Volts

In this episode: more heat pumps! Jane Melia, co-founder and CEO of Harvest, discusses the advantages of teaming a high-end eat pump with a large thermal battery, to coordinate the timing of electric…

New York City was on the cusp of (finally) implementing a congestion pricing program when Governor Kathy Hochul announced earlier this month that it would be “indefinitely delayed.” In this episode, …

In this episode, CEO Kyle Clark of BETA Technologies walks us through the details of how to design, build, and operate electric planes — first for relatively short light-cargo flights, but eventually…

In this episode, recorded at a live event, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee discusses his multiple decades of climate advocacy, his political successes, and the upcoming threat to one of his crow…

In his book The Price Is Wrong, Brett Christophers argues that, contrary to recent economic triumphalism among renewables advocates, wind and solar are not profitable enough to attract the private ca…

In this episode, I have a lively conversation with Alp Kucukelbir, co-author of a recent “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap,” about the strengths and limits of AI in relat…

More than half a billion people on the African continent lack access to electricity, and the number is only growing. In this episode, Tombo Banda of CrossBoundary’s Mini-Grid Innovation Lab discusses…

Steel production generates almost 10 percent of global carbon emissions and has long been considered “hard to abate.” Enter Boston Metal, a startup that aims to make carbon-free steel using only (sin…

In this episode, Rob Gramlich of Grid Strategies comes back on the pod to discuss the suddenly sizzling transmission world, where both President Biden and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hav…

Which political races should climate advocates focus on to get the most bang for their buck? (Hint: not the presidency.) In this episode, executive director Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet explain…

In this episode, I talk with CEO Paul Lambert of startup Quilt, which came out of stealth this week with heat pumps that are not ugly. They perform well too, and are easy to buy and install, but most…

In this episode, California electricity guru Lorenzo Kristov shares his vision of a just, democratic, “bottom-up” grid based in distributed local energy.

Climate awareness is growing in the real world, but it remains rare in popular entertainment, as illustrated by some new research on climate in film. In this episode, Anna Jane Joyner discusses the e…

In this episode, Grace Van Horn and Jonas Monast of the Center for Applied Environmental Law and Policy do a deep analysis on the EPA’s recently finalized carbon pollution standards for power plants.

In this episode, longtime clean-energy analyst Michael Liebreich assesses five causes for pessimism about the net-zero transition, alongside five causes for optimism.

In this episode, Joselyn Lai of Bedrock Energy describes hardware and software improvements that enable geothermal heat pumps to be installed more quickly and less expensively, even in large commerci…

What’s the best way to handle rising US electricity demand? Contrary to what some large utilities and regulators think, it’s not building new fossil gas plants. In this episode, Eric Gimon and Michel…

The Inflation Reduction Act made it much easier for companies to sell clean energy tax credits that they cannot make use of themselves. In this episode, CEO Alfred Johnson of Crux Climate explains ho…

Is China on track to reduce its carbon emissions? If so, why is it building so much coal power? In this episode, researcher Lauri Myllyvirta brings data to bear on China’s recent decarbonization effo…

In this episode, I speak with Maxine Bédat, a former fashion startup CEO and founder of the nonprofit New Standards Institute. We talk about the source of the fashion industry's emissions, what can b…