Volts

In December 2021, Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE), a Bay Area community choice aggregator (CCA), issued a white paper on the need for 24/7 clean energy, its rationale for pursuing 24/7 by 2025, and the steps it intended to take to get there. Earlier this month, it issued a follow-up white paper reporting on the tool it built to map out 24/7 and the lessons learned.I am fascinated by the practical challenges of getting to 24/7, so I’m excited to talk to Jan Pepper, CEO of Peninsula and lead author on the latest white paper, about why PCE is setting out to achieve 24/7, the main barriers, and the ways it may get easier in the future. 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

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 — are on learning curves which guarantee that, if they are deployed at the scale required to reach zero carbon, they will get extremely cheap.This is, as they say, big if true. In September, I had one of the lead authors, Doyne Farmer, on Volts to discuss the paper in-depth. He made a convincing case for the paper’s thesis, but when I asked him why these technologies were on learning curves and others weren't, he could only speculate.That's the question that's been on my mind ever since. Why are some clean-energy technologies getting rapidly cheaper while others aren't? What is it about particular technologies that make them amenable to learning curves?I cast that question to the academic gods, and lo, they returned with a paper, and that paper is what we’re here to discuss today. It’s called “Accelerating Low-Carbon Innovation,” by Abhishek Malhotra of the School of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, and Tobias Schmidt of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.It sets out to chart technologies against two basic axes: design complexity and need for customization. That creates a schema that can help illuminate why some technologies developed quicker than others.I don't want to say much more than that, since I have my Malhotra and Schmidt here with me to help explain. 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

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 never.If you have learned from or been entertained by my podcasts over the last year, if they have helped you become more useful, and if you are in a financial position to do so, I hope you will consider signing up as a paid Volts subscriber. It is a relatively modest sum — you pay less for a year than you'd pay for a nice pair of pants — but it means the difference between me continuing this work and me getting a real job. 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

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.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2019, in the wake of Democrats’ congressional victories, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be re-forming the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which had been disbanded by Republicans in the previous session. She appointed Florida Representative Kathy Castor as chair.At the time, the decision caused considerable controversy in the climate community. Climate activists were pushing for a more ambitious committee, with the power to write a full Green New Deal legislative package. Instead, the committee was to be an advisory body only, meant to do research and develop policy suggestions.History is littered with congressional committees that busily produce reports and whitepapers that no one reads. But the climate committee proved much more potent than that. Castor set about gathering testimony from hundreds of witnesses — scientists, policy wonks, and average citizens alike — and putting her expert staff to work translating their testimony into policy recommendations. But the recommendations did not simply decorate reports. The Democrats on the committee, and the Democrats educated by the committee's work, took those recommendations back to their own committees, where they found their way into a wide variety of bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act contained numerous policies that originated in the climate committee.Altogether, hundreds of the recommendations made by the committee found their way into law — a crazy-high success rate for a committee with no real power. As the committee prepares to sunset — of course Republicans are disbanding it again — it has put out a final report, summarizing all its achievements and pointing to the work that remains to be done.I called Rep. Castor to get her thoughts on the committee's work, the achievements she is most proud of, and what progress she thinks can be made in the next two years.Alright, then. With no further ado, Representative Kathy Castor. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Rep. Kathy CastorOh, I'm delighted to be here, David. Thank you.David RobertsSo just to start off, I'm assuming that the coming Republican majority is going to shut down the committee. Has this been explicitly stated yet, or is this just ... are we all assuming? Is that a valid assumption?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, the ranking member, Garret Graves of Louisiana, did kind of spill the beans. The problem is, on the Republican side, the Speaker-to-be, Kevin McCarthy, does not quite have the votes yet. So that leaves everything in limbo getting organized for the new year. But, they've made it plain that the climate crisis is not a priority for them, and therefore the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will not exist in the next Congress.David RobertsSo then it's been wrapped up. It's been a whirlwind three years, I guess, since you were placed in charge of this committee. Have you had a chance to kind of pause and step back and think about it all, or are you still kind of in a sprint til' the end of the term?Rep. Kathy CastorIt has been a sprint right til' the end, especially since the large appropriations package and the defense bill were not completed due to really foot-dragging of the US Senate. We have so much more left to do. I mean, we are thrilled that this was the most important Congress when it comes to clean energy and climate action and building more resilient, safer communities across the country. I mean, this was the Congress, the one that people inside and outside have been pressing for decades, frankly. But there's still so much more left to do. We're living in a climate emergency, and the world's top scientists tell us it is just urgent that we reduce climate pollution across the board. And now we have the tool. We passed a number of the tools, but implementation will be key, and that's what we're looking ahead towards.David RobertsI wanted to ask you, looking back on it, if you can cast your mind back to 2019, when you became chair and you had a majority in the House, but very narrow-split Senate, looking back, were you surprised by the productivity of this Congress? How did it perform, relative to your expectations from back in 2019?Rep. Kathy CastorGosh, it was yes, I think the the fact that we were able to accomplish so much when the United States Senate was divided 50-50 truly exceeded our expectations, but we really didn't have a choice. Policy could not wait any longer, while so many private actors, private sector, clean energy entrepreneurs, some utilities, some states and local communities are going gangbusters. The federal government and the Congress had not responded. So the stars finally aligned when we kind of knitted together pieces of the climate movement across the country, across the economy, and had the plan ready when President Biden was elected. But a 50-50 Senate, that was a roadblock. But looking back now, it's pretty impressive. The bipartisan bills that we were able to pass into law.David RobertsYeah, my expectations are so low, naturally, that I was quite pleasantly surprised. So let's talk about a little bit about what I think is one of the most striking features of this last few years, which has been a crazy time. But I wrote a piece back in, I think it was 2019 or 2020, about the climate movement kind of splintered apart after Waxman-Markey back in 2008, 2009, and was kind of just fractured and drifting up through, I would say probably like 2018. And then, of course, I've been writing about these processes, whereby groups are talking to one another, and there's been just this intensive policy discussion and activity.And the left seem to sort of pull together around a policy vision, which I sort of characterized as standards, investments, and justice: SIJ. I tried to get SIJ to catch on, but it never quite did. But then your committee comes along, you consult with hundreds of people. You get testimony from hundreds of people. And that's kind of that shared vision is more or less what you came around to. And for all the chaos of the ensuing years and all the sort of ups and downs and roller coaster of it, there was remarkably little, I thought, conflict within the Democratic Party or within the left about policy specifics.There seemed to be a weird sort of policy consensus that kind of held firm. Did that strike you too, especially relative to like, 2008, 2009, when, you know, whether you supported cap and trade or not was this, you know, this absolute marker of your purity or your intentions and all this, you know, all the very vicious policy fights back then? I thought there was a strange amount of consensus around policy this time around. Did you find that as well?Rep. Kathy CastorI'm glad that we made it look easy, because it wasn't. And it really started with Speaker Pelosi's vision coming back in tackling the climate crisis, there's nothing like having a professional committee, staff of experts. Some of the other committee chairs in the Congress, they protect their turf, their jurisdiction, but she understood that solutions to the climate crisis cut across all jurisdictions and they needed to be knitted together. So having Ana Unruh Collin serve as our staff director, a brilliant, knowledgeable scientist, but policy guru. And then Alison Cassady is our deputy, who had served under Chairman Waxman, went through EPA after a report and now is helping Codesta in the White House get all of these clean energy and resiliency policies done. Fatima Maud, great on transmission in the power sector. Samantha Medlock, who understood that the climate we have to prepare and adapt, so another professional. So there's nothing like having a team that is in place, ready to listen.David RobertsMost of them, veterans of the Waxman-Markey fight. So, had seen how things could go, I think, and went in, determined to make them go differently this time.Rep. Kathy CastorYou're absolutely right. And what I learned watching Speaker Pelosi and just kind of growing up as a policy nerd myself, is that from the very get-go, you have to listen. You have to listen and learn. And that's what we set out to do right off the bat; listen to farmers who were hungry for climate solutions because their crops and livestock being impacted, scientists, folks in the clean tech sector, the innovators. We needed to understand what the modern solutions were. The environmental justice community, who had felt so left out of discussions on solutions, on clean energy and technology for many years, and we set out to do that, held a number of those listening sessions, but put out a request for information asking for the climate solutions across the country.And at that time, we also Hal Harvey and the folks at Energy Innovation gave us a kind of set-the-table tutorial to really point us in the direction of what gets the biggest bang for the buck when we're talking about reducing climate pollution and clean energy. And then, before COVID came down, trying to go out across the country to listen, one of the first trips was to coastal South Carolina to look at the impacts of climate on ... and coming from the state of Florida, I understand very well the impacts of climate on a tourism economy and your economic wellbeing. But then out to Colorado, to the National Renewable Energy Lab, where we really tried to bring our Republican colleagues along with us, because durable policy oftentimes has to be bipartisan. And I think looking back on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS Act, everything we've done in the defense bills through the appropriations, they were bipartisan, and they will be more durable. The Inflation Reduction Act, not as bipartisan, but, boy, to have ten years of continuity of clean energy tax credits and energy efficiency across the economy will provide that certainty that our innovators need.David RobertsSo you put out this report in 2020, or not 2020. When did the big report come out? Was that earlier this year?Rep. Kathy CastorIt was 2020, David.David RobertsIt's all a blur.Rep. Kathy CastorI know. It does get blurred. And in fact, we were set to release it in March of 2020, and I remember very well talking to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer on the floor, and we said, okay, well, we won't be announcing it next week because of the COVID, but we'll be back in a month to do this. And it took a little longer, but it gave us time because the country was grappling with the murder of George Floyd. And we knew that, unlike Waxman-Markey, kind of technical solution to the climate crisis, that people across America were hungry for solutions that are much more cross-cutting and focused on equity and addressing the communities that have disproportionately carried the burden of pollution.So, that gave us time to kind of build up our environmental justice pieces of it. And the other thing that gave us momentum was the youth climate movement at that time. And thank goodness we have environmental advocates across America who know how to organize. And they organized, and we heard them. Our very first hearing was with youth climate leaders, so that they understood that we were truly listening to their pleas for action. And it's important to have those protests they were protesting in the Congress, and they need to continue to press policymakers. But we listened and really turned their passion into policy.David RobertsSo this report comes out in 2020 magisterial report, I would say extremely I wrote it up when it came out. I just thought it's extremely fleshed out in the report. There were 715 policy recommendations, and your recent sort of wrap-up report that just came out says, "Out of those, 436 passed to the House, and then 314 of them were signed into law." So I did the math: that's a 44% hit rate. You got to be feeling pretty good about that. I don't know what typical expert committees in Congress produce, but that seems like a remarkably high success rate for getting recommendations into policy.Were you surprised how much from that initial report, sort of, survived the sausage-making process and sort of came out the other end more or less unmolested?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah. We looked for every opportunity in every bill moving through the Congress to build in some of those policy recommendations into law. And for folks that want to look at that groundbreaking report at climatecrisis.house.gov, you'll see we had legislation in certain areas already drafted that was ready to go, and then we made other recommendations for the need for legislation and to their credit, members across the Congress took us up on our offer. We work very closely with each congressional committee. Almost, just about every committee had a piece of this.David RobertsYeah, I wanted to ask about the ... because the committee didn't have the power to write legislation. It's just an advisory committee, which I think makes it kind of even more remarkable how much of its recommendations became a law. But tell me a little bit about the process, whereby this sort of recommendations that began in an advisory committee made their way to lawmaking committees. What was the sort of process, whereby you kind of diffused your recommendations and tried to get them into things? It seemed to work remarkably well behind the scenes. I didn't read a lot of stories about sort of infighting or backbiting so it seemed like a weirdly rational policy-making process. Tell us a little bit about how these things made their way into policy.Rep. Kathy CastorWell, Speaker Pelosi was very wise to appoint to the Climate Crisis Committee a number of members who are steeped in climate policy and politics. For example, Jared Huffman from California who was an environmental lawyer. He also sits on the Transportation Committee and has kept a very keen eye on those policies. Plus, Sean Casten, a clean energy tech guy from the midwest who understands power markets very well. Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon who is a leader in oceans policy, Ocean Solicitors. Donald McEachin, who recently passed away, was kind of our moral conscience, and had crafted an Environmental Justice For All Act that we recommended, and a lot of the policies in equity sprung from that.So, for example, as Chairman Peter DeFazio and the Congress was crafting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that we also called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. We had made recommendations for electrifying the transportation sector and doing it in a way that also built the bridge to workers and labor. And though it looked pretty easy looking back, I'll even say great. But these were very difficult discussions with auto makers, with auto workers, with members of Congress like a Debbie Dingell. But you had a Chairman DeFazio focused on this very important infrastructure law, something that President Biden ran on. So in the end, all of those taking, listening, and hammering out the compromises and policies in advance, we end up with an infrastructure law that includes $62 billion for the Department of Energy over five years to support clean energy transition and infrastructure upgrades, including the $7.5 billion to build the very first nationwide EV charging network.So, that had already been built into the Biden administration's goal of 500,000 public EV chargers, and a future where all Americans can have easy access to EV charging. But it also has those important — none of this happens unless we can build the batteries. So $3 billion for battery manufacturing, recycling grants, another $3 billion for battery materials processing.David RobertsThat was in the Infrastructure Act, right? I mean, this is one of the interesting things, is that you sort of seeded your recommendations in the Infrastructure Law and in CHIPS and in the Inflation Reduction Act. And so, we didn't end up in that kind of situation where there was just one big bill with everything this time. You guys were working on everything that had a chance of passing. It seems like.Rep. Kathy CastorThat's correct. And with a patriotic flare. Buy American, build American. I know right now it's causing some consternation for a lot of our allies that also make cars and trucks, but that domestic content and the requirements for manufacturing in the United States, we viewed as vitally important to building bipartisan support for decades to come. And already you've seen the announcements of where these battery plants, where the EV plants are going to be built, largely in the midwest, largely in red states, in Republican areas.And I think over time, the GOP is so wedded to oil and gas, but over time, as these workers and these communities have a piece of the clean energy future, it will be changing. It will build on itself, and it will help us address this climate emergency.David RobertsYeah, I want to come back to that, too. So I don't want to ask you to choose a favorite child, but out of all these, out of this report, full, just chock full of recommendations, are there any recommendations or set of recommendations that became law that you are particularly proud of, that you think are particularly sort of central to what we're doing? If you had to choose kind of your favorite thing that you did that ended up actually passing the finish line, what would you point to?Rep. Kathy CastorThe electric grid across America. And it's not all the way done, because there are some very significant policy changes that must happen. But what folks like Hal Harvey and Energy Innovators told us right away is the most important way to tackle the climate crisis and to reduce greenhouse gases is in the power sector, getting the lower cost solar, wind, energy-efficiency resources out ASAP, and then especially following on with the transportation sector. So, here I sit in the state of Florida, the so-called Sunshine State, but they've kept us addicted to gas. They've put all the eggs pretty much in the gas basket. And that has really cost my neighbors a lot of money.When we have price spikes, especially after Putin's unprovoked attack on Ukraine, we can do so much better. We can lower cost, we can clean the air. We can build more resilient communities. You probably saw that after Hurricane Ian, the one community that didn't lose power and really didn't suffer as much damage was a solar-powered community, Babcock Ranch in southwest Florida. And, I want that for the entire country. And we're on the cusp of getting there, but that's why we have more work to do when it comes to getting the renewables out. But David, there's nothing like having those tax credits now for ten years.David RobertsYeah. Hearing you put the grid at the center, of course, warms my heart. Of the stuff that didn't make it, were there pieces that you were more disappointed didn't make it? This is sort of the flip side of the other question. Is there stuff that you were hoping was going to make it that didn't, that you look back on with regret?Rep. Kathy CastorI wish we could get a national renewable portfolio standard. Again, using my experience here in the so-called Sunshine State, boy, we're a laggard. And again, we could bring that lower cost, clean energy to more of my neighbors here. And it's just so disjointed. You have states that have truly committed, local communities, truly committed. They're going to reap the benefits, and really, the benefits should be available to everyone. So, we recommended a clean energy standard, energy-efficiency standard. You need those goals to press ahead, even as you have the standards investments in justice. I think the goals are very helpful to set the bar.David RobertsWell, that's the standards piece, which is hard to get through a reconciliation bill, right? That's the nature of the beast.Rep. Kathy CastorAnd remember, it morphed into making large incentive payments to utilities to get there. But that didn't quite go. And at that time, it looked like the climate policy was teetering. And thank goodness we had a president who never gave up. And Senator Manchin came around to his credit, and a lot of outside groups kept pushing. I don't think that's very evident when you watch what's happening in Washington DC. You think it's so insular, but I think everyone can be grateful for the wide variety of interests, from the environmental justice groups to the innovators, to the scientists who just kept at it, kept pressing.David RobertsThis is probably an unanswerable question, and I don't want to get into trying to get you to psychologize Joe Manchin. Thank god that those days are past us for now. But do you think that pressure from outside groups reached him? It's very hard to tell from the outside. He looks, from the outside, like he just doesn't care about most of those outside groups. Do you think that pressure had some role in bringing him around?Rep. Kathy CastorYes, I do. And I think he has children and grandchildren. I don't think he wanted to get up and look in the mirror and be responsible for a planet that is not as livable for our kids and future generations.David RobertsLet's talk about a little bit of the Manchin changes. So he stripped out the renewable portfolio standard or the, I can't remember, the name of what it had become, but the sort of reconciliation equivalent of the renewable portfolio standard.Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, Clean Energy Payment Program or Performance.David RobertsRIP.David RobertsSo that would have been nice. But, the other main thing, as far as I can tell that he changed, was some changes to the EV tax credit. And I'm just curious what you make of the changes to that credit. Were you sort of supportive of those? Do you think they went too far? Because I've heard some concern that the requirements now for domestic content are kind of so tight that no one's going to be able to meet them for a couple of years. So curious if you have any thoughts on that.Rep. Kathy CastorIt is going to be difficult. And when I say that we had a patriotic plan of action that was because we really do want to win the future. We want the United States of America to be building those electric vehicles and have the leading technology. But the minerals and the batteries are going — the domestic content requirements are going to be difficult — and I think everyone is pressing ahead. They're good tax credits and significant dollars to build up those domestic manufacturing, the plants, the workforce. So everyone is kind of pressing along in that direction, now.It's only been a few months but yes, we're hearing from our allies. I know when President Macron was here recently that he was bending the President's ear. And there may be some ways for the administration as they go through implementation to listen and do some and things on timing. But I think, mostly, Americans are committed to wanting these to be a pathway to good paying jobs for our people. The industrial base in America, we've got to invest through CHIPS, through everything we've done with EVs, and I think we still have more room on workforce to do, but okay, so difficult, but we've got to try. It's important for competitiveness.David RobertsSo Manchin stripped out the Clean Payment Program. He tweaked the EV tax credits a little bit, sort of tightening their domestic requirements. But it was striking that, for all the sort of suspense around Build Back Better, is it going to happen, is it going to not? Manchin stripped out the care provisions and a lot of the healthcare stuff. All this drama, through all that, the basic clean energy and climate portion of that bill was mostly left alone. What ended up passing in the Inflation Reduction Act is pretty close to what your expert committee members wrote down on paper. Did you expect Manchin to do more?Because, you know, for all that, he's objecting and objecting and saying no. And I just thought, "Well, surely he's going to strip this down. Like he stripped everything else down." But he ended up sort of not doing all that much to it. What do you make of that?Rep. Kathy CastorI make of it that it really was an effort that knitted-together interest and collaboration across the economy that was bigger than the Congress. People knew if we didn't act now, we were condemning our kids to a bleaker future and that now was the time to lay the foundation to slash pollution across the board. It ended up through tax credits. Tax credits will drive investment in affordable clean energy, the electric vehicles, cost-saving energy efficiency technologies, but also through making environmental justice a cornerstone of climate action, a stronger enforcement of environmental laws. Monies will flow into that, increasing the investments to communities on the front lines. Rural communities, tribal communities, energy.A lot of the communities that grew up through coal mining and frack gas, they're going to need to see themselves in the clean energy future as well. Bonuses for those High Road Labor standards, domestic manufacturing. Also the cross-cutting approach to reducing methane pollution. I think there was broad bipartisan realization that control of methane is vitally important ASAP to give us a fighting chance to meet our climate goals.David RobertsSo do you think he left it alone because it was good policy? I guess, I love that story, and I hope it's true. So you say several times in this recent report there's a lot left to do. 44% of your recommendations pass, which is remarkable, but that leaves a bunch more that didn't pass. Do you have any hope at all of decent energy legislation passing through this coming Congress with Republicans in control of the House? Or is it more or less up to Biden over the next two years to act via executive action?Rep. Kathy CastorDemocrats are going to be quite focused on finding bipartisan solutions moving forward, even with the chaotic Congress, the House of Representatives, that is sure to come, because there are some folks on that side that just are ... they live to shut down the government for some reason, I don't know. They're just not constructive. But, hopefully, they don't cause complete chaos. So most of the action, yes, will be in implementation. We have got to get money back into people's pockets through the more energy-efficient appliances and through weatherizing their homes and building the solar plants. My local mayor here in Tampa looked at the tax credits that they will receive and said, "Well, I'm going to put solar panels on top of this brand new big community center, and that's going to save us a million dollars."Multiply that all across the country. But it's going to be important to get those monies out into people's pockets. And thankfully, we've got allies that are going to be working with us on that.David RobertsI'm just curious if there are particular things that you would like to see Biden do via executive action over the next two years? Any sort of top priorities left over from the report that you would like him to sort of prioritize?Rep. Kathy CastorThe Department of Energy now has more resources at its disposal than ever before. That Green Climate Bank, I think is going to be fascinating to see the innovations that come from across the country. It's kind of like community development block grants that go to local communities where they have the most flexibility to determine what meets their own community needs. And I see that Green Climate Bank as a way to speed up some of these climate solutions.But back to where there could be bipartisan work that I would hope everyone again can continue pressing policymakers to move on. We'll have a farm bill up, and ranchers, producers, farmers, they are hungry for climate-smart ag policy.David RobertsIs that true? Because now, traditionally there's been some hostility from the agricultural sector toward climate stuff. This has not been traditionally, historically allies. Do you really think opinion within that community has swung around to the necessity of this stuff or is it still kind of a trench warfare over there in that sector?Rep. Kathy CastorWe have work to do. But I'll tell you, I met with a very conservative group here in Florida. The citrus growers, the dairy farmers, all of our nurseries, the specialty crops and they are ready to be part of the solution. There is so much that they learn through our ag extension offices and we have now made these climate-smart ag hubs, where farmers now can do more for soil health, for conservation. They should get some compensation if they are going to be part of the solution and sequester carbon and be smarter and more efficient. The whole entire food system, I would highlight, is an area where we can do so much better as well.Then the defense bills now, the past two defense bills have been the most climate forward. For example, we're going to pass this omnibus appropriations bill and well over half of the trillion dollars, I think upwards of 900 billion goes to the Department of Defense. So they can be an important customer, a research instigator, deployment across their military bases, but developing those clean technologies in everything that they do. So that will have to continue. And that's why I'm so happy that the smart people at the Biden administration are there for two years so that we can implement and get these technologies and policies on track.David RobertsWell, if we're talking about executive branch action, you kind of got to think about the Supreme Court. I wonder how worried you are about the Supreme Court. How much of this do you think they could screw up? How safe do you think this entire effort is from the Supreme Court? What's kind of your level of worry there?Rep. Kathy CastorWell, the good news was the last term they didn't completely got EPA's authority to regulate climate pollution. So that was an important takeaway. And EPA needs to continue on in all of their important enforcement activities and ways to cut climate pollution from the regulatory side. You may remember, since you've read our 2020 Climate Crisis Action Plan all the way to the end, that we highlighted other policies that are important to tackling the climate crisis involving strengthening democracy. The January 6 Committee, now, has issued their final report. We have got to strengthen the laws relating to big money in elections transparency. There have been scandals across America in various states where electric utilities now are playing in elections. There's no reason that any ratepayer money, or some fungible money, should be going into blocking the deployment of lower cost clean energy. So strengthening our democratic institutions we highlighted as important climate solutions as well and they remain so.David RobertsIt does not seem like the Supreme Court is on your side on that particular issue. This is a little bit of a depressing question, but it's all about implementation these next two years and the nature of the House seems pretty binary whether you have the majority or not. Is there anything you can do from the minority in the House to really make sure this is implemented well? What can you do from the minority in the House? Or is this just a time to retrench and dry your powder for the next fight? or what can you do from the minority?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, David, the policies, the grants, and the opportunities that flow out of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS, and everything else are so vast that an average member of Congress could spend every waking minute on making sure that your local community understands and is maximizing what will flow out of that law. So before I went to Congress, I served as a county commissioner and I'm busy already talking to my local partners and nonprofits, my environmental justice folks, but just plain city county governments and others to make sure that they understand what is available. At the same time, we've got to keep an eye on the entrepreneurs and the scientific discoveries. And again, I'll highlight the vast new resources at the Department of Energy.In Congress, on the Energy and Commerce Committee, we know that the Republican majority is going to shine a spotlight on the Department of Energy. I anticipate Secretary Granholm will be a frequent visitor for our committee, and there's nothing wrong with oversight. But if you're going to throw a wrench into lower cost clean energy solutions, simply to benefit the legacy oil, gas, fossil fuel industry, that's just plain politics. And we need to stay focused on the people, and people over politics, and there will be plenty to do.David RobertsSo big picture-wise, if you step back and you look at, say, the coming ten years, what do you see as kind of the biggest — between us and decarbonization, most of which is supposed to happen in the next ten years — what do you sort of lose sleep over? What do you see as the biggest challenge? Is it education? Is it transmission? Is it going to be politics? What are the sort of big, looming challenges you see that you worry most about as we try to pull off something, which is huge and has never been pulled off before?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah. Again, I come to you with a Sunshine State perspective where we should be a leader in clean energy and where we lag behind. So I see enormous opportunities to lower electric bills and we're suffering through a property insurance crisis and flood insurance is not widely people just don't take it. Maybe they will now a little more these more intense hurricanes. But I see a political system that is not responding as it should for the people to have a plan to expedite the clean energy technologies, the plain weatherization, to use every tool at our disposal to help move to the clean energy economy through good paying jobs with an element of justice.Fortunately, we now have a plan like that on the national level. But I worry it will be too disjointed and politics will come into play and the people who need it most will be denied the opportunity to have the lower cost clean energy, or the appliances, or the readily available EVs over ... in ten years that they should have.David RobertsSpeaking of red state politics, I'm curious, looking back, how much help would you say you got in all of this from the minority members of the committee? How on board were they versus trying to throw wrenches in the works? What's your sort of take on where the Republicans on your committee are on all this stuff, especially after three years of work?Rep. Kathy CastorWell, they don't outright deny climate change any longer, so they bring arguments on cost that some things are unworkable. So I guess one thing it does is it has us sharpen our pencils and make sure that what we are proposing is workable. There are some bipartisan solutions out there on natural solutions and resiliency and adaptation. We've had good discussions on that and crafted some legislation on that, but still on the clean energy side, they're not totally there. But again, I am hopeful because now businesses, small and large, innovators, universities, red states and blue states, rural areas and not, will, over time, understand and have access to the jobs, the careers, the opportunities that I think will push them. The problem is we're running out of time.David RobertsYeah, I was going to ask about that. So, one aspect of all the legislation they passed this last term, which I feel like doesn't really get enough press, I'm not sure if the public at large understands it very well. It's not just focused on reducing emissions and climate stuff, it is a big, industrial policy package. There's a ton of money to bring manufacturing and factories and mines and processing facilities and battery manufacturing and battery recycling, tons and tons of money to onshore those industries.And I swear since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, I've probably seen like a half dozen, at least announcements of new plans for big manufacturing facilities. I just saw one plan for West Virginia yesterday, I forget what it is, if it's maybe battery manufacturing or recycling, one of those. So, one of the things that's going to happen — it's happening already — but it's going to continue happening in the next few years is a flood of jobs to red states. And I just wonder, is that going to change their position on this? Is that going to change their orientation on this stuff just at a grassroots level? Is incoming jobs going to shake people out of the partisanship on this and if so, when?I realize there's no way to answer that question, but it seems like this ought to be sort of like an acid eating away at that opposition, right? The more jobs you have, the less opposition. Do you see that dynamic taking root yet or how long do you think that would take for that to sort of put down roots?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, there is nothing like your home grown, hometown industry and workers, your neighbors tell you these are good paying jobs. We see a future for our children to stay in this community, live here. There's nothing like that in moving a policymaker. And that's why we understood it was important to focus on energy communities. A rural, electric co-op here in Florida, they highlighted to me how important that was going to be to change over from old coal and gas into solar and other clean technologies. Oftentimes, those plants are the largest property taxpayer in those communities.They are the largest employers. So, yes, over time that has to happen. But as I stated, we're running out of time, and so we're all in this together. But community engagement, that's why we thought it was also important to focus on building capacity among those energy intensive communities and the communities that have a lot of the polluting plants. And you'll see as the Biden administration rolls out grants and initiatives, they're going to stay true. I trust to that push for environmental justice, and I know a lot of people poopoo the term, but it simply is based on fairness. And we've got to follow through with our promise to make sure we're lifting up everyone, that everyone benefits from this transition to clean energy. Otherwise it will take longer and it will be harder.David RobertsWell, I've kept you a while, but to wrap up, I thought it was quite notable that in the 2022 midterms, as contentious as they were, you did not see Republicans organizing around opposition to — I was going to say the Inflation Reduction Act, but really the Infrastructure Act, CHIPS — all these sorts of big, marquee legislative achievements, many of which crucially involved climate stuff. And the Inflation Reduction Act basically was a giant climate bill. They didn't run against those, which is a striking contrast, again, to back in 2010, when opposition to the Waxman-Markey bill, the quote unquote "carbon tax," was a headline feature of almost every Republican campaign.They didn't campaign against this climate bill. So what do we make of that? Why did that happen? What what is what can we learn from them?Rep. Kathy CastorYou're right. They didn't shoot the Inflation Reduction Act with a shotgun.David RobertsYes, exactly. No one shot it.Rep. Kathy CastorNo, because climate impacts are all too real. All across the country, no one's immune. Whether you're suffering major water shortages in the west, Colorado River drying up, or huge wildfires, extreme heat, hurricanes that intensify faster, everyone ... there's been an awakening to the impacts of climate. And they cost so much. The folks aligned with fossil fuels, they've gotten away for years with saying, "Oh, we can't do clean energy because it's so expensive." Well, for one, clean energy is cheaper energy. But the cost of climate, the years of inaction or smaller steps were really costing us.And I think people understand there are solutions out there. We just have to unleash the scientific know-how that we have here and convert a lot of those good ideas into actual solutions. We've got a lot of smart people — and a lot of dedicated people — who are ready to do this. And we're on the cusp of making it happen. I think having these huge gas price spikes, and people watch their neighbor with an EV doesn't even have to stop at the gas station and drives right by it. It kind of made people think twice. I know that F-150 electric truck as it rolls off, that's the number-one selling vehicle in America.And they to think that you'll be able to come from the Florida perspective again. We have a hurricane, and they knock out your electricity and you can plug in your air conditioner, your home into that truck and power it for a while. So people now, they're waking up to ... okay, climate is ... if we don't address it now, we're condemning our kids to a bleaker future. And right now, it's costing us a lot, and we've got to get a hold of our wallets, too.David RobertsSo you really think that climate denialism and the sort of anti-clean energy has lost its political potency on the right? Are you willing to lay down that marker?Rep. Kathy CastorI wouldn't say entirely, no. There are still members of Congress. They don't lead with it anymore.David RobertsRight.Rep. Kathy CastorThey don't lead with it, but it's there, unfortunately. But, I think we're poised to deliver again. But that's what it depends on, this implementation. And it's up to everyone. I hope everyone who listens to your podcast understands they also have a responsibility, and I trust they take that seriously, to be guided by the science and rooted injustice and powered by American workers to provide those solutions to our neighbors.David RobertsWell, I do think, facts on the ground, as they say, generally do more to change people's minds than arguments and reports and white papers and IPCC meetings. So we'll get to see that tested in these next few years.Thank you so much for coming on. I encourage everybody to read this report you guys put out. It's a really interesting sort of summary of what made it from your report into law and what remains to be done for Congress. Again, it's always policy nerds. Policy nerds will love this. It's very in-depth of what has and hasn't been done. And just thank you, again, for your work over these past three years.I feel like it's not often, especially in the current American system of government, that you really get a chance to be at the center of something and help change things in a concrete way. And I feel like your committee has done that in a way that a lot of expert committees and meetings don't. So, congratulations on that and thanks for all your work.Rep. Kathy CastorWell, thank you, David. And again, we had a fantastic team, some committed members. We had the most effective Speaker of the House in the history of America, and Nancy Pelosi. And the Climate Committee was her vision, and she's always focused on making sure we're keeping an eye on our kids and future generations. But thanks to everyone. I bet a lot of your listeners weighed in with the Climate Committee along the way and helped us craft these solutions. And thanks to you for your attention to our work.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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

Independent journalist Michael Thomas did a deep dive into the methods and misinformation used by right-wing groups to rally community opposition to renewable energy projects. In this episode, he discusses what he found and how climate advocates can fight back.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt's easy to find stories in the media these days about communities blocking solar, wind, and other clean energy projects. This has prompted an enormous amount of discourse about NIMBYs and the challenges of permitting projects. What's often left out of the discourse — and almost always left out of those stories — is how such community groups receive organizational help and money from billionaire-funded right-wingers. Across the country and the internet, there are hundreds of conservative think tanks, groups, and individuals working to stir up community opposition to renewable energy with misinformation and lies. With virtually no public scrutiny, they have secured state-level policies restricting renewable energy siting in dozens of states.Independent journalist Michael Thomas set about to learn more about these right-wing groups. He joined anti-renewable-energy Facebook groups, combed through the tax filings of various right-wing think tanks, and tried to trace funding sources. He published the results in his own newsletter, Distilled. I'm excited to talk to him about what he found: the groups involved, the tactics they use, the policies they've helped pass, and the best way to fight back.All right then, with no further ado, Michael Thomas. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Michael ThomasThanks for having me. I've been a longtime reader and I'm a fan of the Volts podcast. So really happy to be here.David RobertsSo for some reason you decided to jump in and immerse yourself in the world of anti-renewable-energy people and organizations and communications online. Before we jump into the specifics, what led you to this? Did you get sort of pulled in bit by bit or did you decide to do a project on this at some point?Michael ThomasYeah, it was honestly not that intentional. I was reading a lot of stories over the summer about NIMBY opposition to local solar and wind projects and was following a lot of the discourse and debate over the permitting reform bill. And one story caught my attention that was about a group of residents on the east coast that were trying to block an offshore wind farm and a substation that was going to be put on land to bring the power to land. And it appeared to be just a normal resident group, kind of the classic NIMBY arguments that they were worried about property values or didn't like the site of the wind farm.And then I read this subtle, just one line mention of a think tank that I had heard of, the Caesar Rodney Institute, and this is a part of a much larger group of think tanks that have been funded for years by fossil fuel companies and far-right billionaires. So I started looking into it and discovered that they were very involved in the effort and giving some of these resident groups money to fund lawsuits and support. And so I started to report on that story, and it kind of got me deep into the world of climate misinformation and clean energy misinformation, and I just really became curious about what was going on and if there was a bigger story here, and ended up working on a series of stories over the last month and a half. And I learned a lot in the process.David RobertsYeah, this is a theme I'll return to later, but it really in some sense should not come as a surprise to anyone that this network of anti-renewable energy, "citizen groups" across the country is being funded and coordinated by right-wing operators. Like, of course it is — you know, the Tea Party was — like, we've just learned that over and over again. But it just seems like the pro-renewable energy forces, the pro-climate forces, just kind of sleep on that and just kind of don't pay attention to it, just kind of let it run in the background.So it's a little insane that it's not a bigger point of discussion among green types. So I'm glad you did this and I'm glad we're talking about it. So one of the things you did, God bless you, is wade into Facebook and join a bunch of anti-wind and solar groups — Good Lord — so tell us what messages about renewable energy are they emphasizing in these groups? Like, what are the consistent themes?Michael ThomasYeah, so I clearly know how to have a good time by joining all of these groups and sifting through the posts. So as context, I was doing this reporting on local opposition and learning about some of these think tanks. And I learned in that research that a lot of these resident groups are organizing on Facebook groups and pages. And that makes sense if you look at the demographics of these groups, they tend to be a lot of boomers and a lot of people who are very active on Facebook. And so I joined a few of them at first.And then in the groups there are often reshares of posts and other groups. And so by joining three or four, I quickly started to see that there were way more of these groups than I had initially expected. And in total I ended up finding about 40 groups. I joined all of them and just started scrolling through and looking at the posts and taking screenshots and taking notes and trying to understand how do the people that are in these groups communicate about clean energy? What are the common narratives? Because there are usually between 500 and 2,000 people in these groups, so we're talking about tens of thousands of people in very small communities that are receiving this messaging.So it's I think, really important...David RobertsAnd of course, you know, just to point out the obvious, these are probably the hard core and they take those messages and spread them word of mouth to many, many thousands more, right?Michael ThomasTotally.David RobertsIt's a much larger audience than just the members.Michael ThomasYeah, it's also — I think — really important to note that these tend to be the most civically engaged people. So on TikTok, a video might go viral about how great solar panels are, but if the people watching that video don't show up to the county commission meeting, then it doesn't really matter necessarily. Or it does matter, but it's not as effective. So these are a lot of people who are retired or who are very engaged in their communities. And so what starts on Facebook quickly bleeds into town halls and county commission meetings. And often the discourse is really intense and really emotionally charged.But to answer your question of what sort of themes and messages I saw, there was a range of posts. Some of them were misleading claims about clean energy. Like, an example that I saw a lot of was that solar panels and wind turbines are made using rare earth materials and they're made in China, and China uses a lot of coal. And so the implication is that clean energy is not actually that clean and it's not good for the environment, which, of course, the status quo energy system we have today that relies on fossil fuels, is terrible for the environment, kills millions of people a year, and is wreaking havoc on our environment.And these are solutions that are orders of magnitude better, but certainly not perfect. So they're sort of driving a wedge in some of that. And another similar one is that wind turbines kill birds. Of course, famous argument against wind. So you'll see memes like if this was a bird that had been killed by oil spill, this image would be all over the front page news. And that one spread like wildfire. Like that thing had tens of thousands of shares.David RobertsOh, yes, you get the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in there too. You you're hitting all the buttons.Michael ThomasExactly. And then another that starts to get us into the — from misleading to just lies — is that the wind turbines or solar panels are going to destroy property values. So we're talking about 25%, 50% declines in your property value. And this is, of course, famously shared by Donald Trump in a, I think, RNC meeting a couple of years ago where he says wind turbines cause cancer and if you live near them — BANG — 50% drop in your property values. So...David RobertsLet's just pause to note that Donald Trump is just perfectly squarely in the demographic to be receiving these messages.Michael ThomasTotally. And interestingly, he's been against wind energy for years. I mean, his goes back to like, 2012.David RobertsIt's a golf course, right?Michael ThomasI think in Scotland there was a golf course that they were going to set up wind turbines near, and so he's been spreading this misinformation longer than most people. So that was a really common one — the property value argument. Of course, again, numerous studies have shown that there's either minimal or no impact on property values when clean energy projects go into a community. But there is one London School of Economics study, which is a big name, very reputable source, that found that it dropped by I think it's something like 8% or 10% that gets shared a lot in these communities and by some of these influential anti-clean-energy thought leaders.And important to look at that study and the actual details of it, because if you do, it found that there were only three homes that they looked at. So we're talking about a sample size of three. And again, if you look at much larger sample sizes, there is no evidence that it really hurts property values. And then the last two that I'll share, kind of archetypes of posts I saw, one was the "wind turbine on fire" post.David RobertsYes, I love... They love those "wind turbine on fire" pictures. I see those all the time, even on Twitter.Michael ThomasYeah, and I was really surprised to see these at first. I actually hadn't ever seen an image of a wind turbine on fire or a video. But when I'm scrolling through these groups, they're like every ten posts or something. And I started to think like, oh my God, this stuff is dangerous. Like, if a wind turbine caught fire and it falls down, you can see where it would scare you. So I looked into the data to see how common this was, and of course, I found that the Department of Energy has done a study on this.They found that I think in 2017, there were something like 50,000 wind turbines in the country, and only 40 of them had a safety incident like this. So it's an incredibly rare event that is made to seem very common and therefore really scary to imagine a project like that going up in your community. And then the last one that I'll share, this is kind of a famous anti-wind piece of misinformation, was posts about wind turbine syndrome. This is something that I had never heard of before, and I'm clearly in different communities. And so this is based on a 2006 study that found that there were a number of people living near wind farms that would develop headaches and nausea.And this study spread like crazy. And there have been something like 20 or 25 peer-reviewed studies on this since then, and none of them have been able to replicate the same findings. None of them have found any association between wind turbines and negative health effects.David RobertsI feel like I remember one out of England where they had like, wind turbine syndrome, and then they did like, a community comparison in another community. They went in early and paid residents, they basically paid residents, like, a small percentage of the profits of the wind farm, you know, to buy them in. And there was no wind turbine syndrome at all in the second community.Michael ThomasInteresting.David RobertsWeirdly. A little money can ward off of that particular syndrome, it seems.Michael ThomasSo one interesting thing that I found in some of this research on wind turbine syndrome is that there's one exception that I found where people do start to develop negative health effects, and that's if they've already read information about wind turbine syndrome or about the negative health effects. And so it's actually really sad because a lot of people are posting this stuff and they're reaching a lot of communities that may or may not end up with wind turbines. And there's a great story in BuzzFeed a year or two back that was written by Joseph Bernstein, and he interviewed a lot of people. And in the end, he kind of concludes the story, saying that as he started to talk to more people and he was sleeping in his hotel near the wind farm, he suddenly started to hear it, and he suddenly started to be driven crazy.It's unfortunate because I think a lot of people will probably have that placebo or start to be affected by those — in their community.David RobertsThat is so darkly hilarious. So let's talk a little bit about how these groups organize. I mean, it's not like these random groups of misinformed and irritable boomers know instinctively how to organize, how to communicate, how to get results, how to block things at the state level. So how's — Let's talk a little bit about the people who are helping them. And you did a piece specifically about this guy named John Droz Jr. Tell us a little bit about him. He's helping these groups organize. What is he kind of telling them? What sort of advice is he giving to these groups?Like, presumably he's on the lookout for these groups and in communication with all these groups. What's his message to them?Michael ThomasYeah, so John Droz is certainly one of the most interesting people I've ever reported on. I learned about him as I was wading into the misinformation in some of these communities. I started to see a lot of posts to this guy's website, and I went and looked at the site, and it just has tons of resources on how to block a wind project or a solar project in your community. And they're incredibly effective tools. All, of course, styled in bright red fonts and, like, Comic Sans font and PDFs, but just like, packed with dense, probably really great information if you're trying to kill a project.But stylistically, certainly interesting. So some backstory on John Droz. In 2011, he was a retired real estate investor, spent most of his career buying and flipping real estate in North Carolina. And that year, he learned about this bill that was going through the state legislature, debating what to do about sea level rise that was coming and how to adapt to that as a state. So Droz, who has no background in climate science or climate adaptation or anything related, creates 125 slide PowerPoint titled "Our Sea Level Policy: From Science or Lobbyists?". And he goes through and basically debunks NOAA.And all of these US agencies, science and all these peer-reviewed studies saying none of this is true and the sea level here isn't going to rise and climate change isn't happening and kind of puts in all of the classic climate denial in this thing. And he was incredibly effective at getting the ear of the Republican legislators. So he met with tons of them, gave this presentation to them and was even quoted in the Washington Post in an article. Somehow the Washington Post fact checking team didn't catch this. But there was a story that ran where he cited as a local physicist and as an opponent to this bill.David RobertsKind of what you call a lay physicist maybe.Michael ThomasExactly. So North Carolina eventually decides to vote against this bill. They don't take those climate adaptation measures. And this gets the attention of American Tradition Institute — ATI, which is a climate-denial think tank that became well known when they attacked some climate scientists like Michael Mann and spread a bunch of lies about him. And so ATI brings John Droz on as a senior fellow. And in 2012 they organized this now infamous anti-wind-energy meeting in DC with really a Who's Who of climate deniers and and a group of local residents around the country who are trying to block projects.And there was a leaked memo from this meeting that I think is worth quoting from. Do you mind if I share a few minutes from this to give you a sense of what it has? So it leads: "The minimum national campaign goal is to constructively influence national and state wind-energy policies." Then they go on: "The goal is to cause subversion in the message of industry so that it effectively becomes so bad no one wants to admit in public that they are for it." — and they're talking about wind energy — "much like wind has done to coal by turning green to black and clean to dirty." Ultimate goal: Change policy direction based on the message.David RobertsHow many dozens of sort of vaguely progressive campaigns have you seen that are out there just raising awareness, you know, with — the left loves to raise awareness — and this guy on the right is like screw awareness. We want to change policy! We are after policy changes!Michael ThomasTotally, and they were incredibly effective at this. So this is back in 2012 and Droz understood long before terms like Fake News or Alternative Facts became really popular. He knew that if you provided people with an alternative story or an alternative set of facts, some small percentage of the population is going to believe it. So rather than debate the little policy details and kind of get lost in the weeds and maybe make a large number of people mildly opposed to clean energy, they spread this misinformation that gets a very small number of people incredibly passionate and incredibly emotionally charged and believing lies about clean energy.Things like: Wind energy is bad for the environment. That's an example of "turning clean to dirty", which is what he wanted to do.David RobertsFamously, Karl Rove's strategy, right? He's like, you find your opponent's virtues, what they're selling as their virtues, and go straight at them, right?Michael ThomasTotally.David RobertsYou go straight at the merits and so you go after sustainability and you go after, you know, good for the economy and good for the environment.Michael ThomasAbsolutely. So he ended up teaching all of these activists that were at the meeting and then in the ten years since then, he's taught thousands of people some of these tactics. And as I was going through all of his materials on his site and looking through old documents, I kind of started to write down John Droz's Rules for anti-wind opposition. And one of them that really stood out to me was this belief of his that in order to win, you have to have aggressive demands and stick to them. So it's all about holding your line and saying, we don't want a single wind turbine in our community. It's not about taking concessions like...David RobertsWait, not preemptively conceding things, not going in saying: We're reasonable, we want to find a reasonable middle. Wow, interesting, interesting, interesting...Michael ThomasSo they basically just say, we don't want a single project or a single turbine to go up. And this is part of what creates such a toxic discourse in local communities because there's no attempt at compromise, which is, I think, a really important thing for local communities when they're debating these things. And instead they aim for either outright bans of wind energy through these local ordinances or setback requirements that require a wind turbine to be cited something like 2000ft from a home or like 2000ft away from one another. And when you play this out, wind companies just can't create a project in a community like that. So it's an effective ban — but different language.David RobertsI was aware of this happening, but it's kind of amazing. So the Biden administration has these huge goals for offshore wind and has made a bunch of big announcements and started various processes. And since they have made announcements, they have been sued in every state on the coast. So just so listeners are aware of the scope of this thing, like, there are these anti-wind groups seated in every state where there's wind. So one of the things you wrote about in that story is none of the local media stories about these groups — you know, so like, they propose an offshore wind farm and some sort of like "earnest residence for good things" group starts.And the local media inevitably treats these as spontaneous democratic uprisings of citizens. And it's not that hard — you don't have to dig that hard — to find out that they're all getting funding from the same sort of network. So, A: Do you have any diagnosis of what the hell is wrong with local media? Why won't they tell the story and then B: Tell us a little bit about the State Policy Network, the SPN, on the right and it's sort of network of funding.Michael ThomasSure. So the State Policy Network and the group of think tanks that are members of this are really the core of the fossil fuel funded opposition and a lot of the things that we talked about earlier. So there's a group of, I think it's something like 50 think tanks. They're all set up as 501c3 nonprofits and they're in states across the country. And if anyone's read Jane Mayer's amazing book on this topic — Dark Money — about the Koch brothers efforts to try to prevent climate policy from passing in the country, you'll know that a lot of fossil fuel billionaires were involved in setting up these nonprofits.So a lot of the think tanks in the State Policy Network were either co-founded with the Koch brothers or given initial seed funding by the Koch brothers, who run — I'm sure all of your listeners know — Koch Industries, one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the country. And since then, the Koch brothers continue to fund a lot of these nonprofits. But so do dozens or hundreds of billionaires that are in other extractive and dirty industries around the country and don't want to see climate policy pass. So the State Policy Network is the organizer of all of this so that they can take learnings from one state and pass those through to the rest of the states.So most recently, a group of bills that I saw that passed through the State Policy Network was some of the preemption bans on local governments that wanted to ban natural gas in buildings. So it's no coincidence that all of those preemption bans had similar, or in some cases the exact same language. It's a combination of the State Policy Network and then ALEC, the American Legislative... — I'm going to butcher the acronym — but there's basically the State Policy Network doing the 501c3 kind of research and then ALEC writes the policy and gives it to legislators to pass. So that's some background on state policy.David RobertsThat's worth just emphasizing briefly. It's not just that these groups get sort of standardized scripts and directions for how to oppose things. There's a whole network of right wing groups that has these sort of model bills, model legislation, model for every level of government, so that these groups don't have to investigate policy or write their own policy, right? They just take the template and change a few keywords. So it makes things very easy. It's very easy for these groups. Every step is worked out for them. PS.: It's the American Legislative Exchange Council that is incredibly difficult to remember.Michael ThomasYes, thank you.David RobertsProbably on purpose, right? I mean, it's meant to be bland and forgettable.Michael ThomasYeah. Jane Mayer read this article where she did some reporting on the State Policy Network. And there was an internal meeting between these think tanks where the head of State Policy Network described their strategy and their model, like "The Ikea of Conservative Policy" where you just, like, grab all your parts and pieces and assemble them...David RobertsExactly!Michael Thomas...yourself and then pass the bill.David RobertsAll you need is the Allen wrench and everything else is there for you.Michael ThomasShe's also described that kind of ecosystem as — like an assembly line where groups fund colleges first and universities that do research on something like climate policy or climate science. So the Koch brothers are giving millions and millions of dollars to universities and then the think tanks take the ideas from those universities and they turn them into policy ideas. And then ALEC and legislators that have been given money by these billionaires, they craft the actual policy and the legal language and then they fund the politicians who end up voting for those and it becomes an assembly line of conservative and anti-climate policy.David RobertsIt's like a vertically integrated Ikea that owned its own supply chain and like its own customers, you know what I mean? It's like a full ecosystem. And so this seems notable, right? So why doesn't the media note it? I mean, it's a little insane. It seems like the first thing you'd do if you ran across one of these citizen groups, is be like, I wonder where this came from. Who's funding these people? But they don't even seem to ask.Michael ThomasYeah, and it's important because the State Policy Network think tanks are setting up campaigns and are giving legal support to these groups. So they're very much intertwined and it's very much an effort by the fossil fuel industry through these nonprofits to block this policy. Just to give an example, one of the groups I'm currently writing a story on, Caesar Rodney Institute, they sent out 35,000 mailers in 2018 to residents all along the coast that were going to see one of these wind projects. And they sent them all of the misinformation that I mentioned earlier that I saw in these Facebook groups and then also a call for financial support.And they ended up raising $50,000 from these residents. They got 700 residents to join the group that they set up that had a very local grassroot name to it. It's like, Save Our Coast. And so now this group can in some ways legitimately say that we have 700 residents from the community who don't want this project to exist when they've really manufactured that opposition using money from fossil fuel companies to do it. So, of course, Caesar Rodney Institute got an award from the State Policy Network for this. It was one of the best communications campaigns of 2020.David RobertsAnd it is too. I hate it. You hate to say anything positive about this, but this is all brilliant. I mean, it's all so well done. Well done evil.Michael ThomasIt's incredibly effective. And so to your question of why the local media in these communities aren't covering this, I think this is a part of the larger story of the collapse of local news in America. So there's a part of this that is the story of these hedge funds, or what are known as Vulture Funds, who go and buy up local papers and gut them, fire all the journalists. And suddenly a newsroom that used to have 20 people has two people, and they just graduated from college. So that's not going to produce the best reporting. And then you also have a media environment that is encouraging really quick stories, getting stuff out every single day and not doing deep reporting.So it's just hard to catch this when you get a press release. You turn that press release into an article and hit publish two hours later and that's the environment we're in.David RobertsWell, it seems like a concerted — I mean, I'll return to this later. I don't want to get into it now. — But it seems like a concerted effort to push this information so that local journalists had access to it could be done, say, by a clever billionaire on the left. But before we get to that, one of the twists of messaging lately is something you call Woke Washing. Let's just touch on that briefly. This is from something that the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is one of these right wing think tanks in the State Policy Network. Another incredibly forgettable name, but it's one of the campaigns they're running. Tell us a little bit about what Woke Washing means.Michael ThomasYes. So Emily Atkin — Heated, another Substack publication — and I ran a story recently about the Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF, and one of the things that we looked at was how they're using environmental laws to block offshore wind projects. And a couple of the laws they're using are NEPA and the Endangered Species Act. And it's worth noting that TPPF in the Trump years was basically attacking these same laws, saying that they're preventing the country from building the energy that it needs and they're destroying the economy.David RobertsThe right has been attacking those laws since the sixties and seventies when they were passed, right?Michael ThomasYeah. So TPPF took a pretty dramatic turn when Biden got in office and has suddenly become one of the biggest advocates for the Endangered Species Act and NEPA. And most recently, they funded a group of local fishermen on the East Coast who wanted to sue the Biden administration over their offshore wind leases. And in the lawsuit, they didn't make a lot of commercial claims. It wasn't necessarily about the fishing. It was really all about how these wind farms were going to further endanger the North Atlantic right whale, which is an endangered whale — of course an endangered species and needs to be protected.But there's a whole process that a lot of environmental groups like NRDC and Conservation Law Foundation have signed off on and signed an agreement with the developers of these projects. And there are a lot of measures taken to make sure that the construction of these projects don't further endanger those whales, but TPPF is suing the Biden administration using these laws and really just trying to slow these projects down. So the term Woke Washing came up when we interviewed a disinformation expert, and she used this term to describe when far right groups use the language of justice to basically fight for injustice and against environmental law.So you're using the language of the environmental movement to prevent its goals.David RobertsGod, it's effective too, because some of these concerns are not baseless. Like you say, if you're going to protect the right whale, you do need to take measures. So if any of these groups cared about constructively engaging — The concerns are plausible enough that I can see how they work quite well.Michael ThomasYeah.David RobertsIt's very devious.Michael ThomasIt's also another example of where these groups are pushing for the far extreme solution and not compromise. So in these lawsuits, the end of them says that the plaintiff's request or the plaintiff's claim is that they want all projects that are associated with this new streamlined offshore lease program that was started in the Obama years. They want all of those projects to be stopped entirely. So that's every single offshore wind project in America, and we're talking about tens of gigawatts of power. And so they're not asking for what the environmental groups asked for when they were trying to protect the right whale, which is just some mitigation efforts and some changes to how they were going to construct the farm. They're trying to kill every single project in America.David RobertsOrganizing these groups — these citizen groups on Facebook — is of course not the only way of reaching people on Facebook. There's also just Facebook ads. So in that respect, let's talk about PragerU, Prager University — it makes me laugh to say the word university associated with this, but nonetheless that's what it's called. Tell us about Prager and PragerU and the sort of revelation that one of their co-founders have and how they sort of implemented that in practice.Michael ThomasSo PragerU is a nonprofit media company that was started by Dennis Prager, who was a conservative radio host, still is, but has been doing this for about 30 years. And when I was in these local opposition groups on Facebook, I noticed a lot of their videos popping up and so I wanted to dig in and learn more about PragerU. I watched a lot of YouTube and have for many years, and so I was already a little bit aware of the channel because...David RobertsThey're everywhere.Michael ThomasYeah.David RobertsIt's everywhere.Michael ThomasAnyone who spends time on YouTube will say that.David RobertsThey come up on my feed. My son sees them fly by all the time. They're ubiquitous.Michael ThomasYeah, they target eleven and twelve year old. You see these stories, parents around of like, what is this group doing sending my son these ads of PragerU? So I looked at their YouTube channel and tried to find all the videos that were related to climate and energy, ended up finding about 20 of them. And the titles of these videos kind of give away the message like, it's so simple. One of them is: "Fossil fuels: Greener than you think". The whole message of this video, which is delivered by Alex Epstein, who wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, is that fossil fuels are clean, they're good for the environment, and that everything you've heard from environmentalists is wrong.And other videos include claims that clean energy is really bad for the environment. These are delivered by people like Michael Shellenberger and Bjørn Lomborg, and they're again making misleading claims based on real problems like wind turbines kill endangered birds, or clean energy projects are built using materials that create environmental harm.David RobertsOne of the interesting things you mentioned in the story is that they were sort of big into the straight up climate-denial business, but then Facebook and Google passed policies saying you can't do the straight up climate-denial anymore. And that sort of created a pivot. Talk about that a little bit.Michael ThomasYeah, so after many years of creating videos with claims like, there's no evidence that CO2 causes climate change, which is of course not true, Facebook and Google changed their policies not to limit their videos. So their videos are still on these platforms, but they limited the ability for them to use ads to promote them. So I looked at Facebook's ad transparency tool and I looked through PragerU Form 990 IRS documents, and I found that they were spending tens of millions of dollars per year promoting videos on Facebook and Google.David RobertsWild.Michael ThomasThat's in part how they were able to reach 100 million people with these videos about climate change, fossil fuels being good, clean energy being bad. And I also looked into where they got the money because PragerU is a nonprofit and trying to figure out, like, is there any connection here between fossil fuel companies? And sure enough, what I found was that in 2013, PragerU received a $6.25 million grant commitment from the Wilks brothers in Texas who started FracTech, a fracking company, and they gave them a huge amount of funding to make their videos. It's worth, just for reference, pointing out that PragerU at the time was bringing in about $400,000 a year.So this is a huge amount of money for them at the time. And as a part of this, two members of the Wilks family joined the board. And then shortly afterwards, they started making these videos about climate change and clean energy and fossil fuels. And the members of the family were still on the board while they were making them.David RobertsYeah, but then to get back to the policy, the anti-denialism policy, they sort of have pivoted. And this seems like — it's hard not to see the whole right as a school of fish sometimes — but it seems like they've all kind of pivoted away from the hard denialism toward the kind of Shellenberger-style, Lomborg-style "green energy isn't green" message.Michael ThomasYeah. And PragerU has definitely started to do this and they are basically able to get around the new policies by Google and Facebook that have limited their ability to spread those pure climate denial videos and are now promoting the videos that say that clean energy isn't good for the environment, which, of course, is going to be almost impossible for these tech companies to regulate. Because what's the difference between a legitimate NPR story about a problem that we really need to figure out and need to solve around the environmental impact of some of this mining for rare-earth materials and the impact it's having on local communities? What's the difference between that and PragerU's video pointing it out but turning a little bit of spin and maybe putting some misleading claims in it?David RobertsYeah, it's one thing to police outright falsehoods, but you really cannot police good faith, right? There is no algorithm for separating good faith from bad faith claims in these videos. So there's no real way to systematically — it seems to me, I mean, maybe you've thought of something else — but it seems to me like there's just no systematic way to stop this stuff or block it or even flag it. There's no real mechanism to do anything about it directly. Am I wrong about that?Michael ThomasNo, I think this is just a really hard problem to solve. I think that there's definitely ways to prevent some of it or there's better solutions out there between some of these tech companies. Like the last couple of weeks has shown us with Twitter that there's a lot of different approaches that tech companies can take before being legally required to do something. Facebook and Google have said that they're going to flag climate misinformation. They aren't doing a great job — have a lot of room for improvement. They've said that they won't let people spend to promote climate denial in their videos.But then now you have Twitter and Elon Musk just unleashing a free-for-all of what he says is free speech but in a lot of cases is hateful rhetoric and in the case of climate change, just misinformation and lies and unsurprisingly, people like Jordan Peterson have come back and are posting a lot of stuff about climate change with claims like CO2 is good for the environment and climate change isn't happening. And so I think there's definitely a lot that these tech companies can do and Twitter is evidence that what they do has a real impact and can limit some of the spread of these ideas. But another thing that I ran across in some of my research — that some tech companies have started to experiment with — is this idea of pre-bunking where you basically expose people to facts about climate change before they click a link that has known misinformation on it.David RobertsYeah.Michael ThomasAnd this comes out of some research out of Yale, I believe, and the impact of that in some studies seems to be good, but definitely not perfect and doesn't change people's opinions in a big way. So it's definitely not a panacea.David RobertsWe here on the left come to this dilemma again and again, which is you don't just want to be thinking about how to suppress other people's speech. That's an uncomfortable kind of place for us to be. That's not you know, you're constantly sort of dancing up against ethical quandaries and people who make those videos, what are you going to argue with them about whether it's good faith or bad faith. They can say it's good faith and — you know what I mean — so there's no — it seems like the root of trying to suppress their speech is fraught.I mean, A: ethically fraught, and B: on a practical level just doesn't seem to be very possible. But then, of course, you read all these studies about misinformation which tell you that once this kind of information is in someone's head, it is almost impossible to root it out. No matter how many good facts you throw in the wake of bad facts, it's almost impossible to change people's minds. And you read all these studies that, say, being exposed to these talking points again and again, even in the context of seeing them debunked, lodges them in your freaking head.So you end up — even if you see a thing debunked again and again — the talking point sticks in your head and you end up sort of like believing it. So it's this horns of a dilemma that the left is on again and again, which is misinformation seems to work, but there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to stop or suppress it.Michael ThomasYeah, there's a famous study on this that I'm sure you're referring to, which is around some ads that Listerine ran in the 70s where they internally knew that Listerine wouldn't do this, but they ran these ads that said that by using Listerine mouthwash, you could prevent the common cold. Or if you got a cold, it was a really good remedy. And they sold tons of listerine this way. They ran all these TV ads with moms telling their kids, come on over, need your listerine. So the FTC caught them and sued them and ended up making them, as a part of the lawsuit, run ads that basically said, sorry, we were wrong and correct the claim. This is definitely a different time of...David RobertsImagine!Michael Thomas...communications and regulation, but even after running this multimillion dollar campaign to sort of correct the record, people, when they were surveyed, still believed that Listerine would prevent or was a good remedy for the common cold. And it was something like 80% of people still believed that Listerine had these effects. So this is a famous study in misinformation science and it just speaks to how difficult it is to change people's minds once that information has hit them.David RobertsYeah, so I guess here's where I kind of come around on this. If we think that trying to get tech platforms to uniformly impose standards of accuracy on all the trillions of bytes of information that pass through them seems kind of impossible, and changing people's minds after they've already seen this stuff is very difficult. It just kind of seems like the only solution you're left with is do the opposite, right? Get good information into people's hands. So here's my question to you, and there's no good answer to this question, so I don't expect you to have one.But on the right, okay, you've got these billionaires. They funnel tons and tons of money and establish this broad network of think tanks, which then go on to share lessons about how to oppose these things they don't like, which they funnel down to local groups, which are more or less kind of disguised as spontaneous citizen groups. And you got other people on the right, got Prager alone spending like $20 million in the last four or five years on Facebook ads so that they become — they get their message out ubiquitously on Facebook. So, as we've discussed, there's this entire coherent ecosystem of right wing — and this is of course — all of this is just clean energy entering this ecosystem.But this ecosystem goes way back. They've been building this forever. They've been using it against all the things they don't like. This is just sort of like clean energy getting absorbed into that Borg. So my question is, what is the analog on the left among people who support renewable energy? Is anybody — are there any billionaires? Where are the billionaires? Is there a network of think tanks that I'm not aware of? Are there astroturf groups, pro renewable energy astroturf groups? Is there someone spending $20 million on pro-renewable energy Facebook ads? Is any of this mirrored on the left?Michael ThomasSo I think one of the good things that the climate movement has going for it is that the facts are on the movement side and the science.David RobertsIt's such a tiny weapon, Michael. That's the least effective weapon in the whole war.Michael ThomasI mentioned it, though, because I think that there's a lot of free media, if you will, that comes by reporters and documentaries and all this stuff that has really brought climate change into the public's awareness in the last ten years. I think that is largely a result of media going back, of course, to The Inconvenient Truth and some of the advocacy of Al Gore. But now Netflix has all of these documentaries. Whenever I talk to my friends who are not in this world, they'll tell me that they learned about clean energy and climate change from a Netflix documentary.But to me — to more directly answer your question, like more overt attempts to change minds or to influence advocacy. There's a YouTube channel that I've been watching for the last year that's become pretty popular called Climate Town and it's a John Oliver, Steven Colbert style of humor all focused on climate change and clean energy and the fossil fuel industry's attempts to block clean energy. Rollie Williams started this channel and had a career in stand up comedy and decided to use his skills to fight the good fight. And his videos have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views spreading messages like my first time when he made a video about the negative health impacts of gas stoves and talking about alternatives like induction cooktops.So that's one channel. He's recently partnered with nonprofit Climate Changemakers that does climate advocacy and trains people on how to be effective advocates in their local community and also in federal politics.David RobertsI was going to say like the missing piece — what would happen on the right is, if a promising YouTuber emerged and got hundreds of thousands of clicks for spreading their message, they would be descended on by a swarm of people, giving them money and setting them up so that they could do it on a bigger level forever and never have to worry about money again. They would be immediately absorbed into the right wing money train.Michael ThomasRight? Yeah.David RobertsWhere's the analog for that? That's what's missing. It's not, you don't have tons of creative, interesting young people out doing cool things. Where is the infrastructure of money and organization that finds them, elevates them, supports them, connects them with one another?Michael ThomasYeah.David RobertsWhere is that, Michael? I don't know why I'm demanding this with you.Michael ThomasWell, I will also just make a shameless plug and say that I am launching a YouTube channel in the coming weeks and am planning to produce Vox style explainers to kind of speak to your alma mater. I think their YouTube channel is amazing and reaches millions of people.David RobertsIt's fantastic.Michael ThomasAnd what I'm planning to do is turn some of these investigations that I've done on PragerU for example — is going to be the first video — and try to get them in front of large audiences and put in a lot of production value to it. So I'm hoping to be able to sort of counter some of those messages.David RobertsWell, let's talk in a year and see if any left wing billionaires have gotten in touch with you. After you do that for a while, I'd be very curious.Michael ThomasYeah, another effort that I think is really valuable and again to talk about your alma mater Vox. I was recently reading some stories in their column Future Perfect about the future of plant-based diets and really talking about the environmental and other ethical harms that are caused by the meat and dairy industry. And I noticed as I was reading that that project has been supported by donors and so I know that Vox doesn't take any money and then let those donors...David RobertsIncluding some uncomfortable donors...Michael ThomasOh, interesting.David RobertsFuture Perfect got a lot of money from Sam Bankman-Fried. That's a whole different subject.Michael ThomasOh no, really?David RobertsJust goes to make my point, like even when we try to do the "left wing billionaire funds — good messages things", it somehow still turns into a dumpster fire. We need better billionaires, I think.Michael ThomasYeah, or no billionaires might be the best solution.David RobertsBillionaires working toward a world where there are no billionaires.Michael ThomasYeah, but yeah, I think — to just get to your point, I don't think that environmental groups have figured this out. And I think that the right is so much more effective at getting people emotionally charged. And I think evidence of this is if you look at some of the local communities where these fights are happening over clean energy, even though there's so much information out there on the benefits of clean energy and the problem of climate change. In the example I saw most recently of a community in Michigan, last week, this community polled at like 55% of people support clean energy in their community.But someone sent me an image of the township meeting where they were voting on it, and there was hundreds of people packed in an auditorium and this Person told me...David RobertsWere they old and white, Michael?Michael ThomasThey were all old and white, and only three of those hundreds of people were there to support the clean energy project. So I think that speaks to how much emotion plays in this. Like if you hear about how clean energy has some benefits and it might provide some tax base for your school — it's like you might feel like you support it, but you're not going to feel as emotionally charged as if you see a picture of a wind turbine on fire or think that it's going to cause your kids cancer. And unfortunately, that's what the right is doing.David RobertsI've said this so many times on this podcast, might as well say it again, intensity wins in politics. This is a point you're sort of making again and again. Like a large group of mildly supportive people is useless in the face of a small group of intensely motivated people because intensely motivated people make noise and politicians hear noise. Politicians cannot distinguish large groups from small groups. All they hear is noise. And if you make a lot of noise, you win. And this is something I talked with David Fenton, the left PR guy on a pod a while back, and this is something he told me again and again.Like in the green groups, there are millions, hundreds of millions of dollars floating around through these groups and they produce endless sort of studies and white papers and reports and do sort of behind the scenes policy work, but they just don't spend on propaganda — to use the charged term for it. They don't go out and spend $20 million buying Facebook ads. And the point he made is like, it's not that expensive to buy a bunch of ads on Facebook to buy an ad in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal to buy ads to carpet the sort of metro stations in DC where policymakers are walking around. It doesn't cost that much and they have a bunch of money.They just are not habituated to act that way. And so I hope that, among other things, your work here sort of showing how this ecosystem works and showing how well it works, will just, like, knock someone's head together who's funding these left groups and cause them to get in the business of communicating and trying to change the public's mind instead of just putting out facts like you say, like good reports, like spreadsheets on the tax impacts and just hoping people take those facts and translate them themselves into emotion. You've got to give people the emotion. You've got to do some communicating and propagandizing and we're doing none and they're doing an amazing amount coordinated across the entire country.Michael ThomasCan I ask a question of you and see what are your thoughts on an effective version of this on the left that I've seen that's very controversial?David RobertsOh, sure.Michael ThomasSo I haven't made up my mind on this debate. But something that has been hotly debated in the climate community over the last year is a lot of the rhetoric around the world is ending; climate change is going to wreak havoc on the planet; your kids lives are going to be terrible because of climate change. These like kind of over the top types of rhetoric. I listened to Adam McKay on your podcast — he came on a couple of times — and the second time when he was talking about Build Back Better, I was just struck by how he was kind of taking this extreme stance of climate change and at the time I was thinking Build Back — or the Inflation Reduction Act rather — was a great bill.But after this conversation I'm wondering if that rhetoric is needed and if the sort of emotionally charged language is maybe more effective than some of the debates around permitting reform around the policy and all that. But I guess just to ask the question, do you think that some of that rhetoric and the exaggeration maybe of how bad climate change will be, is effective?David RobertsI, like you, am ambivalent about it. I think my take is it's a little bit like one hand clapping. I think fear does motivate people. I think the idea that fear doesn't motivate people is just ludicrous. Like fear motivates people to do all sorts of things. But you need — I mean this is — the problem is on both the right and the left, it's just much easier to oppose things and it's just much easier to gin up emotion in opposition to things. This is one of the reasons that the climate activist movement sort of seems drawn inexorably to fighting pipelines and fighting things and fighting wells and all these things because you can get people in the streets for that.That's why the Keystone Pipeline, despite its sort of irrelevance in the grand carbon picture, sparked a whole giant march and a whole giant movement because people are fired up by opposing things. And the riddle to me, which I do not know the answer to, is how, if you're a PragerU or if you're a left wing billionaire, how to spark passion and real fire in favor of things. In favor of building things, right? Because we got to pivot now to building things. You know this we've been talking about this online. The whole movement needs to pivot to building a shitload of stuff like we got to build faster and more than we've ever built in our lives.And so how do you create passionate fired up support such that people will go to these meetings and yell and scream in support of building things? And I just hate to end this podcast on a note of bafflement but I really don't know. Do you have any ideas?Michael ThomasLike you, I am not overly optimistic on some of this but I think there's probably enough cynicism or pessimism out there. So maybe just to end on some inspiring note, I think the most recent abundance movement or supply side progressivism that some of the folks like Derek Thompson at the Atlantic and Ezra Klein at New York Times now are talking about is really important. I think that the left has probably become too skeptical of technology and in some cases for really great reasons. But I think that we need to start talking about a really beautiful and amazing future that we can build.And we need to continue to focus on how much harm there will be from climate change and how bad it could be. Because I do think fear motivates. But we also need to give people that picture of the future. That's inspiring. And I think some nonprofits that are starting to do this in terms of communications and policy or groups like Rewiring America and other groups that are talking about how the clean energy transition represents one of the most amazing opportunities to really build this beautiful, clean future that could raise incomes for people and make all of our lives a lot better.And I don't think that we talk about the benefits of that or paint that picture for people. Because if we built this sort of clean energy utopia that I think is in a lot of our optimistic vision, we would be talking about ideally not sitting in traffic for nearly as many hours as we do if we built great public transit. Like if you've ever been to countries like Japan or the Netherlands, you know that there's this other model that we can have and it's incredible. Like sitting on a train reading a book instead of sitting in traffic sucking up nitrogen dioxide emissions is pretty incredible.And to be able to save millions of lives by reducing fossil fuel pollution and to hopefully use the clean energy transition as a way to shift power and give it to the people who don't have power and who have been marginalized. I think that represents this incredible utopia that we probably don't talk about it enough and I think that that can be motivating and can get some people to act. So I won't put my own but in there — that sort of naive optimism.David RobertsI'm struggling to contain my own but there. So we'll leave it there in a happy place. If there are any liberal billionaires out there listening, that's a good place to channel your money. If not there somewhere else. Please do something. Please witness this network of moneyed groups and intellectual launderers and quasi local groups that have mobilized against you and do something.Michael ThomasAbsolutely. And maybe just to make one more call to action that I think everyone can do — to share a really quick story. Over the holidays, I decided I was finally going to talk about climate change more with my family and talk about some political topics.David RobertsI hope you read all the articles "How to Talk to Your Family about Climate Change". There's about 5000 of those out there.Michael ThomasI did. And I was honestly a little skeptical of some of this, but had been hearing this from people like Dr. Katherine Hayhoe and the importance of talking about climate change. And so I brought this up and also the importance of plant based diets and how bad the conditions for that turkey that we ate were and how it was in a terrible environment, which was a little bit uncomfortable as the turkey was sitting there — to maybe just paint a picture of my Thanksgiving. But my brother pulled me aside the next day and he's much more conservative and hunts a lot and does not talk to people about climate change often so very different politics than me.But he was really pushing back and asking me some questions and I was answering and not really holding back and talking about climate change. And he called me a couple of days later and he said, hey, so I was looking into getting a new car and I was planning on just getting this truck. But after our conversation I got really excited about electric vehicles and so I'm getting an EV and he sends me a text a couple of days later with a picture of this new car. And then I saw him another couple of days later and he says, after our conversation, I was just thinking a lot about the importance of eating less meat.And so I decided I'm going to start eating less meat and I'm going to start talking to my friends about it because they don't really hear about this stuff as much. And I think it's important. And of course, I'm like sobbing happy tears at this point, but it was this really beautiful moment and I think that's something that we can all do, even if we don't have a billion dollars. We can just talk about the stuff and talk about the benefits of climate action and clean energy with our friends and our family.David RobertsYeah. Each one teach one. Thank you, Michael, for diving into this squalid area and wading through bad YouTube videos to bring us all this information. And thanks for coming on.Michael ThomasThanks so much for having me. It was a really fun conversation.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time. 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

In this episode, scientist Sam Calisch, whose company just introduced an induction stove with a built-in lithium-ion battery, and Wyatt Merrill of DOE, who helped secure funding for the project, talk about the exciting opportunities that stoves with embedded batteries might offer for chefs, consumers, grid operators, and more.(PDF transcript)(Active Transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn the last few months, two separate fledgling companies — Impulse and Channing Street Copper — have announced the upcoming release of a new product: an induction stove with a lithium-ion battery built in. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is actually a peek into a whole new world of possibilities.Embedding batteries into appliances opens up all kinds of intriguing opportunities. A stove with a battery can deliver more power at the point of cooking. It can continue working when the power grid goes out. And it can serve as distributed storage to assist in grid stability.To explore the new world of battery-enabled appliances, I contacted two experts. The first, Sam Calisch, helped start Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on national electrification. He also worked at Otherlab with previous Volts guest Saul Griffith, from which he helped launch Channing Street Copper Company, where he is chief scientist. Channing’s first product is a stove with a battery (for now, there’s a wait list, and they’re only selling in the Bay Area).My second guest is Wyatt Merrill, who works at the Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office, where he manages programs related to building electrification. He was instrumental in helping Otherlab secure more than $2 million in funding from DOE to help launch the Channing stove project. I am excited to talk to Sam and Wyatt about the merits of embedding batteries in stoves, the things battery-enabled stoves allow consumers to do, and the future grid benefits battery-enabled appliances could yield. With no further ado, Sam Calisch and Wyatt Merrilll. Welcome to Volts. Thank you guys so much for coming.Sam CalischGreat to be here.Wyatt MerrillThanks for having us. A long time. First time.David RobertsAwesome. Sam, I want to start with you putting aside the stove for a moment. Take us back to your work. You've been doing work with Otherlab. You've been doing work with Rewiring America. You're big into the whole Electrification of America thing. You're very immersed in that whole business. Tell us how all that work led to this idea and this proposal.Sam CalischGreat question. So, as you say, I've been spending the last few years really going deep on electrification, both from a technology perspective, which is the majority of my background, but also from a policy perspective, and worked really hard on a lot of the stuff that went into the Inflation reduction act. And so about two years ago, my friend Saul Griffith and I, we were working on this book called "Electrify Together" with our friend Laura Fraser, and we're doing a bunch of data analysis for it, looking at trends in cost of the technologies related to electrification. And the thesis of that book is that we kind of have all the technology we need today and we just need to deploy it.And David, you've done a really good job getting this idea out there. I think you said electrification is the main course. Right. Which I really enjoy. And so it's mostly true that we have what we need today. We just need to deploy it. But there's certainly technology developments that we can do that will make it faster, better, cheaper.David RobertsRight.Sam CalischAnd one of the trends that we were really disturbed about was all these costs were coming down. Like, if you read Bloomberg New Energy Finance, you see battery prices approaching $100 a kilowatt hour, all of this. But if you actually looked at what it cost to install those, to put them on your house or something, those prices weren't coming down. And it was mirroring a very familiar story from residential solar, where now the hardware cost of residential solar is really cheap. It's something like $0.26 a watt for the actual hardware, but it's closer to $3 a watt to put it on your house.And we were seeing the same thing happen with batteries and to do what we needed to do. Those trends couldn't continue. And so we started thinking about ways to get around that. And this idea emerged what we now call energy storage equipped appliances or ESE, or if you're feeling cheeky, maybe easy appliances where you can put a battery into an appliance in a factory instead of putting a battery on your house. And by doing that, you can do it really cheaply and really safely when you put it on your house in a sort of a bespoke way.You need to have a site plan. You need to get a permit. You need to have someone come out and do custom electrical work. You have to get it inspected. All these things just add tons and tons of cost. So we said, well, what if instead of doing that, we allow batteries to be installed in appliances in a factory at the cheapest possible cost? And then they kind of come into your house, kind of like a trojan horse inside of the appliance, and all of a sudden you have this battery backup, this ability to use more renewables to power your life, this ability to make it easier to electrify.And you didn't have to do all that custom, expensive work.David RobertsRight. You submitted a proposal to the DOE, right?Sam CalischThat's right. So we kind of wrote this idea up, and fortunately, our proposal found its way to Wyatt and some other folks who thought there was some potential inside of it and recommended it for award.David RobertsThat's a good hand off to Wyatt. So, Wyatt, tell us what you're doing at DOE, kind of what your team is doing and how you found this and why it grabbed you.Wyatt MerrillSure. I'll start with, kind of broadly, my role and the role of the team that I'm part of. I'm in the Building Technologies Office. I'm part of the Emerging Technologies Program in the office. And that office is one of a number of tech offices that comprises energy efficiency and renewable energy, or eer under DOE. So it's org charts on charts. So just to give you an idea of kind of where the project lives in DOE, so broadly, what I work on is R&D across a lot of different technologies. This is one project out of dozens that I manage.David RobertsThese are all related to building technology, though?Wyatt MerrillYes, all related to building technologies. And in particular, our Emerging Technologies Program is focused on research and development and sort of pre-competitive, next generation type technologies. So we're always doing like road mapping and analysis for what's coming next to save energy or to make electrification more viable in this particular proposal came as part of our Benefit FOA in 2020. Was the Benefit 2020? I think it was officially on the street in 2021, and that was a pretty broad funding call for a lot of different technology areas. We funded everything from heat pumps to lighting projects and windows and envelope.And there was one topic that I was in charge of for that FOA.David RobertsTell everybody what a FOA is.Wyatt MerrillSorry. A Funding Opportunity Announcement. So there was one topic that was part of that funding opportunity that was a little bit more on the open ended side. But I really wanted to think hard about certain problems that consumers face when they want to electrify. And one of those things was panel capacity and being able to make the upgrades that you might want to make without having to go through the expensive and often time consuming process of upgrading your panel at a minimum, and sometimes even having to run new service and trench new lines out to homes.And that can be a major constraint for certain people. And so I was really looking for creative ways to kind of sidestep this problem. Putting aside questions around national electric code and other kind of bureaucratic constraints, I was really interested in what are some of the technology solutions out there that might make it easier for people to electrify? And when this proposal came across my desk, it was really exciting to me. Not just because, yes, you can get batteries into the home for the purpose of, as Sam said, load shifting and aligning your demand with renewable supply.That's certainly an application. But the big thing that actually I don't think Sam has mentioned yet is you can plug this into 120 volts outlet, which is for many people, a big savings on not having to run, have an electrician come in and run new circuits into the kitchen, and potentially can avoid those panel upgrades.David RobertsHad you heard of or thought of sort of embedded batteries or what was it? ESE easy appliances? Had you thought of that before you saw the proposal? Because this is one of those things which, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, well, duh. But I didn't think of it until I saw it had you heard of it before you saw the proposal?Wyatt MerrillSo I hadn't heard of it specifically in terms of we should put a battery in an induction stove. But there have been some ongoing discussions and we continue to have ongoing discussions around sort of what does the future of home energy storage look like. And a lot of the focus has been on thermal energy storage. And to the extent that we've talked about batteries, it's usually been those larger stationary batteries. But there's been more and more discussion around, well, what if we thought a little differently about this? What if there was a battery in an appliance or in an outlet even?Or how do we take advantage of devices that already have batteries, even, like battery backup systems in, like, emergency lighting? In principle, you could load shift with those if you wanted to. And so obviously there's a lot that goes into that beyond just the technology, the innovation protocols and interoperability standards and code. But in principle, there's, I think, a lot of different ways that you could imagine energy storage taking root in buildings. And so I don't want to say that we thought that this was definitely going to take off. It's been super successful just in the couple of years that we've had the project going, in my estimation.But I think it's one of a number of ways that we're thinking kind of more creatively about batteries. Of course, the other thing is, if you have one in your garage, how do we take advantage of that? With a bi-directional charger.Sam CalischRight?Wyatt MerrillSo there's all these different kind of scales and opportunities, I think, for battery storage that we need to kind of think more creatively about, in my opinion.David RobertsYeah. And one other thing about the DOE program. Is public education a piece of what you do at all, or you just feel like purely immersed in the tech? Because I just wonder, because currently I think it's like 5% of Americans have induction stoves or something like that, 10%. So they're unfamiliar to a lot of people. Is that part of your job or is that somebody else's problem?Wyatt MerrillIt's not a major part of what I work on. I'm mostly focused on the R&D, but it's absolutely part of the broader effort that we have at the Buildings Office and across EERE, and we have partnerships with businesses through Better Buildings and with states and local governments to try to get some of that messaging out. So there are programs that are more focused. I mentioned I was in Emerging Technologies. We have other programs that are focused more on deployment and workforce development and education, for sure.David RobertsLet's talk about the stove. Let's get into the stove.Sam CalischAwesome.David RobertsFirst of all, I know what an induction stove looks like, and I think probably most people do. It just looks like a stove. Where is the battery in the stove?Sam CalischWell, it's funny you say, you know what induction stoves look like? A lot of coverage of induction stove often uses incorrect pictures. It uses pictures of radiant stoves because they actually glow and are sort of more interesting to look at. But induction stoves are just invisible magic stoves.David RobertsI think they're beautiful, like, all the sleek, smooth surfaces. Like I'd love induction.Sam CalischAbsolutely. And then you take them apart, and they're even more beautiful inside.Wyatt MerrillAnd you paint them yellow. Have you seen the stove at Otherlab?David RobertsOh yeah, yes.Sam CalischSo we we've got our demo unit that we take to farmers markets. We cook people grilled cheese and talk to them about induction. This is our version of the public education campaign. It's painted bright yellow and blue, and you can wheel it around the park, and people kind of look at you funny, and that's the goal.David RobertsBut, like, where is the battery in the stove? Is it near the surface? Is it in the back somewhere? I want to get a physical sense of what's going on.Sam CalischOur battery goes down at the bottom. It's kind of where there's a lower drawer underneath your oven.David RobertsRight.Sam CalischThat's the space that we use for a battery.David RobertsAnd how big is it? Can I see the battery if I own the stove? Or is it embedded somewhere where sort of out of the way?Sam CalischYou could definitely see it. I don't think I'll recommend that people go and mess with their batteries or their copper stove, but we're not hiding anything. It's right there down at the bottom.David RobertsBigger than a shoebox. How big is the better physical?Sam CalischYeah, most of the plan form, like, most of the footprint of the stove and maybe like four or five inches thick slab.David RobertsGot it. So pretty big, and I would imagine fairly heavy too.Sam CalischYeah. So that's one reason to put it down low and also to make it kind of a modular component so you can take it off if you need to move the stove around, et cetera. And it's really important to know. These are sealed packs. They've got a robust metal casing around them. So this is about water ingress. This is about making sure they're temperature controlled. But critically, these are lithium iron phosphate packs, which are different than the lithium-ion chemistries that are in a lot of laptops and cell phones. When we think of lithium battery, and you have the vision of fire that's lithium-ion, lithium iron phosphate is an inherently safe chemistry.It doesn't have thermal runaway. It's also an inherently long lived chemistry. You get much more cycles out of it. So the kind of degrating that you experience with your phone is not a feature of lithium iron phosphate.David RobertsWe just had a pod on this on Volts a mere few days ago. So all our loyal listeners are completely up to date on this on LFP batteries. So they're longer lasting, they have a longer charge cycle. They can charge more times. They don't have thermal runaway. They don't catch on fire. Their only really disadvantage, if you call it that, is that they don't have the energy density of familiar lithium-ion chemistries, but in most applications, they have enough energy density. Two separate questions. One is, how powerful is it vis-à-vis cooking? Right? Like, what does it do for your cooking that you can't get out of a non-battery stove?And then secondarily, is it big or powerful enough to meaningfully play a role in, like, if your power goes out and you need some electricity to run your lights or whatever, does it store enough power to be a meaningful part of kind of a larger whole house backup system?Sam CalischYeah. So this battery is about four kilowatt hours in our flagship product. You could think of that as about a third of a Tesla powerwall. And so it is meaningful with respect to your whole homes energy use. Say the power goes out and you have no access to power, you'll be able to run your fridge for about four days. Modern fridges tend to do about a kilowatt hour a day. And depending on how grandiose your meals are during that blackout, you can cook meals for that same amount of time. But the really interesting thing about the battery, or this is actually an interesting thing about our cooking habits generally, so we've taken a lot of data about cooking.You put power meters all over the stove and you measure how much power goes to the burners into the oven, and you get to cook nice meals for the engineering team at the same time. And on average, for sort of like windows of about an hour or so, there's no cooking activities that really draw more than one or 2 kilowatts. That's 1500 kilowatts what you can get from the 110 volts outlet that's already in your kitchen. And so, on average, the power supplied by that relatively meager outlet can totally run all of your cooking activities. It's just these brief moments when we're bringing the pot to boil, or you put the 20 pound bird in the oven, or you really want a lot of flashbang, then you're using way more power.And those short moments are the only reason a conventional induction stove has that huge 50 amp, 240 volts outlet.David RobertsA hilariously familiar story, right? Like, this is the whole electricity system in miniature. Absolutely. You're talking about, right, peak shaving.Sam CalischAbsolutely. And so what all this data collection shows you is that in normal conditions, like, not a blackout condition, in relatively normal conditions, it's basically impossible to run out of battery. We put a big one in there to get you through a blackout, but in normal conditions, there's no sort of range anxiety to worry about.Wyatt MerrillI'll tell you, when we got this proposal in that funding opportunity I was talking about earlier, one of the main things that I heard from the external reviewers because when we go through the process of making selections, it's quite a long process and I won't bore you with the details, but we do have a round of reviews externally. And some people said, what about Thanksgiving dinner? Are people really going to be able to use a stove like this and cook all these different pots and pans on the turkey in the oven all day long? And I think it was sort of an open question at the time that we made the selection.And then, sure enough, this year, if I'm not mistaken, Sam, your team made Thanksgiving dinner on the stove, is that right?Sam CalischWe did. We did a nice pre-Thanksgiving meal with the team and cooked a bunch of really delicious stuff.David RobertsUnplugged, you mean? Because of course you're not going to run out if you're plugged in, right?Sam CalischWell, it's plugged into the 110 volts outlet, the small one.David RobertsRight. So is it the case that you cannot use an induction stove with 110 volts outlet, period? Or is that a hard rule or is that like a guideline?Sam CalischA conventional induction range. So we're talking four burners and an oven. There's no way in hell you would plug that into 110 volts outlet. That would require 240 volts to your kitchen and either a 40 or 50 amp breaker and all the copper through you all to support that amount of current, especially renters looking to electrify. Like, I did this for many years. I wanted induction in my kitchen. And so I just bought a single burner induction. And those you can plug into 110 volts because it's only 1500 watts that you're pulling. And that's okay, even though a single burner on a full size induction range will easily get you up in 3000 watts.And that's just for that flashbang experience of why induction is magic.David RobertsRight? So you've got the battery in the stove that can provide those surges. This brings up a very familiar question, which I'm sure you've heard dozens of times, which is whenever I talk about induction stoves online, in addition to the avalanche of dumb myths about gas stoves.Sam CalischYes.David RobertsThere's also the question of what about my wok? Right. This is the one thing that sort of gas stoves have left. Like the induction stove, especially once the battery is embedded, can deliver more just raw energy now than flame can. So all that's left is the wok. So just for listeners benefit, answer the wok question.Sam CalischSure. I call these the induction whataboutisms, or, you know, more generally, the electrification whataboutisms. And one of our kind of guiding principles at Copper is we're going to solve all of the induction whataboutisms, and that includes the wok. We have some really exciting technology that will let you use a Wok on our stove. And that's about all I want to say about that right now, but yeah, no.David RobertsWell, at least tell me what that looks like. I don't get it. I don't get how it could work because it's about well, there's two things with a wok. One is the curved surface, which is problematic, and the other is you need the really high heat to get that particular kind of flavor and charred thing. So is this an addition to the stove? Is it an extra piece of something?Sam CalischYes, exactly. So this will be an accessory for the stove that allows you to use sort of a wok of your choice.David RobertsOn that theme. As I was thinking about this, if you have a stove that is effectively boosting the power from your wall, it seems like you could design other stuff to plug into the stove. Right. And to run off the stove's battery. So it seems like once you start thinking about this, there's all sorts of accessories you can imagine plugging in to various parts of the stove to enhance kind of the stove's usefulness. Is the wok accessory the only one you've got so far, or is this a family of things you're thinking about?Sam CalischIt's definitely a family of things we're thinking about in the vein of plugging things into your stove. In our flagship product, the pre-order campaign that we just sold out, there is an auxiliary outlet on it which allows you to plug any other thing you want to run on the stove's power system. So kind of the primary use case we think of is plugging your fridge in, and what that allows the stove to do is it can run your fridge when the power is out, and then it could also use that additional load of the fridge for load shifting, for grid support, for things like that. Just having more loads underneath the battery to play with.David RobertsThat's interesting. I guess I was thinking more about cooking accessories, although I don't know exactly what that would look like, but I'm not a cook. Just like it just occurred to me, like you have all this power available, like you could run other power using devices related to cooking off of this thing or integrate them almost somehow. I imagine you don't want to say too much about any of that since it's all in development.Sam CalischYeah, this is a slightly sensitive area, but basically what I'll say is we've got some chefs on staff, we're doing some things I'm really excited about here, and we're going to solve all the induction. whataboutisms? And this is going to be a really great cooking experience that's from the ground up.David RobertsRight. And final stove question, which is just how much is it going to cost? Off the bat, I assume a first in class product is going to be relatively expensive. So what's the cost and what's the story you kind of tell about the cost?Sam CalischSure. Just kind of the facts are for our pre order campaign, these stoves are $6,000. And that may sound like a lot sticker shock, but we got to remember a couple of things. One is that because the battery that's built in is larger than three kilowatt hours, it can qualify for the investment tax credit. That's in the inflation direction act.David RobertsThat's a tax credit for home batteries. Specifically.Sam CalischThat's a tax credit for residential battery energy storage systems.David RobertsGot it.Sam CalischAnd that's a 30% tax credit. So there's lots of issues with tax credits. They are regressive. It's hard for people to claim them, but it's 30% off the top when claimed as a tax credit. Then on top of that, obviously there's local rebates. So in the bay area, bay rent provides $750 rebate for an induction stove. And then the other piece that we have to think about is this cost gets you everything. It gets the stove into your house working. If you go to home depot and buy an induction stove, you then have to schedule an electrician visit, stay home from work, get them to come over and pay them a significant amount of money to run copper from your breaker box to your kitchen for that new outlet.And that's assuming you have the ampacity in your breaker box. If you're upgrading the breaker box, that's a larger project and sort of like chain of potential upgrades start kicking in. So when you factor in those costs in a bunch of cases, this is the cheapest way to get induction. And we're providing all the other sort of energy storage equipped services on top of that, like the ability to run during a blackout, the ability to use renewables, et cetera, et cetera.Wyatt MerrillIt's also perhaps worth mentioning, Sam, I don't know how much you want to get into it, because I know it's still sort of part of the development process in this project. But in principle, if you have time of use rates that you can take advantage of in your area, you could be charging and discharging at certain times, correct?David RobertsRight. I want to talk about that later. Actually, let's let's bracket that for later because I want to talk about the the larger sort of grid questions, just.Wyatt MerrillTo say it has some bearing on the lifetime cost.Sam CalischDefinitely just one last thing on pricing. We've talked to a bunch of municipalities who are running low income housing retrofit programs. These are cities like city of Oakland, city of Berkeley, city of LA, DC. Chicago, New York. They're all running large programs. And we sort of relied on them for some of the data on setting pricing, especially as it involves the cost and complexity of electrical work. And they said if you can sell a stove for $5,000, that's what we're currently budgeting in our programs for induction stove plus electrical work. So coming in at six in the pre order leaves us room to come down for a large buyer like a municipality to be able to take part in those programs.David RobertsRight. And then, of course, if you're involved in public policy, there's also the sort of health benefits of removing a source of pollution from the home. Those health benefits accrue, they're not reflected in the cost of the stove, but they're out there.Sam CalischThat's a great point. A lot of us are familiar with the case for childhood asthma and gas stoves. There's been a really strong link established between these two things. More recently, there's a growing body of evidence for the link between gas stoves and adult dementia. After childhood asthma might be among the most scary things I can think of to have linked to gas stoves.David RobertsYeah, I guess I shouldn't take that for granted. I assume people listening to Volts are probably aware of this. But just to put it on record, there's a large and growing body of evidence that gas stoves inside your home produce indoor pollution that has all sorts of negative effects. And like any form of air pollution, the more it gets studied, the more effects they find. So there's a good reason to get gas stoves out of your home separate from all of these benefits that we're talking about, just to quit poisoning yourself. So you could say there's two strategies here.One is for every home, just bite the bullet, do the big upgrade of the electrical box, of the electrical power system in general, and then just install a big central battery, because you can get all the benefits we're talking about here and more. I think from a central battery you could run things when the power is out, you can provide surges of power when you need extra power more than your outlet can provide, et cetera, et cetera, down the line, all the benefits you could get from a central battery connected to all the appliances in the home. Or the alternative strategy which we're talking about here is sort of bypass that because it's a giant hassle and expensive and then just embed batteries all over the place in homes, in appliances to bypass the need for these upgrades. Does DOE sort of favor one of those over the other?Or do you favor one of those over the other? Or how should we think about those two strategies? Like, does the funding of this mean that sort of DOE is all in on the latter strategy? Or how do you think about the relationship of those two?Wyatt MerrillYeah, sure, I'll do my best to answer and you can tell me if I'm avoiding the question. We are very much in an ongoing process of developing from the buildings perspective, kind of where we're headed with battery storage. There's been a lot of efforts across DOE, of course, when it comes to the battery cell chemistry, when it comes to electric vehicles, manufacturing processes that I'm not really equipped to speak on. And so my answer here is really about batteries in buildings and what that looks like in the future. Speaking personally, I'm sort of agnostic as to how batteries get into buildings.I think it's incumbent on us certainly to think about not only technology solutions but realistic adoption scenarios. And so it's not enough to say like, well, you could do this with a $12,000 stationary battery in your garage and maybe you could do it even better if you had a DC microgrid and you tore it all the wiring and you did everything from scratch. But I want to be creative about thinking about sort of serving all types of buildings and geographies and people in different economic situations. And so that's part of the thought process. The other thing I'll say is that I think it's sort of an open question still whether or not getting batteries into homes is on its face, a decarbonisation strategy.So I think it definitely has the potential to be. But when you think about the entire sort of lifecycle of mining lithium and developing the batteries and shipping them around, you really have kind of a hole to dig out of when you're setting these up in a home. And so my feeling is whether you're talking about a large stationary system or you're talking about some kind of creative integration strategy, like putting it in a stove or putting it you could even imagine it in like a modular wall type construction or outlets or whatever that we're thinking about operationally, how to do the best we can from an emission standpoint. And that becomes a difficult thing.David RobertsIt seems like that would weigh against, not definitively, but at least sort of on the ledger of pros and cons. That would weigh somewhat against multiple batteries, would it not? It seems like you would want from a materials and embedded carbon perspective, you would want to minimize the number of batteries, would you not?Wyatt MerrillThe thing that I come back to is that not all homes need a huge battery in their garage that can island the entire home. In a lot of cases it's really sufficient to control one or two or three peaky loads and make sure that they're not coincidental or make sure that those peaks can be curtailed by a battery. And so oversizing big batteries for the entire home that ultimately have a pretty large embodied carbon component is not to me, always going to be the most effective method for decarbonization. Right? But these things are not just about decarbonization, it's about resilience.It's about economic benefits. If you want to take advantage of time of use rates, as we mentioned, and decarbonization. And I think there's some questions that are yet to be answered about how we can align those priorities and under which circumstances they are aligned.David RobertsRight. So Sam, how do you think about this? Do you think about this as a stop gap until you can upgrade the electricity in your home or do you view it as like a full on different way to go about it, a different strategy?Sam CalischGreat question. And Wyatt roughly just hit a number of the points I was about to make. So that's perfect. This is a full on decarbonization strategy. The way we think about this is we're putting the smallest battery we can at the right place to avoid the most amount of infrastructure upgrades we need to do. So that means targeting the peaky loads like we talked about, and that sets off cascading cost reductions. I've looked at this at a number of places. We're talking a lot about the cost of running copper from your breaker box to your kitchen.There's the cost of upgrading your electrical panel. There's the cost of upgrading the electrical service into your house. Those costs are large. The last one I mentioned, just the electrical service in, I did a study on that and it's estimated to electrify the residential stock of the US. It's a quarter trillion dollars just to upgrade the incoming electrical service for the homes that will need it if we don't do something.David RobertsThat's just new panels for homes that need it. That's it.Sam CalischHonestly, David, that's not even the new panels. That's just the wires coming in. The wires coming in and the distribution transformers on the street.David RobertsThat's a lot.Sam CalischIt's a lot because any time you've got underground wires, you got to retrench. Any time you've got underground wires near natural gas infrastructure, that retrenching is very expensive.David RobertsAnd is there not a shortage of electricians at the moment too? Just to toss that in there.Sam CalischThere's a very large shortage of electricians. You know, electrical contractors would much rather send their workers to larger job sites where they can make a bunch of money. So getting them to roll to your house for your piddley kitchen circuit is going to cost you a couple grand just to get the truck to show up. So we're in the business of hearing horror stories about this because we solve this problem for people, so they like to tell us about it.Wyatt MerrillDavid, I think you can get a lot of similar benefits in terms of a stationary large battery versus maybe a coordinated group of smaller batteries. But if it allows somebody to electrify that wouldn't otherwise electrify, to me, that's sort of a categorical difference in terms of the benefit space. And then one other thing I want to say around the alignment between resilience and decarbonization. It's perfectly valid to want a battery in your home for the purpose of resilience and for the purpose of keeping the lights on or the fridge running or the stove running during a blackout, especially in places now that have scheduled blackouts.And you can count on them like clockwork. That's perfectly valid. But I guess what I want to understand from in terms of the DOE's perspective that you asked about earlier, is, like, if these batteries are sitting idle the other 99% of the time that you're not in a blackout scenario, what can we do with them to really bring some better alignment between supplies from renewable sources and demand? On the other hand.David RobertsYes, indeed. So, Sam, did you have any additions to that?Sam CalischNo. Wyatt said it beautifully, like, roughly, we're looking for the biggest benefit for the smallest battery that's being used most of the time. So we don't want our batteries to sit idle and we don't want to put more batteries than we need.David RobertsGot it. Let's talk about this, then, the ability of batteries to be a tool of decarbonization. I think you sort of raised this earlier and I think it's just worth emphasizing. It's not automatic, right? It's just not automatic that if you just throw batteries out to as many places as possible, you're going to get decarbonization. You need to do certain things and have certain policies in place. And a big piece of that is having the batteries play some role on the grid, not just in your home helping you cook, but that when you're not cooking. And when that battery has some capacity and it's sitting there with power in it and you're not using it.The grid needs to be able to know that that power is there and how much of it it can use and be in dialogue with all those batteries. So tell us just sort of like briefly what policies you think need to be in place to get the most decarbonization benefit out of these distributed batteries that we're putting in appliances and everywhere else.Wyatt MerrillSo I'll say a couple of things and then I'm going to toss it over to Sam, because to be honest with you, I won't be speculating as to policy needs, but I'm happy to let Sam do it. But I will say that there's kind of two things here in terms of aligning the choice to install a battery with decarbonisation. And the first, as we've already touched on, is just, is that battery giving you the ability to electrify that you might not have otherwise had? So, in other words, can you get those direct emissions out of homes?Can you cap gas lines to buildings? And in doing so right away, you've made some impact on the emission picture and then you have to ask, okay, well, what type of electricity is going to be charging this battery? Is it coming from, when does it come from solar? So then the operational carbon becomes an hour to hour question, and it certainly varies geographically in terms of the grid mix. And it's going to vary temporarily over the next ten years as we scale up renewable supplies to the point where this question would not be so pressing. Perhaps in 2035, if all goes well.But it's certainly in the transitional period, we want to be mindful.David RobertsRight, if all the electricity is renewable, a lot of these questions will be mooted.Wyatt MerrillYeah, that's right.David RobertsBut certainly between here and there, we need to use them well. So, Sam, I guess you sort of literally wrote the book on this. So maybe you can take a swing at what needs to be in place for my battery and my stove to be a good grid citizen, a good decarbonizer.Sam CalischI'll start by just noting that even without communicating to the grid, your energy storage equipped appliance is already helping the grid just by your pattern of use. You arrive home, you cook dinner after the sun has gone down. It's likely that in your area this is a peak time of use and you're drawing most of your power from the battery at that point.David RobertsLet me pause you there. When you just start cooking, does it draw on the battery first? Do you have to tell it to use battery power rather than grid power? Or how does it decide?Sam CalischThere are complex control laws that run inside of it to determine what mixture of power sources it gets from where. And so it's not one or the other really, but kind of your ratios and a little bit of it will be user preference. You as a very climate concerned citizen could say, pull no power that was generated during a time likely to be supported by peaker plants and it could implement that. Or you could say, keep me as resilient as possible at all times, keep the battery as full as possible at all times, things like this.So a little bit of this is going to be personal preference.David RobertsYou can program that into the stove somehow.Sam CalischYeah, but the larger point is just that any amount of power sort of absorbed during the day during the solar window and dispensed at night during a peak time is already supporting the grid even before a lot of the more complicated back and forth and price signaling and emission signaling, et cetera.David RobertsOkay, well, that's our baseline, but say we want to go beyond baseline.Sam CalischSure. I think there's a lot of people and to be honest, there's a lot of people that know more about this than me. But doing daily look ahead from the grid operators to know what the projected outlooks of generation mix are going to look like, having those signals dispatched as close to just day ahead is really kind of the stuff we need to make this work really well.David RobertsAnd what about aggregators? Am I still going to be talking directly to the grid or is this mostly going to go through aggregators just for listeners benefit? And aggregators just an entity that makes contracts with dozens or hundreds of small distributed energy resources. Your batteries in your garage or your stove or your car or whatever, anything. All these little behind the meter resources and coordinates them such that they act like a big energy producer or a big energy storage installation, basically like a virtual power plant, it's called. Is that how you see these things working in the future?Are these embedded batteries playing a role in aggregations?Sam CalischYes, absolutely. And so in that case, we would be the aggregator for these devices.David RobertsOh, really? Channing Street is going to get into that biz.Sam CalischYeah. What's interesting, though, is that one of the other main reasons we haven't touched on too much here is that another reason to put batteries into appliances is you then gain access to the much larger market of residential appliances compared to the market of residential energy storage. And so you don't have to have a large market share of stoves. You can have single digit market share of stoves for five years, and you'll have deployed more battery capacity than Tesla has.David RobertsInteresting. You mean Tesla has four home batteries?Sam CalischPer Powerwall, Yes.David RobertsYeah, I hadn't really thought of that. But especially if you can get this so standardized that it just becomes sort of like a standard feature, and people don't have to do it on purpose. They're just buying appliances that naturally have batteries in them.Sam CalischExactly.David RobertsThat's a lot of appliances out there.Sam CalischYeah. These ESE appliances, I think people will buy them for the amazing performance they give. Not necessarily the fact that they have a battery. We didn't touch too much on this. But even outside of stoves, other appliances, there's a lot of really good benefits, even with stoves. You know that annoying buzz some induction stoves make?David RobertsYes.Sam CalischRunning from a battery, you can make that silent.David RobertsWhat, why? How, what?Sam CalischAnd then you get to have the fun conversation that we've now had about EVs about what sounds good in induction.David RobertsRight. So you know the stoves on, right?Sam CalischYeah, exactly.David RobertsHilarious. What makes that noise? PS: Because everybody out there with an induction stove knows what you're talking about, what makes it, and how do you silence it?Sam CalischSo it varies a little bit, depending on the model. But in almost all cases, that noise is an artifact of the fact that that stove is being driven with alternating current, with AC power. So that buzz is the 60 hz signal that you're hearing, making its way all the way through the driving circuitry and into these sort of vibrations of the pan and vibrations of the driving coil, vibrations of the glass. And so when you're running it through a battery instead, a lot of this is happening in a direct current sense, and that buzz can be completely eliminated.David RobertsInteresting. I had not heard that bit. I've heard a lot of people complain about that noise. So this is highly relevant information.Sam CalischThat buzz is terrible. I agree.Wyatt MerrillThis reminds me. I have a separate project, totally unrelated, but looking at interfacing thermal electrics with various appliances, but dishwashers being one of them. And it turns out if you set up a thermoelectric heat pump in a dishwasher, you can eliminate the what do you call it, the mist, the fog that comes out when you open the dishwasher. That, I guess, is a big consumer preference.David RobertsI like that fog.Sam CalischI enjoy it. Yeah, exactly.David RobertsIt's like a little face. So Wyatt and maybe Sam too. But Wyatt first, what other appliances are next? Like batteries are getting small and cheap enough that in theory you could just stick them anywhere, but presumably you'd want to prioritize somehow. So what are the after stoves? What are the next big places where you might want to embed a battery?Wyatt MerrillSo whenever we start a project like this one with Otherlab or Channing Copper, we sit down and we come up with different stage gates that we're going to work on throughout the course of the project. And one of the first ones in that operating plan was to answer the question that you're asking, which is like, which appliances are going to benefit the most from this? And I know we looked at water heaters, we looked at refrigerators. I think it dryers as well. I actually do have some of the results in front of me, but I don't want to steal the thunder of the person who actually did the analysis.So Sam, do you want to speak to that?Sam CalischSure, yeah. So in a lot of cases, the same value proposition can be captured, the avoiding the 240 volts outlet for things that already run on gas. So dryers, good example, gas dryers are common. Gas water heaters are common. Both of these, there's a strong value proposition for avoiding that electrical work. In the case of water heaters, we're already seeing some 120 volts heat pump water heaters hitting the market, Rheem ProTerra unit as an example. It got some buzz earlier this year when it came out, and this is really exciting, but it's important to note that that water heater is not a solution for all climates and all households.It's a warm climate, small household solution. And so there's still a huge unmet need in terms of 120 volts water heaters. And so there's a bunch of room there.David RobertsSo a battery embedded heat pump water heater. That's what we're talking about.Sam CalischYeah. And so the ability to deploy this amazing cost saving heat pump technology without having to rewire your house, the value proposition is strong. The other one I will mention is replacing on demand gas water heaters. If I walk around my neighborhood, it's like every house less than 1000 sqft has a gas on demand water heater on the outside of their building. Those homes don't really have a viable electrification pathway right now. There are electric on demand water heaters, but they are even peakier than stoves. They require three or four separate 30 amp breakers, all with dedicated copper runs.It's cost prohibitive. So if we think about this is an equity issue. If we think about all these houses, they don't have a viable way to get off gas for their water heating because they don't have room for a storage tank.David RobertsSo a battery embedded on demand water heater, then I would think intuitively that the peak demand on an on demand water heater might even be higher than the peak demand from a stove. Or is that wrong? Like, is an on demand water heater a more challenging load than a stove, or are they comparable?Sam CalischIt is actually more challenging generally. I mean, these are generalities. there'll be differences, obviously, but for comparable households, yeah, the peak power running to an on demand water heater is exceptionally high. This can be in the 20 or 30 kilowatt range, whereas an induction range, it might usually be around 10 kw peak.David RobertsBut this is still something you think a battery can handle?Sam CalischYes. Specifically, a battery is a good choice for it because a small amount of battery can really yield a lot of savings because it's these peak times that aren't really that long.David RobertsRight. Wyatt raised this earlier? Why not batteries embedded in your wall, behind your drywall, attached to your outlet, such that anything you plug in the outlet right. Enjoys these benefits?Wyatt MerrillI've seen some proposals for that type of work. I think it's compelling as innovations go. I think there's a lot of questions around fire safety and code that have to be addressed for that to really get off the runway. I hesitate to strongly endorse that approach, but I think thinking creatively about if you can make that installation happen in a factory where they're doing modular type walls, maybe you can do a much better job with all the safety and make sure that it's not going to cause any problems versus somebody doing a custom job on their own home.You might be more concerned embedding that in the wall.Sam CalischWe actually did some design studies on this originally. Fire code is a huge, huge barrier to this. Talk to people who have been through that process and they said, no, no way in hell are you going to get that through. The other point is that this kind of general purpose battery sitting next to an appliance is compelling, but particularly for high power appliances, there's a lot of cost that goes into the power conversion and conditioning needed to go in and out of the battery. And in the case of a lot of these appliances, when you integrate directly with them, you can simply skip a lot of those steps because you know exactly what you're going to be driving.You don't need to do as much voltage conversion, you don't need to do as much inversion. So you save a bunch on cost there and you save a bunch on efficiency, because there's a critical efficiency threshold below which it's really not beneficial to store away energy. It's round trip efficiencies of batteries. DC to DC is something like 90%, but if you look at our national fleet of grid connected batteries, it's more like 80% after. It includes all of those other power conversion losses.David RobertsGot it. Otherlab, if I'm not mistaken, did some modeling, trying to assess what is the sort of decarbonization potential of easy appliances. I'm going to try to make that happen. These ESE appliances, tell us about that. What are we talking about when we look at the big if we could spread this across the nation, what could we get?Sam CalischThe overall potential of energy storage equipment, appliances.David RobertsCorrect. How much decarbonization could we get out of them if we made them ubiquitous?Sam CalischYeah, so I did an analysis of this, and the emissions reductions come in kind of three buckets that are when you run the numbers on it, they're roughly equal in size. Roughly. The first is direct combustion, so we're not burning gas anymore in our stoves and our water heaters, et cetera. So there's a savings there. The second bucket is in methane leaks, which this is another thing where the more we learn about this, the worse we find out it is. And because methane is so potent, as the news cycle is starting to remind us more and more, which is good, little leaks are big problems from a climate perspective.And so avoiding the leaks of the methane supply chain and of the appliances themselves is another huge bucket. And then finally there's what I call the marginal grid emissions or the avoided emissions of the electricity sector that comes from having this additional battery storage supporting it. And when we add all that up, we find that in the US. It's approximately 330,000,000 metric tons per year of technical potential for energy storage equipped appliances.David RobertsWhat are some sort of like, consumer pain points here that we could concentrate on?Wyatt MerrillI don't know if we've covered it thoroughly enough, but I do feel like it's not talked about enough in general. Is this constraint around panel upgrades, and that I think you have an idea in your head of what something might cost you in terms of the end use, but then the infrastructure needed just to supply power to that end use is often not part of the equation. And then when you find out, oh, by the way, it's going to take months and months of permitting and before we can get an electrician to come out and your furnace kicked in the middle of the winter, a lot of people are not going to wait around for that to happen, even if they can't afford it. And a lot of people are going to have trouble affording that upgrade.David RobertsJust to emphasize what you just said, because I meant to mention this earlier, it's well known that people tend to be replacing appliances under stress because their appliance died. And if you have a dead water heater or a dead stove, the idea of waiting several weeks for a panel upgrade is even more of a pain in the ass.Wyatt MerrillYeah, I think that's a big one. And I think a lot of the sort of studies around electrification challenge, if you will, just kind of sweep that under the rug sometimes and then they'll also just upgrade the panel at the same time. And that'll just be just tack on another five grand, and maybe it'll be five grand. Some places it's less than that. In some places it's a lot more than that, especially if you need new service. But then there's also that time factor of, like, not in the middle of the winter, they won't.David RobertsYeah. And honestly, the more I have sort of studied and thought about and read about any sort of upgrade or difference or thing to do in the household that you rely on a consumer to do, you just have to dial back your expectations for what they will do. They don't want to do anything. They will default almost always to the easiest default choice. Even if you're just asking them to make a phone call or just like one extra step, you lose enormous swaths. It's absolutely got to be as easy as possible.Wyatt MerrillYeah. So I have a separate project, not part of the Otherlab work, but a separate project with a couple of our national labs, NREL and Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And it's got a number of partners as well. And the whole point of that project is really to get our arms around this upgrade question of what I think of as the gray area. Right? Because there are certain homes that, yes, no matter how you cut it, they're going to have to upgrade, and there's no way around it. There are some homes that don't need an upgrade, that have plenty of capacity and that might be like newer construction or newer renovations, and then there's people who might be somewhere in the middle there.And my sense is really that that gray area in the middle is not very well defined from the current kind of analysis landscape that's out there. There's been a couple of studies that try to quantify this, and I think we can do a better job. And that's what we're doing right now. So we have this project that I mentioned with a number of components. Part of that's analysis, part of it is looking at even future grid mix and then maybe making recommendations for national electric code revisions to try to make some of these transitions more viable.And then also there's a lot of really interesting ideas around load management, especially digital load management, that, again, might not be code compliant in all places, but have a lot of potential from a technical standpoint to make sure that your dryer and your EV are not charging at the same time. Right. So you run into a situation where you can come up with a lot of creative ideas around avoiding those upgrades, and then there's kind of what's going to be permissible from a code standpoint. What are consumers actually going to want, as you say? What are they going to put up with or do to make the upgrade possible?So that's the big one for me. I'm sure there's a bunch of others we could talk about.David RobertsSam, what do you go you've been immersed in electrifications. I'm sure you've heard every what-about that there is what are some other others on your list?Sam CalischWell, there's the classic, but will the grid handle it? And there's a lot of precedent here that we can lean on, but also we're going to have to do things like distribute storage in order to avoid all of the upgrades that might otherwise be necessary. The one I tell folks a lot is between 1950 and 1970, we quadrupled the amount of delivered electricity in the US. And that was largely through consumer education campaigns. That was Ronald reagan hosting a show sponsored by GE and Westinghouse talking about all his electric appliances in his house. And we don't even need to do that much.We need to deliver two and three times the amount of electricity we do today in our electrified future, and we need to do it in 20 years. So we've already done more than what we need to do. So that's one we can lean on. But not to make it sound trivial, it's going to require a massive build out, particularly of transmission, and we need to rely on things like distributed batteries to avoid all the upgrades to the distribution network that we might otherwise have to do.David RobertsRight. And what about I bet you've heard where I live, grid mix is mostly coal anyway, so how is this helping decarbonization I'm sure you've heard that one.Sam CalischOh, definitely. And the answer there is these electric appliances are inherently efficient. And so in most cases, even if you're exclusively powered on coal, your EV contributes less than your gasoline powered car, your heat pump contributes less than your gas furnace. I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here, though.David RobertsYes. One of my favorite statistics that your friend Saul uses all the time is just the efficiency gains of switching from fossil fuel to electric appliances and cars and everything else. That almost cuts in half the amount of raw energy that you need to put into the economy, which is wild. That is just wild. Which means you can either do 50% more stuff for the same amount of energy right. Or you can dramatically cut the amount of energy necessary. Which is why I think those sort of, like, charts of total energy that's gone to renewables are somewhat misleading.You're just not going to need as much energy.Sam CalischExactly, yeah, completely misleading. A couple of percent of all of our energy needs are spent just moving around natural gas and pipelines. The mining, refining, and transportation of fossil fuels are responsible for a massive amount of our energy expenditures as a nation.David RobertsRight. You don't have to electrify that. It just goes away.Wyatt MerrillIt's also just a very sort of defeatist attitude to say, well, my electricity is coming from coal, so I'm not going to get fossil fuels out of my home. It's like, well do you think it's always going to be coming from coal forever? It kind of suggests that it will always be that way and I think we know that's not the case.David RobertsRight. grids everywhere are improving and the way I try to put it is that like if you have an EV, if you buy a gas car, it's basically the same dirty for its lifetime. Right. It is a set amount of emissions per mile. But the EV you buy because the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner. Your EV is getting cleaner and cleaner every day. You have it, you don't have to do anything. It just is magically getting cleaner all the time. Same for any electric appliance.Sam CalischYeah, it's an appreciating asset. But as you rightfully point out, to get consumers to do stuff, we got to give them multiple reasons. So the climate reason is a great one, the saving money reason is a great one. But I think we also just need to deliver better experiences and luckily electric appliances tend to do that. I just put heat pumps in my parents' house where I'm currently visiting and previously we'd burned wood to keep the house warm my whole life. And this house is more comfortable than it's ever been in my entire life and especially with my aging parents not having to chop and haul firewood.It's the benefits are huge.David RobertsYeah. And I'm curious, this thing is coming out under the market for you. It's a big shift I would think from being a sort of data analytical nerd to being a consumer facing consumer interacting product company. A company with products. Right.Wyatt MerrillI got to tell you David, I actually met Sam for the first time in a program at Cyclotron Road called the Lab Embedded Entrepreneurship Program. So he's actually got all kinds of hidden talents for this stuff. But Sam, you should speak to that.Sam CalischWell, I appreciate that way. Yeah. My background is in the technology but I've always had a passion about the energy data stuff and a lot of that goes back to being friends with Saul and geeking out on data sets together. But additionally there's just hire a great staff to do this. So I'm just so excited about the team we're building. We've got folks who have background building kind of mass mobilization campaigns. So I think there's really exciting stuff that's going to happen and I'm thrilled that we have a great team to do it.David RobertsWell, the purpose of that question and this will be we can wrap up with this question which was just we've discussed benefits in actual cooking, right? Like you can get a surge, you can get really fast, tightly controlled surges of energy so you can do your wok cooking with your mysterious accessory. You can boil water super fast faster than anything else. There's the cooking benefits, there's the resilience benefits. Meaning if power goes out you still can run your stove and potentially your refrigerator and other stuff. There's the sort of money saving benefits, avoiding the panel upgrade, maybe even getting a little extra income if you can hook up with time of use or time shifting if your utility is smart enough to do that stuff.Behind all that, there's the climate benefit. My question is just if I opened a browser window in a year and saw an ad for Channing Street Copper Stove, what is your top line message to consumers? Which of all those benefits are you centering and sort of hooking your hopes on in terms of just sales?Sam CalischI think this is one of the reasons I like calling these things energy storage equipment, ESE Appliances. I want to hang this on, this being a new class of appliance that delivers just a large number of benefits that are incomparable to existing appliance offerings. So you've got the climate benefits, the resilience benefits, the better performance. So I'm doing a good job not answering the question.David RobertsI think if you have an advertisement with a bullet, with a bullet pointed list, I don't think it's going to sell very well. What's the sizzle here?Sam CalischThat's why we have targeted ads. But I will say in our customer research, the things that really motivate people are the resilience aspects. And so being able to be prepared for what comes is a really strong motivator for people. And it cuts across party lines, it cuts across affiliations in a real way. So if you're going to force me to pick one, I might have to pick that one. But in truth, it's the portfolio.David RobertsEspecially in California where you're starting, there's a lot of blackouts. The resilience thing is big in California.Sam CalischYeah, PG&E shuts off my power once every couple of weeks.David RobertsAnd actually, as usual, I lied about the final question. This is the final question. When are you starting out in the Bay Area? As I understand it, just selling stoves in the Bay Area. Do we know or have any idea when the rest of California or the rest of the country might have access?Sam CalischYeah, so we did a pre-order. We sold it out quickly, and we're going to deliver on that pre-order. And as you said, that's just in the Bay Area. And that's to make sure that we can provide really excellent support for the folks that chose to support us early. And then I would say I don't want to be bound by this, but I would say within 2023 we'll be in a broader market.David RobertsInteresting. Well, this is super fascinating. It's just one of those little areas of electrification where you peek through the keyhole, you're like, oh, there's like a whole world of interesting questions in there. So thank you guys for coming on and maybe we can reconvene in a year or two and see if easy appliances, see if our phrase is caught on and see how far they've spread.Sam CalischWell, thanks so much for the interview, David. I really appreciate it.Wyatt MerrillThank you.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time. 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

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