Volts Community Thread #04
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 a question for March’s Mailbag (anyone can ask a question but mailbag episodes are a paid-sub-only perk). We request that you ask questions via these community threads. Volts has a form for those who are shy, but David prioritizes questions posted in the community threads.
🚨 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. Volts’ second mailbag episode dropped last week! I answer subscriber questions on plug-in hybrids vs EVs, India’s impact on decarbonization, my federal government dream job, Ezra Klein’s recent Biden take, and more.
2. I’m polishing off the finishing touches to Volts: Jumpstart. It’s a cross between a “Best Of” list and a “Start Here” list. If you want to catch up on, say, electricity transmission, I’ve collected all the best episodes in one place. Sam has also painstakingly “tagged” every single episode by topic. You’ll now be able to search by these tags via Volts: Jumpstart.
Hoping to send Jumpstart out in the next few weeks.
3. As expected, many of you are skeptical of Jigar Shah’s takes in our recent nuclear episode. Ryan S. commented:
Your guest shot right over the underlying assumptions that all his models were based on, those assumptions are absolutely critical to how arguments are made. It’s assumes demand, and a stable political environment. What he doesn’t even touch on are nuclear non-proliferation issues and potential terrorism or intentional damage to plants by MAGA Republicans. It also assumes a reasonable intact political structure that looks similar as today. All of that is very much in question right now and nuclear for better or worse has all kinds of problems associated with it.
F Selker wrote:
Great podcast but he brings a Panglossian view. He glossed over waste and terrible history of costs - in WA alone you may recall "WPPS" and the Trojan plant that closed prematurely at great cost. The "we need everything" view is questionable - we need what makes sense with current technology and economics. You made a great point about lack of intermittency and his response made no sense: if flexible demand (e.g., hydrogen production) can soak it up and deliver it later, the same would work for solar and wind. Finally, I don't believe big tech's (or bitcoin miners) desire for steady power is a public problem: It makes no sense to subsidize generation or take risks for them- they can solve that themselves, with public constraints making sure it's clean.
And Patty D. wrote:
Nuclear is a huge distraction from the faster and cheaper clean energy solutions that we should be focusing on. Want proof? Georgia’s Plant Vogtle has been under construction for 15 years and is still not done. It’s $11.1 B for 1,024 megawatts- an insane ratepayer ripoff that should be criminalized. Jigar danced around the truth of that, claiming that lessons learned will make the next one(s) faster and cheaper. Nearly everything he said was false.
4. ✅ Community response of the month: One of my favorite parts of this job is the freedom to dig into woefully undercovered topics like building codes (requested by Jo D). And it gets even better when Volts listeners add more context.
Kjell A. (of the Washington State Building Code Council) reminds us:
One minor point is that codes were contentious long before 2019. Industry groups sued often, occasionally winning. The 2009 and especially 2012 versions were big wins for efficiency as well. Then the sad set of cycles with no marked improvement occurred. See graphic after some scrolling. https://www.swinter.com/party-walls/2024-iecc-residential-code-requirements/
5. My family recently adopted Abner, the world’s cutest puppy. The newsletter update announcing this development quickly became one of the most popular posts in Volts history.
Should Volts move to a 50/50 energy/puppy ratio?
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--- SHARE WORK, ASK FOR HELP, FIND COLLABORATORS ---