Volts

1. 🇩🇰 As promised in last month’s note, I flew straight from Climate Week NYC — where I found the sideline conversations quite doomy — to Denmark, where I was immersed in thoughtful, cooperative, successful green infrastructure. It was a balm. I was on an “Industrial Symbiosis” tour — you can read about it and see the itinerary here. There were many highlights: Copenhagen itself, of course, which is just as dreamy as everyone says — probably my favorite city I’ve ever visited.

The proposed bipartisan federal permitting bill is 417 pages filled with extremely consequential provisions that have left the climate community some mix of excited, infuriated, and confused. In an attempt to bring some clarity, I asked Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures, a veteran of Senate permitting fights, to walk through what’s in it.

On September 14, I sat down with Leah Stokes in front of a live audience at Seattle’s Town Hall to talk about her new book, The Carbon Wave. It’s an insider account of how the Inflation Reduction Act got made, braided with the story of the high-risk twin pregnancy she went through while helping to make it.

Volts published seven conversations in September, which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We’ve rounded up the highlights into less than an hour. Enjoy! 📌 Instructions to add paid episodes to your preferred podcast app via mobile / desktop I am in a hotel room in Aarhus, Denmark, just about to go to bed, but I wanted to get this out to you, so pardon the sound quality.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:04:52 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Heat pump water heaters use a fraction of the energy of conventional electric resistance heaters — which use more electricity in a year than an EV — but they're only 2 percent of the market, mainly because they tend to cost more, be slow and loud, and require a plumber and an electrician.

Home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall are nice, but what about people who can’t afford them, or renters who aren’t allowed to install them, or people who just don’t want the hassle of dealing with a permit and an electrician? A company called Pila is selling small (1.6 kWh) batteries that simply plug into a normal electrical socket.

❓ This month's question: what should David ask the Danes? 1. 📚 Last Monday I sat down with Leah Stokes at Town Hall Seattle to talk about The Carbon Wave, her book about the fight for the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s a fantastic read, even for someone like me who tracked most of the ups and downs. It fills in the details and even more so weaves in personal stories that are genuinely gripping.

Back in 2011, I wrote that fossil fuel interests had a much better media game than clean energy. My example was Frank Maisano, a media relations guy for coal utilities and the natural gas industry. Thirty years on, he’s still at it — still writing his newsletter, still connecting reporters to sources, still better at it than anyone on the clean side (sigh).

Verrus is building data centers designed to address every objection the public has raised: they use batteries instead of diesel generators, which makes them grid assets that help hold down power prices; they use closed-loop cooling, which uses a tiny fraction of the water; their equipment is quieter; and as a bonus, they squeeze more servers into the same grid connection. Yet both of Verrus’s proposed sites, in Michigan and Oregon, are mired in fierce local opposition.

Jane Flegal has worked inside philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, industrial emissions policy at the Biden White House, and carbon-removal market development at Frontier; she's now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, writing some of the smartest climate policy analysis around.