Volts Community Thread #02

Open to all free & paid subscribers

This is your monthly opportunity to share! Use the comments section in this community thread to:

• CLIMATE JOBS & OPPORTUNITIES: Share climate jobs/opportunities

• SHARE WORK, ASK FOR HELP, FIND COLLABORATORS: Share your climate-related work, ask for help, or find collaborators

• CLIMATE EVENTS & MEETUPS: Share climate-related events and meetups

• DAVID'S NOTES: Discuss David’s Notes

• EVERYTHING ELSE: Discuss anything else climate-related

• MAILBAG QUESTIONS: Ask questions for the next Mailbag, in January We’ve got all we can handle this month (mailbag episodes are a paid-sub-only perk)

🚨 To keep organized, please only “REPLY” directly under one of Sam’s headline comments, which are in all caps. Anything not posted as a “REPLY” under a category may be deleted, as will anything inappropriate, spammy, etc. Be nice! Check out our Community Guidelines.

---

David’s Notes:

1. 🎉 Big update: Full transcript texts are now included in an episode’s newsletter! We typically publish a podcast immediately after editing, so putting together a human-vetted transcript in a day is a miracle. Props to the Volts team 👏

2. Sam here — the 1st mailbag episode comes at the end of the month! Y’all ask amazing questions; David especially appreciates the more light-hearted ones. However, there are far too many to answer in a 30-60min mailbag podcast.

This is one of the reasons why we started the monthly Community Thread. Our community is full of incredible people. Our hope is that these comments sections further develop into places where Volts listeners share knowledge rather than just ask David questions. So, if you see a question that you think you know the answer to, give it a shot! We’re going to start rewarding great responses with paid subscriptions to give to friends, and maybe some other goodies.

3. ✅ Speaking of great answers, in our last thread, Sean asked “why don’t lithium ion-batteries don't work for longer duration storage?” and Kelly answered:

There was a great podcast (a couple weeks ago I think) on Catalyst with Shayle Kann where he interviewed the CEO of Form Energy about this very question. Essentially, Form's iron-air chemistry is way cheaper on a per-kWh (energy) basis, although it's more expensive on per-kW (power) basis. So you can have a 1 kW, 100 kWh battery with Form Energy. At a cost of $20/kWh, that's $2,000. If you wanted to get, say, 10 kW of power, you would also have to scale up the battery to 1,000 kWh (total cost $20,000). Whereas you could just use a 10 kW/40 kWh Li-ion battery in that case if you really just needed the shorter duration. At a cost of ~$150/kWh for the Li-ion battery, that would be $6,000 - 70% cheaper.

4. Volts now has Community Guidelines! Our goal is to ensure that the community is respectful, safe and engaging. The guidelines can be summed up rather easily: “Be nice… or else!” The document describes what happens to comments and subscribers who are not nice. Also, we understand that not everyone is comfortable posting in the comments section. A simple solution outlined in our guidelines is to change your Substack profile name to whatever the heck you want. Or you can create a second, anonymous profile. Let us know what you think!