Volts

In 2021, a group of Scholars at Oxford University published a paper that made big waves in the energy world. It argued that key clean energy technologies — wind, solar, batteries, and electrolyzers —…

Volts was born on December 7, 2020. It recently turned two years old and I forgot to wish it a happy birthday. I also forgot to send out my once-a-year fundraising note.

However! Better late than neve…

In this episode, Florida Rep. Kathy Castor, chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, describes the committee’s ambitious goals and notable achievements over the past three years.

(PD…

To get a grasp on the current state of play in the lithium-ion battery recycling market, I contacted Yayoi Sekine, an analyst who works as head of energy storage at Bloomberg NEF. We talked about cur…

As production of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) scales up, costs will fall to the levels of the materials involved. The cheapest material that still works well to hold energy in LIBs is sulfur. Today I…

A little something different today on Volts: an interview with my favorite singer-songwriter, Cory Branan. His first album came out 20 years ago and his music has been interwoven into my life ever si…

The UK podcast Sustainababble has been around for eight years, but it is shutting down this year. Happily, it had me on as a guest before it turned out the lights -- we discussed the recent US midter…

David Fenton has just released a new book — The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator — that is a combination biography, photo journal, and accounting of lesso…

The Ukraine war has seen Germany's supply of methane gas from Russia cut off. Energy prices have spiked as it scrambles to make up the deficit. Some people have taken this to mean that Germany was wr…

Despite well-meaning pledges to the contrary from a wide array of countries, banks, and other institutions, new coal plants are still getting financed, putting global climate targets further out of r…

The transition to clean energy is going to radically increase demand for a key set of minerals, many of which are mined today in social & environmentally destructive ways. In recent years, attention …

When we look across the broad sweep of human history, what needs explaining is not times of rebellion and upheaval, but the much more common periods of unjust rule facing little resistance. Why do pe…

The massive coming surge of electric vehicles (EVs) could destabilize the grid -- or, if properly managed, become a crucial tool to maintain grid stability as more renewable energy comes online. The …

Emerging economies represent huge potential demand for distributed energy (solar power and microgrids) but to date the markets have been too fragmented to attract large-scale investment. A company ca…

I was recently a guest on My Climate Journey, a podcast that features various climate types discussing how they got where they are and how they currently think about the climate crisis. Host Jason Ja…

In this episode, lawyer and activist Ruth Santiago discusses Puerto Rico's latest electricity crisis, as the island struggles to restore power in the wake of Hurricane Fiona. In the wake of Hurricane…

Geothermal power has conventionally been viewed as a baseload, always-on resource, like nuclear. But new research suggests it could play a much more dynamic & valuable role on the grid than that -- a…

A newly published research paper out of Oxford suggests that a rapid energy transition will not "cost" anything -- it will save nearly a trillion dollars relative to the no-transition case. And the f…