Volts

On this episode, recorded live at Climate Week NYC, I talk with Matt Traldi. He’s the founder and CEO of Greenlight America, which finds the local meetings where clean energy’s fate is being decided and recruits supporters to attend. Traldi argues that siting and permitting approvals turn on who shows up, and that local partners, conservative groups included, outperform outside advocates. We discuss how to measure impact, recent wins and losses, blue-state resistance, data center backlash, and Greenlight’s growth.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:09 – What Greenlight does and why Matt started it

04:41 – How Greenlight finds the decisions that matter

07:27 – Growth, and the tax credit deadline sprint

13:38 – Who shows up to local hearings

19:39 – Winning in conservative communities

22:35 – Bodies in the room, measuring impact, and win rates

27:46 – Losses, wins, and “there is no bag”

32:44 – Blue-state obstacles and organized opposition

36:31 – When data center backlash spills over onto clean energy

42:31 – Which projects Greenlight won’t back

45:38 – Lessons from housing and growing an organization

50:17 – Audience Q&A: disinformation and state permitting reform

54:39 – Audience Q&A: developers and elections

59:30 – Audience Q&A: funding local groups and designing community input

The proposed bipartisan federal permitting bill is 417 pages filled with extremely consequential provisions that have left the climate community some mix of excited, infuriated, and confused. In an attempt to bring some clarity, I asked Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures, a veteran of Senate permitting fights, to walk through what’s in it. We cover the blockbuster transmission reforms, the rule making data centers pay more than their share of grid costs, the wins for geothermal, and the fossil carve-outs. Then we get into NEPA reforms that render the act toothless, limits on state water permits, and the permit-certainty sections that have lawyers worried about “forever permits.” And finally: whether it restrains Trump, why Democrats shouldn’t wait for a better deal, what the modeling says about emissions impacts, and Daniel’s odds of passage. This is a long one, folks. Buckle up.

Chapters:

00:00 – Intro: the bipartisan permitting bill

04:15 – Why permitting reform matters

12:23 – Agency staffing and capacity

16:59 – Past permitting attempts

20:26 – Transmission 1: planning and federal backstop

28:28 – Transmission 2: who pays and grid upgrades

38:17 – Data centers 1: paying more for grid access

43:20 – Distributed energy and geothermal

49:06 – Oil, gas, and mining provisions

57:06 – Data centers 2: will they go off-grid?

1:00:19 – NEPA 1: courts can’t halt projects

1:08:57 – NEPA 2: the main objections

1:17:10 – State water permits

1:23:35 – Endangered species

1:27:37 – Permit certainty 1: limits on revoking permits

1:36:43 – Permit certainty 2: lawsuits and damages

1:48:12 – Politics 1: Trump’s wind blockades

1:52:57 – Politics 2: why not wait for a better deal?

1:58:33 – Politics 3: elections, courts, and modeling

2:10:57 – Politics 4: next steps and odds of passage

On September 14, I sat down with Leah Stokes in front of a live audience at Seattle’s Town Hall to talk about her new book, The Carbon Wave. It’s an insider account of how the Inflation Reduction Act got made, braided with the story of the high-risk twin pregnancy she went through while helping to make it. We get into why electrification is the heart of decarbonization, the enduring mystery of what’s going on in Joe Manchin’s head, what it means to trade your carbon footprint for a carbon wave, and how much of the IRA survives. It was followed by questions from the audience.

Chapters:

00:00 – Welcome and housekeeping

03:05 – The twins, the NICU, and writing the book

08:51 – Carbon footprint vs. carbon wave

13:39 – Sam Ricketts and 100% clean electricity

18:13 – Why electricity is the core of the solution

23:28 – Utilities and the politics of change

26:18 – Tech companies and data centers

29:11 – Inside the Manchin negotiations

33:57 – Why Manchin got to yes

38:46 – Trump, setbacks, and where things stand

42:55 – Clean energy politics and the global shift

46:25 – Audience Q&A: the transmission gridlock

48:59 – Institutions, speed, and structural reform

53:27 – If Democrats win the House, what next

55:43 – Permitting reform

59:06 – State utilities, coal, and getting involved

Volts published seven conversations in September, which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We’ve rounded up the highlights into less than an hour. Enjoy!

Heat pump water heaters use a fraction of the energy of conventional electric resistance heaters — which use more electricity in a year than an EV — but they're only 2 percent of the market, mainly because they tend to cost more, be slow and loud, and require a plumber and an electrician. Reservoir is a Boston company trying to fix all that, with a smarter, quieter machine and its own plumbers. I talk with CEO Luke Winston-Almanzar about how it works, what it costs, and its potential role in demand response programs.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

03:06 – Why water heaters

06:34 – How gas, resistance, and heat pump water heaters work

09:33 – Size and slow recovery: predictive heating and party mode

15:31 – Installation and vertical integration

22:19 – Cutting electric resistance backup

20:31 – What Reservoir builds and what it sources

23:41 – Tankless gas, virtual capacity, and the booster heater

27:11 – Recirculation, freeze protection, leak detection, and Legionella

32:03 – What it costs and what it saves

36:01 – Placement: small rooms, basements, and cold climates

42:37 – Noise and durability

48:19 – Demand response and virtual power plants

53:22 – A. O. Smith’s CO2 split system and Reservoir’s moat

55:54 – Policy headwinds after the IRA

59:29 – What’s next for Reservoir

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

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

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

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

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