Why not buy the pieces off the shelf?

25:42 – Duration: what happens when four hours runs out

34:28 – Diesel backup and what customers ask for

37:15 – How flexible is compute, really?

42:37 – Noise, fans, and the sound studies

48:42 – Water use and the 12 million gallon question

52:19 – Industrial land and by-right zoning

56:07 – Public opposition, recall petitions, and community benefits

1:00:07 – Oregon, Salem, and the moratorium

1:03:56 – Ride-through, NERC, and losing the moat

1:07:11 – What V2 looks like

Building a big, abundant, clean grid Sep 11, 2026

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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

Jane Flegal has worked inside philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, industrial emissions policy at the Biden White House, and carbon-removal market development at Frontier; she's now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, writing some of the smartest climate policy analysis around. We cover a lot of ground: industrial policy versus market approaches, what the IRA got right and wrong, philanthropy's proper role, data centers and the case for an infrastructure fund, and behind-the-meter gas, among other things. This is a long one, and spicy!

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:11 – Flegal's thesis: building a clean grid fast enough to power growth

06:29 – Why she rejects degrowth

09:27 – The Roosevelt essay: climate as more than a market failure

13:30 – Why clean energy underuses its political muscle

15:24 – Industrial policy and the green spiral theory of change

20:40 – Was IRA the right approach?

22:12 – Lily Bermel's paper and the fight over what survived

23:21 – What she would have done differently under IRA

30:11 – Philanthropy, Silicon Valley, and what government is for

33:29 – The epistemic crisis inside environmental NGOs

39:09 – The abundance movement and what each faction misses

44:16 – What establishment Democrats get wrong on climate

46:06 – Why issue polling misleads

50:34 – Republicans and the Cold War analogy

52:47 – Data centers and the American Grid Infrastructure Fund

59:13 – Affordability politics and who pays for the grid

1:08:14 – Emissions, behind-the-meter gas, and flexible load

1:13:57 – The clean firm debate: storage plus transmission?

1:20:14 – Capacity markets, ERCOT, and the case for planning

1:24:32 – Utility incentives, public power, and affordability fixes

1:35:55 – Permitting reform and the land footprint asymmetry

1:41:05 – NEPA reform and the political window

1:48:21 – Where fresh policy thinking comes from

Is there way more conventional geothermal than we thought? Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

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

Zanskar argues that the US is badly underestimating its conventional geothermal resources — that there are far more undiscovered hydrothermal systems, and that each one can produce far more power, than people think. They think AI can help find those resources, and they have drilled three sites to back it up, including a “blind” discovery in Nevada with no surface signs and no prior exploratory wells. If they're right, terawatts of firm, carbon-free power are reachable with off-the-shelf drilling technology. Co-founders Carl Hoiland and Joel Edwards make the case.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:29 – Heat, permeability, and how resources have been found

04:49 – Why conventional geothermal stalled, and why the estimate is stale

09:22 – Applying AI to old exploration data

11:10 – The data Zanskar works with

13:09 – Models, field testing, and the feedback loop

15:02 – How much more resource is really out there

20:22 – Lightning Dock: reviving a written-off field

22:14 – What has changed in drilling technology

28:37 – Pumpernickel and the permeability question

31:08 – Natural permeability vs. enhanced geothermal

34:21 – Big Blind, the first blind discovery in 30 years

37:09 – Improving the models to keep getting better

40:51 – Financing exploration: the development capital facility

44:38 – The NV Energy PPA and data center demand

47:42 – The skeptical case and geographic limits

54:20 – Policy dependence and public lands

58:11 – What's next for Zanskar

Best of August 2026 Sep 04, 2026

Show notes

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.volts.wtf

Volts published eight conversations in August — with two Idaho state legislators, a grid cybersecurity expert, the architect of Uruguay's energy transition, an EV charging exec, and more — which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We've rounded up the highlights into a single hour. Enjoy!

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and how the best-of series works

01:59 – Saleem Chapman on why every market design fails ratepayers the same way

07:51 – Patrick Miller on Chinese inverters and commodity boards

12:22 – Ben Toews and Megan Egbert on how Idaho's housing bills happened

18:34 – Seth Cutler on why an IONNA site is technically a bakery

22:52 – Ramón Méndez Galain on getting every Uruguayan party to sign one plan

28:00 – Quinn Nakayama on why a utility would adopt something that saves money

34:16 – Varun Sivaram on workload tiers and who pays when flexing goes wrong

38:44 – Todd Tucker on the Defense Production Act precedent

44:20 – Closing note and what to send in

How to respond to disinformation about clean energy, at scale Sep 02, 2026

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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

Disinformation about clean energy is showing up everywhere — online after every blackout, at county commission meetings about siting new projects, in regulatory dockets stuffed with fake comments. GoodPower, which combines a C3 education arm with a C4 advocacy arm, is trying to fight back with a network of thousands of content creators, rapid-response campaigns around storms and grid failures, and an AI tool that detects manufactured public comments. I talk with CEO Leah Qusba about what they've tried, what they've measured, and what actually works.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:06 – What the disinformation claims, and who spreads it

05:57 – From Action for the Climate Emergency to GoodPower

08:38 – Building a creator network in non-political verticals

14:17 – Competing with talk radio and Fox News

18:26 – Winter Storm Fern and the rapid response system

23:26 – Measuring whether a deployment actually worked

27:24 – Pre-bunking and the 80-county experiment

33:18 – Getting people off the couch and into the room

38:10 – AI agents and where human judgment sits

42:05 – Keeping the C3 and the C4 distinct

47:13 – Battery fires, Moss Landing, and talking to fire chiefs

50:54 – TrueVoice and manufactured public comment

56:13 – Whether AI will overwhelm the comment process

58:11 – The best messages that actually land

1:04:22 – Super PACs, budgets, and what comes next

Could we use Trump's tricks to make good green policy? Aug 28, 2026

Show notes

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

Even as he has torn down climate policy, Donald Trump has normalized the use of more powerful & aggressive tools of economic statecraft, like equity stakes in private companies, new federal authorities, and sovereign wealth funds. The Roosevelt Institute recently issued a collection of 17 essays exploring how a future administration could use the tools Trump has assembled for decarbonization. I talk with Todd Tucker, editor of and contributor to the volume, about these new industrial planning tools.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:32 – Did Biden's green policy prove durable?

09:39 – The Defense Production Act and the Sable pipeline

14:59 – Whether to leave the DPA on the table

15:35 – Executive orders and the durability problem

19:01 – Whether the Supreme Court treats Democrats differently

22:03 – Executive power and a disempowered Congress

25:05 – Senate malapportionment and filibuster reform

29:43 – Court reform and the major questions doctrine

34:13 – Manufacturing vs. deployment

42:52 – Permitting, abundance, and theory of power

49:20 – Public ownership and the U.S. Steel golden share

55:22 – What state capitalism could look like for green ends

59:56 – Shelley Welton on utilities as planning tools

1:02:42 – Speed vs. deliberation before 2029

Making data centers flexible so they can serve the grid rather than stress it out Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

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

Typically, AI data centers are large, inflexible loads that the grid has to build around, which is one reason utilities take so long to connect them. Emerald AI has designed a “digital brain” that can ramp down, move, or delay computing jobs in a data center on demand, making a data center a flexible asset to the grid. I talk with CEO Varun Sivaram about how the software works, what flexibility costs the compute, why it beats just installing batteries, whether utilities can enforce it, and what it would mean for clean energy.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:05 – Temporal, spatial, and resource flexibility

06:26 – What Emerald Conductor touches on site

08:35 – Who decides which workloads can flex

10:55 – Who is liable when a job slows down

13:45 – Who actually signs the contract

14:49 – Larger and faster grid connections

18:02 – Enforcing the flexibility promise

19:05 – What broke in the demos, from bad nodes to slow telemetry

26:41 – What flexing costs the compute jobs

29:21 – Why not just use batteries, and the demand merit order

35:44 – Training, inference, and substation-scale data centers

40:23 – PJM, ERCOT, and legal enforceability

44:50 – Renewables, gas, and consumer bills

Why can't utilities innovate? Aug 21, 2026

Show notes

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

When it comes to innovative new grid technologies, every utility wants to be the third in line to try them. None of them want to be the first to take risks and iron out new processes. That's one reason grid-enhancing technologies, better software, and smarter internal procedures stay stuck in pilot purgatory, even as the industry faces the biggest buildout since rural electrification. PG&E's Quinn Nakayama and Microsoft's Hanna Grene discuss what's actually blocking utility innovation — and Quinn offers a novel proposal for paying someone to go first.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:44 – Why grid-enhancing technologies stall in the US

07:54 – Selling grid software into utilities: what goes wrong

11:08 – From a pipes-and-wires company to a technology company

12:38 – Pilot program hell and the last 30 percent

15:04 – Innovation as a bolt-on, and the three muscles

17:47 – The digital spine, data quality, and smart meters

23:56 – Org chart versus work chart

25:09 – Strategy, structure, people, process, technology

29:24 – Build, buy, and the ecosystem skill set

36:15 – Data leakage, shadow AI, and paying twice