Volts

PJM is the largest wholesale power market and transmission planning region in the US. Currently, it is stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one side, rising demand from data centers; on the other, a choked and congested interconnection queue that can’t keep pace. The result: rising prices and political discontent. I talk with Clara Summers of the Citizens Utility Board about how PJM can solve this dilemma and get prices under control.


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Meat is responsible for roughly a fifth of climate change, the lion’s share of deforestation, 70% of our antibiotic use, and quite possibly the next pandemic — and consumption is going up every single year, with no end in sight. In this episode, Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute joins me to argue that the only way out of this mess is better meat: plant-based and cultivated alternatives that can compete on price and taste, the way renewables now compete with fossil fuels.


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Utilities and their regulators are often protected by a "force field of tedium," but in this episode, I pierce the veil to discuss the complex machinery of utility profit-making. I’m joined by Joe Daniel of RMI to unpack the critical distinction between "return on equity" and "cost of equity," and why the former is almost always higher than necessary. We discuss how regulators can close this gap to lower consumer costs without hindering essential grid upgrades.


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In this episode, I chat with Dr. Sarah Kapnick about the core of climate science and the wild variables that have emerged in the last decade. We discuss the “accidental geoengineering” experiment of reducing shipping aerosols, the newfound ability to pinpoint methane leaks from space, and the legal implications of being able to attribute financial losses to climate change.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe