Volts community thread #15

Open to all free & paid subscribers.

David’s Notes

1. 📫 Leave your mailbag questions below! There’s a lot of stuff to talk about. (All you paid subscribers, don’t forget to check out January’s mailbag — and thanks for your feedback on the clips episode experiment. Stay tuned on that.)

2. 🛣️ Canary Media is throwing a shindig in Chicago on March 27th and I’ll be joining them to interview Rep. Sean Casten on stage about [waves hands] all of this. These events are always a hoot — I love meeting subscribers and fellow energy nerds. As always, we’ve set aside a handful of free tickets for paid subscribers: register your interest here. You’ll probably get a ticket if you register, unless demand is nuts, in which case winners will be chosen at random.

Paid tickets are also available to anyone & everyone here.

3. ✏️ In last month's mailbag, I discussed the idea of making introductory content for Volts. I’m probably not going to do that, but I should have mentioned that Volts subscriber (and philosophy professor) Jeffrey Seidman has developed a wonderful set of gateway pages for people who are looking for digestible introductions to these topics. There’s a section on climate solutions and a section on climate careers, designed for students (but anyone, really) looking to wrap their heads around what needs to be done and how they can contribute. Plus there are tons of links to Volts pods throughout. Great place to send people looking to get started.

4. 💎 My recent conversation with Fervo’s Tim Latimer featured some talk about diamond drill bits and it got me wondering what diamond drill bits actually look like. They are, sadly, not particularly bedazzled:

Still, drilling with diamonds is pretty cool. If you want to read about drill bit learning curves — and you know you do — check out this new piece on the evolution of polycrystalline diamond drilling from Construction Physics:

What Learning by Doing Looks Like

5. ✅ Community comment of the month: Craig chimes in with some skepticism regarding a claim on the recent pumped hydro episode:

I believe Erik’s statement that pumped hydro accounts for 90% of grid storage might be based on out of date data, as battery storage has grown dramatically over the last four years. A May 2024 article on “RenewEconomy” website titled “Battery storage is about to overtake global capacity of pumped hydro” indicates that on a global basis pumped hydro made up 90% of grid storage in 2020, but by 2023 it was down to 68% and expected to end 2024 at 56% and that battery storage would surpass pumped hydro in 2025.

I lost another wallet & ID to this little monster.

Monthly Thread — How It Works

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

• EVERYTHING ELSE: Discuss David’s Notes or anything else climate-related

• MAILBAG QUESTIONS: Ask a question for this month’s mailbag episode (anyone can ask a question but mailbags are a paid-sub-only perk). Volts has a form for those who are shy, but David prioritizes questions posted in this thread.

🚨 To keep organized, please only “REPLY” directly under one of Sam’s headline comments. Anything inappropriate, spammy, etc may be deleted. Be nice! Check out our Community Guidelines.