Volts Podcast
1) Me, interviewed by Noah Smith
Economist Noah Smith runs the excellent substack Noahpinion, where he writes and podcasts about β¦ pretty much everything. Economics. Politics. The war. Housing. Technology. On and on. The guy is ludic...Show More
2) How inverters can stabilize a renewables-heavy grid
Today's electricity grids are kept stable by the inertia of spinning masses β mostly fossil fuel generators. But what happens when those spinning masses are replaced by inverter-based resources like w...Show More
3) What's the deal with sodium-ion batteries?
Lithium-ion dominates the battery world, but alternative chemistries are finding their niches. I talk with Landon Mossburg, CEO of Peak Energy, about using sodium-ion batteries for large-scale grid st...Show More
4) Climate philanthropy in a time of Trump
This week I talk with Dan Stein, whose organization Giving Green seeks to align climate philanthropy with the principles of effective altruism. But what does "effective" mean in the face of fossil fue...Show More
5) What does clean energy activism look like?
Movement veterans Bill McKibben and Jamie Henn have been thinking about where climate activism goes from here. They argue for a new focus on celebrating and accelerating the miraculous global boom in ...Show More
6) Trump's latest attempt to save coal
In this episode, I'm joined by Frank Rambo of the Horizon Climate Initiative to discuss "uneconomic dispatch" β the costly and polluting practice of running coal plants even when cheaper, cleaner opti...Show More
7) What the FEOC?
In this episode, I'm joined by Jake Higdon and Isabel Munilla, who helped develop the original "foreign entity of concern" (FEOC) standards for the Inflation Reduction Act, which sought to encourage d...Show More
8) A fireside chat with Jigar Shah
In this episode, recorded live back in May, I'm joined by the one and only Jigar Shah to discuss Washington state climate policy and post-IRA policy in general. Jigar argues that to build political du...Show More
9) US transit costs and how to tame them
I'm joined by Alon Levy of NYU's Transit Costs Project, whose work documents how expensive it is to build transit in the US relative to the rest of the world. We discuss how countries like Spain and I...Show More
10) Ann Arbor's experiment with a new kind of utility
Ann Arbor voted to create a parallel, municipal electric utility that offers only distributed renewables, and Missy Stults is the woman making it real. We explore the nuts and bolts: buying existing s...Show More