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(If you would rather listen than read, just click play above.)Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Battery Week! We’ve talked about why lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are so important and we went through a basic primer on how they work. Today, we’re going to get into the competition within the broad lithium battery family, among all the different kinds of batteries that use lithium and exchange charged lithium ions. (See the previous post for a full list.)There are a few clear leaders — lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC), lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA), and lithium ferro phosphate (LFP) — that have achieved mass market scale and several others looking to get in on the action. The market prize is likely to exceed a trillion dollars within the next decade, so if any of these competitors can even carve out a substantial niche, it could be worth billions. Let’s look at the players. Better NMC and NCAThe bulk of LIB research these days is going to improve the dominant batteries on the market, mainly by reducing the amount of cobalt (the most toxic and expensive ingredient). Most EV makers use NMC batteries; Tesla uses NCA. In the past, it’s been difficult to push down the amount of cobalt in these batteries (it plays an important balancing role), but manufacturer LG recently introduced an NMC 811 battery: 80 percent nickel, 10 percent manganese, 10 percent cobalt. GM will use them in its new line, including in the Hummer, and Tesla will put them in some of its Model 3s in China.Most big battery manufacturers, including Panasonic (which supplies many of Tesla's batteries), have vowed to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate cobalt. Nickel is the key to energy density. Tesla, VW, and others are working on special high-nickel battery varieties that will be used for specialty vehicles that require extra-high energy density, like larger SUVs and trucks.But not every vehicle needs that, and nickel supply constraints are looming, so work is also being done to further boost manganese — a much more stable, abundant material — and reduce cobalt.Silicon anodesMany LIB developers are experimenting with silicon as an anode coating, partially or completely replacing graphite. Tesla has been working to increase the proportion of silicon in its anode since at least 2015.Silicon holds on to nine times more lithium ions than graphite, so energy density improves (range expands by 20 percent), and a silicon battery can charge and discharge much more quickly than graphite batteries, so power density improves as well. But silicon expands when it absorbs ions, so it breaks down quickly; cycle life is still much lower than graphite. If engineers can overcome that problem (and Tesla has vowed it can), LIBs could take a leap forward soon. SILA Nanotechnologies, in its brief on the future of LIBs, considers silicon anodes the biggest potential near-term market-shifting breakthrough in the space. It summarizes:[T]here are no high-volume commercial Li-ion batteries (yet!) in which a silicon anode entirely replaces the graphite one. When it does arrive, the reward will have been worth the wait. We expect automotive cells with NCA or NCM cathodes paired with Si-dominant anodes will increase energy density by up to 50%, thereby dropping the $/kWh cost by 30-40% in less than a decade. That is a mind-boggling prize, if any manufacturer can unlock it. (Read Canary’s Julian Spector on Sionic, a battery company that has recently debuted a silicon anode that it says can fit into existing LIB manufacturing.) Silicon anodes are technically “cathode agnostic,” though most testing so far has used NMC cathodes. If engineers can crack the code and make silicon anodes with high cycle life, it could benefit any and all cathodes (e.g., see LFP below).Fluorides as cathodesOne thing I didn’t mention about silicon-as-anode: it doesn’t operate via intercalation. Instead of nestling into the anode, ions react with the silicon and bond with it, a process called “conversion.” That makes it more difficult to peel the ions off without damage, but it can hold way more ions.With anodes (which are the limiting factor on most batteries now) improving, there’s more room for cathode improvement. SILA is big on research into fluorides — it cites metal fluoride-based cathodes (like iron fluoride or copper fluoride) and sulfur-based cathodes — which also operate via conversion rather than intercalation and can also store more ions. It writes:It’s plausible that with a conversion cathode and an engineered low-swell silicon anode, the cycle life of Li-ion can be extended all the way to 10,000 full cycles while also having the highest energy density in the market — thus breaking the [power vs. energy] compromise.SILA believes it’s only that combination — a conversion-based anode and a conversion-based cathode — that can bring LIB prices down to “~$50/kWh by 2030 and ~$30/kWh by 2040.” If it happened, that would be absolutely wild and almost certainly crush all competitors.Lithium ferro phosphate (LFP)LFPs, which use a lithium-iron compound as cathode, were among the first LIBs to commercialize. They are already standard in China, used in its ubiquitous scooters and small EVs. “The big Chinese battery makers — BYD and CATL and Lishen — each one of those is larger by itself than any other battery company that's not in China,” says Lou Schick, director of investments at Clean Energy Ventures, “and they have been making lithium iron phosphate cells for 10 years.”A few years ago, it looked like LFPs were going to be displaced by NMCs and NCAs, but lately they’ve made a comeback and now have a decent case that they could take the lead in the EV and stationary storage markets. They have already captured almost half of the Chinese EV market.LFPs use lithium ferrophosphate (LiFePO4) as the cathode, replacing nickel, manganese, and/or aluminum. The advantages relative to nickel-based competitors:* cheaper on a materials basis (though not yet on $/kWh);* higher cycle life (Matt Roberts, previously executive director of the Energy Storage Association, now working at battery company Simpliphi, says his company’s LFP batteries are warrantied for 10,000 cycles, compared to 2,500 to 5,000 for cobalt batteries.);* higher power density;* high safety and low toxicity (“They're almost literally bulletproof, in that they can't catch fire,” says Schick.);* replaces problematic and/or rare metals with iron, which is safe and abundant.In exchange for these advantages, LFPs offer lower energy density (there are fewer spaces for ions to intercalate). However, because they are so safe, LFPs do not require the same protective packaging as NMCs and NCAs, so they can gain some of that efficiency back at the pack level. Tesla says that, while LFPs have 50 percent of the energy density of their high-nickel competitors, an LFP-based vehicle can still get 75 percent of the range. VW announced last month that, starting in 2023, it would be “employing lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, in entry models; nickel-manganese in volume models; and nickel-rich NCM in high-end models.” Tesla said more or less the same thing at its Battery Day event in 2020. It plans to use LFPs for an upcoming cheap (under $25,000) vehicle, the Model 3, and commercial energy storage.Current LFPs are not going to feature in high-performance vehicles, but most vehicles aren’t that. They are “good enough, essentially, for any kind of commuter car,” Schick says. “I think you're going to see a whole bunch of economy cars that are LFP.” LFP will be used in taxis, ride-share vehicles, and fleet vehicles, along with scooters and rickshaws and motorcycles. It will be the cheap, reliable, everyday option.And if LFPs can make use of silicon anodes, they could potentially nudge up into the over-300-mile range category. LFP in energy storage marketsEnergy density is also less important in the energy-storage market, where price, capacity, and safety rule. LFP’s high cycle life and low costs make them attractive in the grid-storage market. As Julian Spector wrote in February at GTM:In 2015, LFP batteries only served 10 percent of the grid storage market, according to research from Wood Mackenzie. NMC dominated, with more than 70 percent market share. But since then, NMC's market share has trended down while LFP's rose. Analysts predict LFP will become the leading chemistry for grid batteries by 2030, capturing 30 percent of an increasingly diversified market.As for distributed, behind-the-meter storage, in some markets like California and New York City, Tesla home batteries (still NMC) are not allowed inside garages, thanks to the risk of thermal runaway, which can lead to fires. LFPs have passed an extensive regimen of safety tests and will be available everywhere; that gives them a tangible market advantage.Roberts is convinced the safety issue is going to rise in salience, thanks to the repeated recalls from manufacturers like LG Chem. (The latest is going to cost Hyundai a cool $900 million.) “What's your levelized cost of energy?” Roberts asks. “You're out there quoting, ‘I can do $100 a kilowatt-hour for a battery pack.’ If in two years, though, you have to do a billion-dollar recall, when does that get factored into the LCOE?” With sufficient manufacturing scale, the price of any battery approaches the price of its materials, and LFP uses incredibly cheap materials. If it scales sufficiently, it could potentially get cheap enough to dominate the storage market, fighting off other LIBs in the home-storage market and other chemistries and form factors (which we’ll look at in the next post) in the bulk-storage market. “Of all the lithium-ion chemistries, LFP may play the largest role in accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” says Jordan Giesige, who makes battery explanatory videos under the moniker The Limiting Factor. (They are superb; I cannot recommend them highly enough.)Lithium manganese oxide (LMO) and lithium manganese nickel oxide (LMNO)Manganese is abundant, safe, and stable at a wide variety of temperatures, though its energy density is lower than cobalt or nickel. Because LMOs don’t contain cobalt and avoid the threat of thermal runaway, they are used in medical equipment, as well as power tools, electric bikes, and EVs.“The original Nissan LEAF was a lithium manganese oxide cathode,” says Dan Steingart, a materials scientist and co-director of Columbia University’s Electrochemical Energy Center, “and the Nissan LEAF has never had a battery that that initiated a fire.” The LEAF also didn’t go very far on a charge, though — LMO may have trouble escaping its niche.LMNO (“high-voltage spinel”) batteries try to retain some of the energy density of nickel while replacing cobalt. According to a 2020 study in the Journal of Power Sources, in the search for “novel cathode materials with high energy density, low cost, and improved safety,” LMNO is “one of the most promising candidates yet to be commercialized.” LMNO batteries will need to boost their still-struggling cycle life before they can compete with more-established chemistries.The next three batteries use lithium or lithium compounds as the anode rather than the cathode.Lithium sulfur (Li-S)Li-S burst on the scene to some excitement in the late ‘00s, demonstrating that a cell with lithium as the anode and sulfur as the cathode — two elements with extremely low atomic weight — could double the specific energy of conventional LIBs. Plus sulfur is incredibly cheap.One problem is that sulfur has very low conductivity, so something (usually carbon) has to be added to pull in the ions. More importantly, Li-S batteries degrade quite quickly and have low cycle life. To date, they remain commercially unavailable. (This paper reviews the remaining challenges.)Lithium metal anodesSimple, solid lithium metal makes for a great anode, in that it is highly prone to releasing electrons and ions. Use of lithium metal as an anode actually dates back to the 1970s, preceding LIB development. In a lithium-metal battery, charged lithium ions “plate” on (attach themselves directly to) the metal anode. The problem is that lithium is highly reactive and ions tend to form “dendrites,” or tree-like formations, that reduce energy density and cycle life and increase the chances of a short or fire. It was problems with lithium’s reactivity that originally led to the addition of graphite to the anode, so the ions could intercalate rather than plating. That was the birth of LIBs. But researchers and developers have recently returned to lithium-metal, figuring out new ways to prevent dendrite formation. Losing the graphite on the anode drops weight and up to doubles energy density. To date, lithium metal has typically been paired with a standard NMC cathode. US startup Lavle is building a gigafactory to produce just such batteries, expected to open in 2023. It is aiming first at markets where energy density is prized, like shipping and aviation.Technically, though, lithium-metal is cathode agnostic. It could potentially work to enable rechargeability and better performance from cheaper cathode materials like zinc, aluminum, and sulfur. Based on pure materials costs, “the true least-cost system for a lithium-based, rechargeable battery is lithium metal and a sulfur cathode,” says Purdue University’s Rebecca Ciez.Much of the R&D action, though, is around electrolytes. Lithium-metal batteries with liquid electrolytes are around (and still being researched), but it’s the solid electrolytes generating the most excitement.Solid electrolytes (solid-state)The liquid electrolytes used in most LIBs limit the kinds of electrodes that can be used and the shape of the battery cell; plus, they are often flammable, a safety hazard. Tons of research is underway on solid electrolytes that enable much higher energy density and can’t catch fire. Many researchers expect solid-state batteries to set off a whole new round of innovation. RMI writes, “several solid-state companies are targeting 2024–2025 for initial EV commercial lines, but demonstrations would likely happen before then.” Companies with lithium-metal, solid-state batteries — like Solid Power and QuantumScape — have received huge investments from automakers and investors like Bill Gates. Nonetheless, for all the hype, there is a considerable strain of skepticism about solid-state. The EV company Fisker, after years of big promises, abandoned solid-state entirely earlier this year. “It’s the kind of technology where, when you feel like you’re 90 percent there, you’re almost there,” founder Henrik Fisker told the Verge, “until you realize the last 10 percent is much more difficult than the first 90.”“The cost and safety of current lithium-ion tech is improving so rapidly that a technology that's 10 years away, in [Fisker’s] estimation, is just not worthy of pursuit,” says Roberts. “At the end of the day, energy density is just not critical in a lot of applications.”Schick is blunt: “None of the solid-state lithium batteries are on track to do anything that anybody cares about.”“While there are technical reasons why this technology appears to be the holy grail of batteries,” writes SILA Nanotechnologies, “the reality is that even if the technology works (and that is a big ‘if’ after 40 years of development) it is unlikely to find more than niche opportunities in the market.” (Read Jason Deign on the current solid-state market.)Let’s call this one an important Maybe.Lithium titanium oxide (LTO) LTO batteries have lithium-titanate nanocrystals coating the anode, which increases surface area and allows for many more electrons to be released much faster than graphite. Consequently, they have incredibly high power density (they can release energy quickly) and can recharge faster than any other LIB. They also have high cycle life and high recharging efficiency.They are lower voltage than conventional LIBs and thus have lower energy density, but because of this they are also extremely safe to operate. “The performance characteristics are amazing,” says Roberts, “but it's just crazy expensive.”For now, LTOs are used in some EVs and smaller applications like e-bikes. If they come down in price, they could find other niches where power density is important, like industrial machinery.Lithium-air (Li-air)Out toward the research frontier is Li-air, which uses lithium metal as the anode, a variety of materials as the electrolyte (that’s where research is most intensive), and as the cathode … air. Yes, air. Lithium exchanges electrons and ions with the air, through the electrolyte. Wacky.Because it jettisons the entire weight of the cathode — air is quite light — Li-air has incredibly high specific energy (energy per unit of weight), theoretically as high as the specific energy of gasoline. In practice, only a fraction of that potential has been demonstrated, but even that fraction is about five times the specific energy of conventional LIBs.All sorts of improvements in electrolytes, cycle life, and scalability will be needed before Li-air will become practical, but in terms of 2030 dark horses, this is one to watch.So that’s a review of the lithium-based battery chemistries jockeying for position in a trillion-plus-dollar market. In my next post, I’ll look at a few non-lithium-based chemistries that are hoping to capture some of these niches — zinc and flow and liquid metal, oh my. 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

(If you don’t want to read, you can listen. Just click play above.)Greetings! Welcome back to Battery Week here at Volts. In my last post, I went over why lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are so important to decarbonizing both transportation and the electricity sector. Next week, we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of different kinds of LIBs, to see how different chemistries offer different kinds of performance and are competing for different market niches.Before that, though, it’s worth the time to do a little review of battery basics. If you’re like me-a-month-ago, you probably have a hazy understanding at best of the structure of batteries and the processes involved in running them.I’m not going to get into any complicated chemistry — believe me, no one wants that — but I thought it would be helpful later, when we get into the competition within battery markets, to have some rudimentary terms and concepts clear in our heads.Batteries 101F’ing batteries, how do they work?As the name suggests, electrochemical batteries store energy via chemical reaction. Discharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that produces electrons; recharging the battery involves a chemical reaction that stores electrons.The basic unit of the electrochemical battery is the cell. In the cell, two electrodes — negative (anode) and positive (cathode) — are separated by an electrolyte. When the anode and cathode are connected in a circuit, two things happen.1. Negatively charged electrons flow from the former to the latter, generating power. The amount of power is determined by two factors: * current, the number of electrons traveling in a given circuit, and* voltage, the force with which the electrons are traveling.Power = current X voltage. It’s like a river: the force exerted by the water will depend on how much there is and how fast it’s moving. You can get the same force with less water if it moves faster, or with slower water if there’s more of it. Similarly, you can get the same power with less current if you have more voltage, and vice versa.2. The anode releases positively charged ions into the electrolyte, to balance the reaction, and the cathode absorbs a commensurate amount. (Some batteries have a thin semi-permeable barrier within the electrolyte to regulate the flow of ions.) Recharging a battery basically involves reversing the reaction, returning the electrons and the ions to the anode.The anode will be a material that gives up electrons easily in chemical reaction with the electrolyte. The cathode will be a material eager to absorb them. The propensity to shed/absorb electrons is known as standard potential, and the difference in standard potential between the anode and cathode will determine the battery’s total electrical potential. The bigger the difference, the more potential.The whole game of battery design and development is to find a combination of anode, cathode, and electrolyte that performs well along a broad set of criteria — holds a lot of energy, releases energy quickly, operates safely, lasts a long time, is cheap, etc. The tragedy of battery development is that there are always trade-offs. High performance on one criterion generally means lower performance on another. Optimize for holding more energy and you limit how quickly energy can be released; optimize for safety and you limit energy density; and so on. Battery development has seen dozens of chemistries come and go, but four have stuck and scaled to mass-market size: lead acid, nickel cadmium (Ni-Cd), nickel metal hydride (NiMH), and lithium-ion (Li-ion).LIBs have hit on a combination of anode, cathode, and electrolyte that performs well enough along several criteria (especially cost) to work for most short-duration applications today. They dominate consumer electronics, electric passenger vehicles, and short-duration grid-scale storage, and are expanding in other markets as well (though lead-acid batteries remain a $45 billion global market). They have gotten very cheap and a large-scale manufacturing capacity has grown up around them.Let’s take a closer look at LIBs.Lithium-ion batteries 101LIBs have been around in commercial form since the early 1990s, though obviously they’ve improved quite a bit since then. Today’s most common and popular LIBs use graphite (carbon) as the anode, a lithium compound as the cathode, and some organic goo as an electrolyte. They boast two key advantages over prior battery chemistries.First, they need very little electrolyte. LIBs are what’s known as “intercalation” batteries, which means the same lithium ions nestled (intercalated) in the structure of the anode transfer to be intercalated in the cathode during discharge. The electrolyte only has to serve as a conduit; it doesn’t have to store many ions. Consequently, the cell doesn’t need much of it. Saving on electrolyte saves space and weight. (Bonus: the process is almost perfectly reversible, which gives LIBs their high cycle life.) Second, LIBs squeeze lots of energy into a small space. Lithium is the lightest metal (at the upper left corner of the periodic table) and extremely energy-dense, so LIB cells can work with electrodes 0.1 millimeters thick. (Compare lead-acid electrodes, which are several millimeters thick.) This also makes LIBs smaller and lighter. Because they are lightweight and high energy density, LIBs got their initial foothold in small electronic devices, phones and laptops and the like. They scaled up quickly to run handheld power tools and lawnmowers and then completely took over electric vehicles. Recently they’ve scaled up further to create home storage batteries and giant stationary battery arrays for grid storage. It’s worth noting that even the biggest LIB installation is just stacks upon stacks of cells, like Legos. LIBs are extremely modular — they can be scaled precisely to need.LIB manufacturingThere are a number of ways of manufacturing LIB cells — button cells, pouch cells, prismatic cells — but the most common for portable and EV applications is the cylindrical cell. Think of it like a jelly roll. A super-thin metal anode is coated with a film (usually graphite). Then a super-thin separator is laid on top. Then a super-thin metal cathode coated with a film (usually some lithium compound) is laid on top of that. Several layers are stacked this way, and then the whole thing is rolled up and packed into a cylinder. Before the cylinder is capped, electrolyte goop is injected to infuse between the layers.Cells are then clustered together into modules, which are in turn clustered together into packs.There’s a whole active area of LIB innovation around cell design. Tesla recently debuted a new, bigger cylindrical cell, the 4680 (46 millimeters wide, 80 mm tall), with improved … everything — energy, range, and power. Tesla is also putting these cells together into packs that form part of the structure of their vehicles, which will reduce overall weight and complexity. I’m not going to get into LIB manufacturing innovation too much, other than to note there’s a lot going on there. The manufacturing techniques that produce LIBs are being continuously refined, a process that is accelerated by scale. According to RMI, “lithium-ion battery suppliers are poised to reach at least 1,330 GWh of combined annual manufacturing capacity by 2023.” According to S&P Global, “global LIB capacity is set to increase 218% between 2020 and 2025.” That’s a lot of scale. The main thing to take from the boom in LIB manufacturing is that any competitor to LIBs will need to take advantage of existing manufacturing processes. “The way these battery factories are building up now,” says Dan Steingart, a materials scientist and co-director of Columbia University’s Electrochemical Energy Center, “they’re so capital-intensive that whatever chemistries come next will be produced and manufactured in such a way that they leverage existing infrastructure if at all possible.”This will be important later; some LIB competitors can slipstream into existing manufacturing and some can’t.For Battery Week, I’m going to focus less on manufacturing (and disposal) and more on the battery chemistries themselves — which ones are dominating and which have a chance of catching on.Li-ion is a family of battery chemistriesLIBs are not a singular thing, but a family. They have in common that they use lithium in either the cathode or anode and exchange charged lithium ions.This leaves quite a bit of room for different chemistries. There are many types of lithium compounds, many choices of anode or cathode materials to pair with them, and many choices of electrolytes. That yields a very large matrix of possible combinations and chemistries, each with its different performance characteristics (and, sigh, acronym). We’re not going to cover all of them, though — even I have my limits. We’ll just hit some of the most-discussed alternatives. The most common LIB chemistries used today are lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC) and lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA), which use compounds of those metals as the cathode. Lithium and nickel turn out to be a knockout combo — incredibly light and energy-dense. Nonetheless, there are others. Here’s a list of the LIB chemistries we will at least touch on starting in my next post:* lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide (NMC cathode)* lithium nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA cathode)* lithium ferro phosphate (LFP cathode)* lithium manganese oxide (LMO cathode) and lithium manganese nickel oxide (LMNO cathode)* lithium sulfur (Li-S, sulfur cathode)* lithium metal (anode) and solid state* lithium titanate (LTO anode)* lithium air (Li-air, lithium anode)Why bother with any of these alternatives? Why not just stick to NMC and NCA? There are two sources of pressure on the industry to diversify. LIBs face pressure to diversify performance The first is performance. Most LIB innovation to date has focused on energy density, for passenger EVs. In some applications, though, like home energy storage or fleet vehicles, energy density matters less than safety and cost. As use cases diversify, so do performance demands. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at the various metrics used to judge battery performance. RMI uses eight:* energy density (Wh/L): energy per unit of volume, or more prosaically, energy relative to space occupied, sometimes called “volumetric energy density”;* specific energy (Wh/kg): energy per unit of weight, sometimes called “gravimetric energy density”;* power cost ($/kW): cost per unit of power output (to return to our river analogy: cost per unit of force the river is capable of exerting at its peak);* energy cost ($/kWh): cost per unit of energy output (the amount of force exerted by the river over an hour);* cycle life: the number of times a battery can discharge and recharge before it falls below some threshold of capacity (usually set at 80 percent) due to degradation;* fast charge: how fast the battery can charge, i.e., how fast it can accept power;* safety: some batteries, particularly those with cobalt, suffer from “thermal runaway,” which means if one cell goes haywire and heats up, it heats up the next one, and so on in a self-reinforcing cycle that results in fires and battery recalls;* temperature range: the range of temperatures in which a battery can effectively operate. As I said, it’s possible to optimize for one or a small set of these, but doing so inevitably involves trade-offs in others. This graphic from RMI compares some LIB chemistries along all these axes. The dark green lines are current performance and the light green is highest theoretically achievable level:As you can see, different chemistries excel on different metrics and will target different applications.LIBs face pressure to diversify materialsCobalt, used in standard NMC and NCA chemistries, is highly toxic, comes almost entirely from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and is mined amidst terrible human rights abuses. Lithium and nickel are fairly nasty too, and may run into supply constraints as the market grows (nickel, in particular, is a source of current stress). There’s lots of innovation underway to reduce the social and environmental impacts of materials mining, and increase supply, but, as we will see next week, there are also competing battery chemistries that eschew these problematic materials entirely.Smart manufacturers like Tesla are diversifying their battery lines in anticipation of supply issues, trying to evolve away from cobalt and secure a steady domestic supply of lithium and nickel. (Biden’s infrastructure plan, which aims to kickstart a domestic EV supply chain, could help.)Some battery diversity will happen, the question is how muchYou can find people in the battery field who stress that conventional LIBs have too great a head start for anything else to catch up. In its white paper on the future of LIBs, SILA Nanotechnologies writes:Technologies that claim they will replace Li-ion often grab headlines, but scale limitations make that impractical within a generation. It is for this reason that by 2050, while Li-ion will not constitute all of energy storage, it will be the most dominant chemistry by far, with most everything else relegated to niche applications. Lou Schick, director of investments at Clean Energy Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in clean technology projects, stressed to me the importance of scale and familiarity:The only selection criteria for any project is, is it bankable? Can I get insurance for it? Is it consumer product? Any insurgent that wants to get to that state and is in a lab right now is 10 years away from being bankable, if they are very successful. So you're never catching up. And it has nothing to do with chemistry or physics.You can find others who believe diversity is inevitable. “It's not like the Lord of the Rings, one ring to rule them all,” says Michael Burz, an engineer who founded and runs battery company EnZinc. “There will be different chemistries for different applications.”Among the analysts more bullish on diversity are those at RMI, who wrote a report in 2019 called “Breakthrough Batteries” that surveyed possible competitors to conventional LIBs. They write:Unlike the market development pathway for solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, battery R&D and manufacturing investment continue to pursue a wide range of chemistries, configurations, and battery types with performance attributes that are better suited to specific use cases.RMI is convinced that other battery chemistries with other performance attributes will begin to find markets and scale up by the mid-2020s. Chloe Holzinger, an energy storage analyst at the research firm IHS Markit, told me that diversity will be a market asset:What we're going to see in the future is increasing diversity in all three of those areas [anode, cathode, and electrolyte]. Automakers will be able to take advantage of this diversity to make their portfolios robust against commodity price spikes and distinguish themselves from other automakers — “we're the only ones that provide this kind of battery.”It’s possible that this disagreement amounts to less than it appears. Even skeptics agree that some competitors might find niches; the main disagreement seems to be over how fast that might happen and how big the niches will be. After all, says Schick, in trillion-dollar markets, “if the market fragments by use case, the individual use cases can be quite enormous.”Conventional LIBs have a huge head start, but the pressure to diversify may offer some hope to innovators both within the LIB family and outside it. In my next post, I’ll get into some of that intra-family competition within LIBs, a space rife with ongoing innovation. Mabel wishes everyone a Happy Spring. 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

People of Volts! At long last, Battery Week is here. It is time to get into batteries. Waaay into batteries.Over the next few posts, I’m going to cover how lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) work and the different chemistries that are competing for market share, but I thought I would start off with a post about why I’m doing this — why batteries are important and why it’s worth understanding the variety and competition within the space.Lithium-ion batteries are crucial to decarbonization in two important sectorsWe know that the fastest, cheapest way to decarbonize, especially over the next 10 years, is clean electrification: shifting the grid to carbon-free sources and shifting other sectors and energy services onto the grid. LIBs are accelerating clean electrification in the two biggest-emitting sectors of the US economy, transportation and electricity. (Each is between a quarter and a third of emissions.)First, they are colonizing the EV market and enabling ever-higher performance and range. The global EV market is on the front end of explosive growth:Researchers at Deloitte expect growth to accelerate through 2030:As BloombergNEF analysts show in their “Electric Vehicle Outlook 2030,” it’s not just passenger EVs, either. The fastest growing EV segment will be buses, followed by scooters. The global market for EV batteries alone is expected to hit almost a trillion dollars by 2030. Sustaining that growth is going to require lots and lots of new batteries. The more energy-dense, cheap, and safe LIBs can get, the faster the electrification of transportation will happen.Second, LIBs are being used both for distributed, building-level energy storage and for large, grid-scale storage installations. As the grid shifts from firm, dispatchable sources of energy like coal and gas to variable, weather-dependent sources like sun and wind, it will need more storage to balance things out and stay stable. Batteries can help at the grid level (they can even serve as transmission assets) and they can serve local resilience at the building and community level. Overall, the research firm Wood Mackenzie expects the global storage market to grow at an average of 31 percent a year over the coming decade, reaching 741 gigawatt-hours of cumulative capacity by 2030.The more energy-dense, cheap, and safe LIBs can get, the faster storage will be infused throughout the grid and the more renewable energy the grid will be able to integrate. All together, here’s what the Department of Energy projects for the global energy storage market through 2030:As this graph shows, the vast bulk of the demand for batteries is going to come from transportation, meaning EVs of various kinds. Whatever is used for EVs is probably going to end up getting so cheap, just from scale, that it dominates energy storage as well.There’s one other cool aspect of batteries that gets too little attention. Storing substantial amounts of electricity for cheap is a relatively new thing in human affairs. We are only just now beginning to explore what can be done with it. What’s happened in the relatively short history of lithium-ion batteries is that, as they get cheaper and more powerful, we find new uses for them. Way back in 2015, energy analyst Ramez Naam called this the “energy storage virtuous cycle.” Lithium-ion batteries can do more and more stuffThere’s a reason why, in 2019, the three chemists behind the initial development of lithium-ion technology won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. LIBs boast incredibly high energy density and specific energy, which is to say, they cram lots of oomph into a small, lightweight package, and they are capable of cycling many more times than their predecessors. The first LIBs, commercially introduced in the early 1990s, were expensive, but found a market foothold in small electronic devices — phones, laptops, camcorders — where energy density is at a premium. They have since all but completely taken over the consumer electronics market. As manufacturing scale grew, prices fell and more uses opened up: power tools, lawnmowers, scooters. Scale grew more, prices fell more, and LIBs displaced other chemistries as the top choice for EVs. Especially in recent years, the growth (and anticipated growth) in the EV market has driven an enormous surge of public and private investment to LIBs, with dramatic effects on prices. According to recent research by BNEF, “lithium-ion battery pack prices, which were above $1,100 per kilowatt-hour in 2010, have fallen 89% in real terms to $137/kWh in 2020. By 2023, average prices will be close to $100/kWh.” (It wasn’t that long ago that most experts agreed $100/kWh was an impossible target.)And so the cycle continues. Prices fall and more new uses open up: big trucks, buses, airplanes, data centers, distributed energy storage, and large-scale grid-storage installations. From BNEF:BNEF’s analysis suggests that cheaper batteries can be used in more and more applications. These include energy shifting (moving in time the dispatch of electricity to the grid, often from times of excess solar and wind generation), peaking in the bulk power system (to deal with demand spikes), as well as for customers looking to save on their energy bills by buying electricity at cheap hours and using it later.Experts generally agree that LIBs are going to hit limits, even if it’s just the base price of raw materials, before they become economical for long-duration grid storage. They are being installed for 4-6 hour storage, sometimes 8-hour, and may some day even aspire to 12-hour, but beyond that — the weekly or even seasonal storage a renewables-based grid will need — some other technology or technologies will have to step in. (I’ll likely do a separate post on long-duration storage.)Nonetheless, continued scaling will ensure that LIBs get even cheaper. Some analysts believe that, with foreseeable improvements in LIB chemistry, prices could hit $40 or even $30/kWh in coming decades. We simply don’t know yet what can be done with storage that cheap. To take one example, if energy storage gets cheap enough to become an economically trivial addition to building construction/renovations, it will eventually be ubiquitous at the local level, and the benefits of ubiquitous, networked local energy are … well, hard to predict. We know that it would protect vulnerable populations through blackouts like those in Texas or California over the last year. But it could do much more.Cheap batteries could open up uses we haven’t even envisioned yet. What sorts of urban mobility vehicles, drones, planes, or research outposts could we power? What kinds of ships or trains could we electrify? How could increasingly cheap, ubiquitous storage be coupled with increasingly cheap, ubiquitous solar energy? We don’t know yet. But we’re going to see some cool s**t over the next few years. Batteries have the potential to change our ordinary lived experience in myriad ways. It’s worth the time to understand what’s driving their development and where they might go.So here’s the question that is driving Battery Week: are LIBs going to be to energy storage what solar PV panels are to solar electricity?By way of concluding, let me briefly explain what I mean by that.Solar panels got so cheap, so fast, they swamped all competitorsBy “solar panels,” I’m referring to the standard kind — boring old crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels, the kind you see on roofs these days, which I will henceforth just call “PV.” Thanks to key early US research and development, German feed-in tariffs (which subsidized homeowners to put panels on their roofs), and a massive Chinese manufacturing boom, PV has received an enormous, extended push in the last several decades. As the scale has grown, the price has dropped — a whopping 99 percent in the last 40 years.PV got so cheap that it has simply steamrolled all competitors. Back in the ‘00s, even after Obama won and was putting together his stimulus bill, multiple solar technologies were in vigorous development: thin-film solar, concentrated solar power (CSP), building-integrated solar, multi-junction solar, all sorts of exotic stuff … there was even this one cool company called Solyndra that made cylindrical solar PV tubes.There were boosters of all these technologies who could tell you chapter and verse about their advantages over plain old PV. They pulled in a lot of venture capital (and some government loan guarantees) making those pitches. But in the end, they and their funders underestimated PV’s one great advantage: it is dirt cheap and getting cheaper all the time. It’s virtually impossible for anything else to catch up. PV’s domination of the solar market has some energy analysts concerned, thinking that government ought to step in and encourage innovation and tech diversity in this area, in preparation for the day that PV reaches its limits and plateaus. (Varun Sivaram — a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy who was recently made senior adviser to presidential climate envoy John Kerry — has a whole book on this subject.) Some researchers disagree and think super-cheap PV will be good enough to get us where we need to go. Either way, it’s clear that without concerted government intervention, PV is going to dominate for the foreseeable future.Is the same true of LIBs? Are they going to dominate in storage markets the way PV has dominated in solar electricity? They already largely own both the EV and storage markets and have a substantial head start in manufacturing capacity and know-how. That head start is only going to get more daunting over the next decade. This is from a brief on the future of LIBs by a company called SILA Nanotechnologies:Before Tesla was founded, Li-ion batteries were almost exclusively used in consumer electronics — mainly laptops and cell phones. At the time of the launch of the Tesla Roadster in 2008, the total global Li-ion manufacturing capacity was approximately 20 GWh per year. By 2030, we expect over 2,000 GWh of annual production capacity based on already announced plans by cell manufacturers.That would be 100X growth in 22 years and a hell of a head of steam for any competitor to take on. “It would be unwise to assume ‘conventional’ LIBs are approaching the end of their era,” concluded a recent comprehensive review in Nature Communications. “[M]any engineering and chemistry approaches are still available to improve their performance.”Nonetheless, LIBs do face restraining pressures, especially materials and safety concerns, which we’ll get into later. They could hit speed bumps. And when you’re talking about trillion-plus-dollar markets, even a niche could be worth billions. Will competitors be able to get a foothold? It’s an enormous prize with more researchers and entrepreneurs chasing it every day. That’s what we’ll be exploring during Battery Week. Next up: a primer on how lithium-ion batteries work! 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

(If you’d rather listen than read, just click play above.)President Joe Biden has released the tax plan that is meant to pay for his $2+ trillion infrastructure plan. You can read the New York Times for a full breakdown. The bulk of the revenue will come from a set of changes to corporate tax law, raising the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, imposing a minimum tax on global profits, and discouraging offshore tax havens.All that stuff is great. I just want to say a few quick things about one of the provisions, which would roll back various fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code. In one sense, this is cool, and a big deal insofar as Democrats can actually do it — they’ve been trying for years, to no end. But in another sense, it reveals that the hue and cry over fossil fuel subsidies in the US is somewhat of a tempest in a teapot, more a political symbol than a real source of revenue or decarbonization.Direct US fossil fuel subsidies aren’t that big in the grand scheme of thingsThe administration projects that closing oil and gas tax loopholes will raise $35 billion over the coming decade.That’s 1.4 percent of Biden’s $2.5 trillion in tax-plan revenue. A Treasury Department report from the administration says: “The main impact would be on oil and gas company profits. Research suggests little impact on gasoline or energy prices for U.S. consumers and little impact on our energy security.” (It cites this study.)There are two reasons the changes would have “little impact on gasoline or energy prices.” The first is that oil is a globally traded commodity, with prices set globally — a US company can’t raise its prices without losing out on the global market. So it eats any extra cost as slightly lower profits.But the second is that $35 billion over 10 years just isn’t that much money. Even in 2020, a truly shitty year for US oil companies, Exxon made revenues of $181 billion. That was down 31.5 percent from $265 billion in 2019. For companies with revenues in the hundreds of billions, experiencing market swings of $85 billion a year, an extra $3.5 billion a year spread out over the whole sector just isn’t going to register much.Last year, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the “End Polluter Welfare Act,” which takes a much more expansive view of what counts as a fossil fuel subsidy and pulls together $15 billion a year in tax changes. That would be $150 billion over the next 10 years — 6 percent of the revenue Biden’s plan will raise. (This even-more-aggressive study from Oil Change International found $20 billion a year in subsidies, though the oil and gas industry hotly contests some of the choices it made.)The point is, to get to real revenue, you have to bring in indirect fossil fuel subsidies.The big fossil fuel subsidies are the externalitiesWhen Greenpeace says that US fossil fuel companies get $62 billion a year in subsidies, it refers to this study, which examines what it would take to “correct market failures brought about by climate change, adverse health effects from local pollution, and inefficient transportation.”In other words, the study tallies up the oil and gas industry’s externalities, the costs it imposes on society that are not reflected in market prices. (And it doesn’t even include the costs of defending global oil supply, which are substantial.)Whether it is fair or accurate to call these unpaid costs “subsidies” is largely a matter of semantics, or, worse, metaphysics, but it doesn’t really matter. Fossil fuel companies don’t pay the costs; other people do. A 2017 International Monetary Fund study pegged the global value of direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies at $5.2 trillion — that’s 6.4 percent of global GDP.Of course, making fossil fuel companies pay those costs would involve more than modest tax code tweaks. It would involve a new carbon tax. How much could that raise? A 2017 study by the Treasury Department modeled a carbon tax that starts at $49 per metric ton in 2019 and rises to $70 per metric ton in 2028 (not far out of line with some popular carbon tax proposals). Over the course of that 10 years, the tax would raise $2.2 trillion in revenue — just about enough to fund Biden’s infrastructure plan!It’s a perfect match. It’s notable, then, that no one on either side of the aisle has proposed it, despite an ongoing hunt for revenue. Carbon tax people are always saying it has bipartisan appeal, but in practice, it seems bipartisan in that both parties want nothing to do with it.Anyway, Biden’s run at fossil fuel subsidies (the latest in a long line from Dems) isn’t really about revenue.This story is mostly about political power and social licenseIn every article you read about the portion of Biden’s plan that goes after fossil fuel subsidies, you will see some version of this: “Previous attempts to eliminate subsidies on oil and gas met with stiff industry and congressional opposition.”Despite the fact that $35 billion over 10 years is relative chump change to the oil and gas industry, it fights any attempt to roll back these subsidies like a cornered polecat. It wants to protect its profits, but it also wants to establish that it still has clout in Congress. It has enjoyed these tax benefits for a long, long time, and giving them up would be a signal of its declining influence.It’s good for Democratic presidents to keep thrusting this issue into the debate, if only to put Congress on record. It will probably fall out of this bill too, if the bill passes at all, but it will serve as something of a barometer on the pressure fossil fuel companies can mount, even in their battered state.In the meantime, on this question as on all others, we await the judgment of our emperor and benefactor Joe Manchin, long may He reign. How it started:How it’s going: 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

Hey, everybody! President Joe Biden has unveiled his first infrastructure proposal and … hot damn. The eight-year "American Jobs Plan" would spend $2.25 trillion on a huge range of initiatives, from highways to the energy grid, water systems, airports, transit systems, broadband, energy R&D, and — paging a Sen. Joe Manchin — abandoned coal mine clean-up. This is an amazing document. Yes, there’s stuff in it that I would take out (some highway spending) and stuff I would add (more transit spending). Yes, a serious transition to sustainability would probably take closer to $10 trillion. Yes, there’s a very good chance the plan gets cut or compromised on the way to passage, if it passes at all, which is far from certain. Still. As presented by the Biden team, it represents not only an enormous total investment, but some really smart investments, in areas where the positive knock-on effects for the clean energy transition could be enormous. There were some true-blue energy wonks involved in writing this thing.I’ll just quickly go over the parts that are most exciting to me and then mention a couple of benefits that are getting underplayed.TransportationThe plan would put $174 billion toward a plan to “win the EV market,” which is on the verge of enormous growth. Biden wants to create a domestic supply chain for batteries and EVs (something that is virtually nonexistent today) and domestic manufacturing capacity to make the EVs, all of which will create domestic jobs. It would offer point-of-sale rebates to purchasers of domestic-made EVs, “while ensuring that these vehicles are affordable for all families and manufactured by workers with good jobs.” It would offer grants and incentives to state and local governments and private businesses to install EV charging stations, with the goal of 500,000 up and running by 2030.And I love this, though I wish it were much bigger: “Replace 50,000 diesel transit vehicles and electrify at least 20 percent of our yellow school bus fleet through a new Clean Buses for Kids Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, with support from the Department of Energy.” This will put us on “a path to 100 percent clean buses.”I have sung the praises of electric city buses; see Vox’s Kelsey Piper on electric school buses. Not only do they save money over time, but they generate immediate air quality benefits for some of the most vulnerable populations — kids and low-income and POC communities, who bear the brunt of diesel pollution. The benefits wildly outweigh the costs. (On the campaign trail, Bernie Sanders proposed $407 billion just for electric buses, which is more like it.)Finally, oh, by the way: the plan “will utilize the vast tools of federal procurement to electrify the federal fleet, including the United States Postal Service.” Whaaat? As Sarah Kaplan reported in The Washington Post in January:There are some 645,000 vehicles in the federal fleet. They include roughly 200,000 passenger vehicles, 78,517 heavy-duty trucks, 47,369 vans, 847 ambulances and three limousines.That’s a lot of vehicles.As for electrifying the 225,000 Postal Service vehicles, I have written at great length about what a fantastic idea that is. This part of the plan is honestly like a present to me. Thank you, Joe Biden.It’s not all about cars and trucks, though. The plan also has $85 billion for public transit (“to modernize existing transit and help agencies expand their systems to meet rider demand”), which would double existing federal investment in transit, and at least $80 billion for rail (“to address Amtrak’s repair backlog; modernize the high traffic Northeast Corridor; improve existing corridors and connect new city pairs; and enhance grant and loan programs that support passenger and freight rail safety, efficiency, and electrification.”)As for transportation infrastructure, there’s $20 billion for “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access” and $25 billion “for a dedicated fund to support ambitious projects that have tangible benefits to the regional or national economy but are too large or complex for existing funding programs.”In my dream world I would spend much more on transit and rail, but this is a huge improvement over previous infrastructure bills, even from Democrats. TransmissionReaders of Transmission Month know that long-distance transmission is very much needed for national decarbonization and currently very difficult to build. The big news in the plan is that Sen. Martin Heinrich’s federal transmission investment tax credit (ITC) made it in. The fact sheet doesn’t specify the size of the ITC, but Heinrich’s proposal is 30 percent. The idea is to spur “the buildout of at least 20 gigawatts of high-voltage capacity power lines and mobilize tens of billions in private capital off the sidelines.”And remember my post on using existing rail and road rights-of-way to site long-distance transmission? Get this: “President Biden’s plan will establish a new Grid Deployment Authority at the Department of Energy that allows for better leverage of existing rights-of-way – along roads and railways – and supports creative financing tools to spur additional high priority, high-voltage transmission lines.”Hell yes. InnovationI have also written a great deal about the importance of concerted, well-funded clean-energy innovation policy. The US currently spends about $150 billion a year on R&D, of which about half goes to the Department of Defense and a paltry $8 billion goes to energy research. Biden’s plan calls for $180 billion of research money for the “technologies of the future.”It would spend $50 billion on the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a technology directorate that would coordinate advanced-tech research across agencies, $30 billion on R&D to spur job creation in rural areas, and $40 billion on upgrading research labs across the country. Half of that lab money would go to “Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Serving Institutions, including the creation of a new national lab focused on climate that will be affiliated with an HBCU.”A climate lab in an HBCU is a nice touch. Good stuff.Speaking of climate change, the plan would put $35 billion specifically toward tech research and innovation focused on the climate crisis, in part by creating an ARPA-C (modeled on ARPA-E and, before it, DARPA) “to develop new methods for reducing emissions and building climate resilience.”And the plan contains something for which every innovation scholar and expert has been advocating for years: funding for demonstration projects.In addition to a $5 billion increase in funding for other climate-focused research, his plan will invest $15 billion in demonstration projects for climate R&D priorities, including utility-scale energy storage, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, advanced nuclear, rare earth element separations, floating offshore wind, biofuel/bioproducts, quantum computing, and electric vehicles, as well as strengthening U.S. technological leadership in these areas in global markets.And there are some other bits scattered throughout, like “ten pioneer facilities that demonstrate carbon capture retrofits for large steel, cement, and chemical production facilities, all while ensuring that overburdened communities are protected from increases in cumulative pollution.”This investment in clean-energy innovation is long, long overdue, and something that every Democrat, including Manchin, at least claims to support. Clean energy standardMidway through one of the bullet points, almost as an aside, we get this:President Biden will establish an Energy Efficiency and Clean Electricity Standard (EECES) aimed at cutting electricity bills and electricity pollution, increasing competition in the market, incentivizing more efficient use of existing infrastructure, and continuing to leverage the carbon pollution-free energy provided by existing sources like nuclear and hydropower.This is rather cryptic given that a CES is a central part of Biden’s climate plan. I’ve heard of clean electricity standards and efficiency standards, but I’ve never heard of an EECES and there’s not much here on how it would work or its targets. (The mention of nuclear and hydropower seems like a signal to lawmakers in, say, the Upper Midwest that they don’t need to be nervous.)It’s good that this made it into the plan, but the lack of detail does cause one to wonder how much faith the administration has that it will survive the coming Manchin Bath. (Listen to my podcast with Dr. Leah Stokes and Sam Ricketts on how to get a CES through reconciliation.)Buildings and distributed energyI have also written on the importance of decarbonizing buildings. (I am old and have written about everything.) Biden’s plan would drop a whopping $213 billion on upgrading buildings.The plan would “produce, preserve, and retrofit more than a million affordable, resilient, accessible, energy efficient, and electrified housing units” and “build and rehabilitate more than 500,000 homes for low- and middle-income homebuyers.”It would also — my heart sings — create a competitive grant program to reward local jurisdictions that take steps to eliminate exclusionary zoning. (Read Sightline’s Dan Bertolet for more on the evils of exclusionary zoning.)The plan has $27 billion for a Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator “to mobilize private investment into distributed energy resources; retrofits of residential, commercial and municipal buildings; and clean transportation.”There’s $40 billion to improve public-housing infrastructure. There’s money to upgrade, modernize, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of schools ($100 billion), community colleges ($12 billion), child-care facilities ($25 billion), VA hospitals ($18 billion), and federal buildings ($10 billion). All of that work on buildings creates lots and lots of high-skill domestic jobs that can’t be outsourced, while reducing energy bills for consumers.So much moreI’ve only highlighted a handful of the dozens and dozens of provisions in the proposal. It extends the federal clean-energy tax credits by 10 years, aims for 100 percent broadband access, invests in resilience for vulnerable communities and ecosystems, creates hundreds of thousands of union jobs plugging orphan oil and gas wells, and on and on. Much like the Covid recovery bill passed last month, the plan contains dozens of provisions and programs that, were they passed on their own, would count as major milestones. If even a substantial number of them make it through, this will be a historic achievement.Biden’s job plan would have seismic direct effects on the US economy and people, but a couple of its less-discussed second-order effects are worth highlighting.Reducing air pollution produces enormous progressive benefitsFirst, if Biden can kick-start a domestic EV industry the way Obama’s stimulus bill kick-started solar — if he can electrify the federal fleet, get hundreds of thousands of charging stations built, and put the electricity sector on a path to net-zero — he will have indirectly set in motion the greatest and most rapid reduction of US air pollution in generations.As I wrote last year on Vox, all the recent science points in the same direction: air pollution, particularly smog, does much worse damage to health, at much lower exposure, than previously appreciated. The upshot of this new research is that a transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy will pay for itself in proximate health benefits alone, even setting aside reductions in future warming. Similarly, though it will take some professional modeling to determine the exact level of pollution reductions Biden’s plan would produce, there’s a very good chance that it too would more than pay for itself in health benefits. And, again, the impacts of air pollution are not equitably distributed. Low-income and minority communities are more likely to be located along highways or near polluting facilities. Children, the elderly, and those with disabilities are hardest hit. Reducing air pollution, especially from vehicles, is progressive, in both the economic and political senses of the term.Cheap batteries will have spillover effectsSecond, by pushing the shift to EVs and scaling up a domestic supply chain and manufacturing base, Biden’s plan will further accelerate the already vertiginous plunge in battery prices. A recent comprehensive study found that lithium-ion batteries have fallen in price by 97 percent since their commercial introduction in 1991. As co-author Jessika Trancik of MIT put it: “lithium-ion battery technologies have improved in terms of their costs at rates that are comparable to solar energy technology, and specifically photovoltaic modules, which are often held up as the gold standard in clean energy innovation.”Batteries’ movement down the cost curve can be accelerated by public policy, just as happened so many times for solar PV. Biden’s plan would put Americans to work making batteries cheaper. The cheaper batteries get, the more uses they find for themselves: as home energy storage, reliable backup power for data centers, or large-scale grid storage. The more storage is distributed throughout the grid, the more stable the grid is. Cheap storage is good for everyone. It’s difficult to predict all the knock-on effects, but I think it’s going to generate some cool surprises. Biden’s plan faces a long, uncertain roadWhat Biden and the Democrats pulled off with the Covid recovery bill was something of a miracle. They held together and got a huge bill through Congress with remarkably little fuss, which never happens any more. That moment, with its particular sense of urgency and necessity, has passed. Congress will inevitably spend a lot more time on this infrastructure bill. Generally speaking, time is Democrats’ enemy. Every day that passes is a chance for right-wing media to fully polarize the issue and make the negotiations look ugly and contentious to the public. Dems have to go through the motions of negotiating with Republicans, not because there’s any prospect of Republican cooperation (there isn’t), but because Joe Manchin’s political brand-building requires it, and nothing can pass without Manchin. At some point (one hopes) it will become clear to everyone that Republicans are a lost cause and Dems must pass the bill through reconciliation, for which they only need 50 votes. Then the only problem will be getting every single Democratic senator on board. Who knows what that will look like.Pelosi says she wants to pass the bill by July 4, but who knows how firm that deadline will prove. There are many twists and turns and setbacks ahead. The very best-case scenario is that Manchin (perhaps with some group of “moderates”) picks a fight over a particular item — the exact structure of the taxes that will pay for the bill, or one of the spending areas — and theatrically wins it, getting some changes made. Meanwhile … the rest of the enormous bill passes largely unremarked. That’s basically what happened with the Covid recovery bill.If the bill passes at all, it won’t be exactly what Biden has proposed. Nonetheless, no matter what happens, it’s worth celebrating what Biden has done here. Within this expansive infrastructure package is a mini-Green New Deal, with large-scale spending targeted at just the areas energy wonks say could accelerate the transition to clean energy — all with a focus on equity and justice for vulnerable communities on the front lines of that transition.If it passes in anything like its current form, it will be the most significant climate and energy legislation of my lifetime, by a wide margin. I’m going to allow myself a moment of excitement and hope. Don’t worry, I’m sure it will pass. 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

(If you don’t want to read the post, click play above and I’ll read it to you.)Hello, beloved readers and listeners! Today I’m going to make an argument that is very important to me: Democrats must pass substantial democracy reform before the 2022 elections. If Dems don’t get this done, the US is in for a long period of political darkness. Democracy in America could very well perish. Climate change will become unsolvable. Every goal progressives seek — taxing the rich, funding infrastructure, fixing immigration, boosting unions, you name it — will move out of reach. It is, I say with some risk of understatement, the most important thing in the world.Let me try to explain why.Biden’s 2020 victory temporarily arrested, but did not stop, the US slide toward minority ruleWhen Biden was elected in November, I felt a conflicting mass of emotions. Most of all, of course, was relief. It is no exaggeration to say that a second Trump term would have meant the end of the American experiment with democracy. But alongside that relief was a persistent sense of dread. The larger context of the 2020 election is an ongoing process whereby America’s mostly white, rural, and suburban conservative minority — which hasn’t won the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004 — is gaining greater and greater structural political advantages each passing year. Republicans are overrepresented in the Senate, overrepresented by the Electoral College, gerrymandered into safe House seats, and busy passing voter suppression bills at the state level. What Dems needed in 2020 was commanding majorities in both houses and a few key state legislatures, enough to stop the next round of GOP gerrymandering and pass substantial democracy reform through Congress.They got majorities, but, far from commanding, they are whisker thin, smaller in the House than in 2018. And Republicans maintained control of all the state governments key to redistricting. That makes Democrats’ job much, much more difficult.Nonetheless, it remains the job. Getting Trump out of office was the first step, but it won’t mean anything in the mid- to long-term if Dems don’t repair democracy. Absent substantial structural reform, the most likely outcome remains the one that Matt Yglesias predicted in 2015: “America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.”I would put it this way: Democrats either pass substantial democracy reform (including statehood for DC) through Congress in the next 18 months or they will lose one or both houses in 2022 and remain locked out of congressional majorities for a decade if not longer. Without voting system reform, Dems are screwed in 2022The most likely outcome of the 2022 elections is that Democrats lose their House majority. To keep it, they would have to defy both history and Republican gerrymandering.Historically, midterm elections are a “shellacking” for the president’s party, as Obama (whose party lost 63 House seats in 2010) put it. With only two exceptions — Clinton Democrats in 1998 and Bush Republicans in 2002 — this has held true all the way back to 1934. Even if they defy that historical trend, Democrats won’t be fighting on a level playing field. Because they retained control of the key state legislatures involved in redistricting, Republicans could win a House majority in 2022 purely with new seats created by redistricting, even if they don’t flip a single blue seat red. To buck these trends and keep the House in 2022, Democrats will need not just the historic turnout that elected Biden, but more. It would take something of a miracle. “If we replicate the GOP’s post-9/11, 2002 midterm performance, we have a chance,” political analyst David Shor told New York magazine’s Eric Levitz. “If we replicate the second-best presidential-party midterm from the past 40 years, we lose.”The Senate will be more competitive in 2022: out of 34 races, Republicans are defending 20 seats and Democrats 14. Nine of those races are considered competitive, roughly evenly divided between parties. But it almost doesn’t matter: if Democrats lose the House, legislation of any substance will become impossible. And odds are getting increasingly stacked against Democrats in both houses, so it could be a long-ass time before they have Congress again. Perhaps there’s some path to bipartisan democracy reform? Ha ha, no.Republicans will fight democracy reform to the deathIf either house of Congress goes to Republicans, any kind of positive voting reform becomes impossible. If they get unified control again, they are much more likely to pass national versions of the kind of targeted voter restrictions they are passing at the state level. Democrats will never get a scrap of help from Republicans on democracy reform, only implacable, relentless opposition. Conservatives will fight it with everything they’ve got, for the same reason they fought it during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era: to the extent voting in the US becomes easier, fairer, and more representative, they lose power. The right has a congenial and enduring Supreme Court majority and a growing network of militias willing to use intimidation and the threat of violence against legislative activity they dislike, as they have in Oregon and Michigan (oh, and the US Capitol). They have shown no hesitation in using either.Dems need to understand that Republicans will escalate the war over voting reform as far as they are able, full stop. It’s existential for them. Passing democracy reform means doing the Manchin danceWith the current dysfunctional and distorted electoral system in place, this could be the last time Democrats hold the presidency and both houses of Congress for a decade or longer. That’s why it’s now or never on democracy reform.Getting there will require a delicate dance. A lot of things have to line up.My hopes for Democrats were dim going into 2021, but thus far Biden has been astonishingly effective. He led with a blitz of executive actions, may get everyone vaccinated by May (!), got most of his cabinet nominations approved, turbo-charged a unionization drive in Alabama, and just got a stimulus bill almost exactly the size he wanted — $1.9 trillion — through Congress. That bill contains state and local aid, extended (tax-free) unemployment benefits, a child allowance that could halve US child poverty, and loads more.It’s a lot of concrete aid to a lot of people in a short period of time (exactly what I advised/hoped). Biden has done all this while maintaining a low personal profile, giving Americans the peace from politics they needed. He remains resolutely boring as a public figure — no provocative tweets, no inserting himself in passing culture-war battles, no unnecessary theatrics. A democracy-reform bill, though, can’t pass through reconciliation with a bare majority the way the Covid relief bill did. To pass it, Democrats will need to either scrap, reform, or otherwise bypass the filibuster. The major figure in that drama is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who has also, I must begrudgingly admit, outperformed my expectations thus far. He kicked up a fuss around the stimulus bill — a fuss that sounds like it was almost entirely about personal pique — but ultimately he signed on without fundamental changes. More importantly, after saying nothing but harshly negative things about filibuster reform for months, Manchin threw a curveball last Sunday, when he expressed openness, not to killing the filibuster, but reforming it. “If you want to make [filibustering] a little bit more painful — make them stand there and talk — I’m willing to look at any way we can,” he told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.That’s only one small step toward filibuster reform — many problems and challenges remain — but it’s an important one. Let’s say you wanted to interpret Manchin’s actions charitably. Perhaps he’s doing a dance, making loud noises about moderation and blocking Democrats and working across the aisle in order to play to his conservative constituents in West Virginia, while ultimately running cover for Biden’s extraordinarily ambitious agenda. Voters, especially Democratic voters, love the optics of negotiation and compromise. Republicans have been incredibly effective at denying them those optics by refusing to compromise — it’s a way to ensure the Democratic agenda fails even as Democrats take the blame for not trying hard enough to be bipartisan.In a sense, fighting and negotiating with conservative Dems like Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema provides voters (and political journalists) some of those optics, making it look like Biden has to shepherd his priorities past the watchful eye of skeptical moderates. It gives the public more confidence in the resulting legislation. (The Covid relief bill is enormously popular.)Perhaps Manchin knows all that and is supplying those optics on purpose. Perhaps he’s accumulating “moderate” credibility that he plans to spend on filibuster reform when the time is right. I still don’t quite believe that — I’m suspicious of 12-dimensional-chess explanations in politics — but let’s just say there’s been no disconfirming evidence yet. The theory still fits the facts.Manchin is now saying that he doesn’t want to use reconciliation for the big upcoming infrastructure bill. Over on Axios:Asked if he believes it's possible to get 10 Republicans on the infrastructure package, which could yield the 60 votes needed under normal Senate rules, Manchin said: "I sure do."Again, there’s no way to know if he actually believes this or if he’s just setting himself up to look like he tried, but … it’s definitely wrong. There is no world in which 10 Republican senators vote for a major Democratic bill, infrastructure or otherwise. The question is what Manchin will do when Republican support for Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda doesn’t materialize. Is there some demonstration of Republican obstinance that will drive Manchin to filibuster reform? If so, which bill might prompt it?Every Democratic constituency, if it gets wind of the possibility of filibuster reform — or even one-time exemptions from the filibuster — will want its issue to be the test case. Key unions are even now calling for filibuster reform in order for the Senate to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act that the House just passed. The filibuster must fall for a democracy reform billBut if the filibuster is to fall — or waver, or reform — it must do so in service of the bill passed by the House earlier this month: HR1, which would implement nationwide automatic voter registration, mandate that nonpartisan commissions handle all redistricting, mandate early voting and no-excuses absentee ballots, institute campaign finance and ethics reforms, and restore felon voting rights, among other things. Yes, it would help Democrats electorally. According to Shor, comprehensive election reform would raise Dems’ chances of keeping the House in 2022 threefold.But it would help Democrats because it would allow more people to vote, in a fairer and more equitable way. No Democrat should be apologetic about backing it. I hope that wiser heads in the Democratic congressional caucus will be able to convince their colleagues, most notably Manchin and other Senate nostalgists, that democracy reform must get a vote. Even if Republicans want to filibuster it, the filibuster has to end at some point; debate must come to a close and there must be a real, old-fashioned, majority-wins vote. Democracy is too important to let arcane Senate procedure stand in the way. There are other things Democrats should do on democracy reform as well, including statehood for DC and Puerto Rico (if the people of PR want it) and expanding the Supreme Court, but HR1 is the core.“Basically, we have this small window right now to pass redistricting reform and create states,” Shor told Levitz. “And if we don’t use this window, we will almost certainly lose control of the federal government and not be in a position to pass laws again potentially for a decade.”Let’s not forget that Republicans, led by the president, tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. They were prevented from doing so by a few key state Republican officials and judges with integrity. Democrats should think about what will happen in the next presidential election, with the House in Republican hands and state parties having purged all their non-Trump loyalists. There’s no reason to think they won’t try to cheat again and their odds are likely to be improved. As they say over on Vote Save America: “HR1 or We’re Fucked.” It’s a narrow path, with dangers on all sides, and it will take a great deal of trust, cooperation, and coordination among Democrats to stay on it. But if democracy reform doesn’t happen, the US will be gridlocked, unable to address any of its problems with legislation, trapped in a self-reinforcing anti-democratic cycle through which an increasingly nationalistic minority exercises control over a growing, younger, more diverse majority. That can not end well. I am not particularly hopeful that Dems can, after passing this giant relief bill, hold on to their unity to a) pass a second giant reconciliation bill devoted to “building back better,” then b) push HR1 to the Senate floor and respond to the inevitable filibuster by c) convincing Manchin and other Senate holdouts to support filibuster reform, d) actually passing filibuster reform, and then e) passing HR1 into law. Oh, and then f) making DC a state.But I wasn’t particularly hopeful about Biden from the very beginning of his presidential campaign, and at every juncture, he’s done better than I expected. It’s the same since he took office. The aura of low-drama competence he and his team have maintained so far is pretty close to my best-case scenario for a Biden administration.So perhaps they know what they’re doing and will go to the mat for democracy reform when the time comes. Perhaps they can pull recalcitrant senators along with them. I suppose they’ve earned a little hope. 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

Hello, People of Volts! Today I’ve got a special treat for you: a podcast with Jesse Jenkins, energy modeler and assistant professor at Princeton.Those of you on #EnergyTwitter already know Jesse. He’s been doing this as long as I have, working his way up from take-haver to think tanker to graduate researcher at MIT to Princeton prof. Along the way he’s developed a reputation not only as one of the sharpest, most empirically informed energy analysts in the country, but as a scrupulously nice guy, always willing to share what he knows and engage in good faith with questions and arguments. As a journalist, I’ve found him indispensable.So it was a real treat to sit with Jesse for an in-depth conversation on energy system modeling. What exactly is it? How does it work? What does it tell us about the kinds of energy technologies we will need to decarbonize, and their relative scale? How do politicians use — and misuse — models?We get into all of it (as you will hear, I kept Jesse talking so long that I started worrying I might be violating the Geneva Conventions). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here are a few links either mentioned in, or relevant to, the discussion:* A three-part series on the “rebound effect,” whereby energy efficiency reduces the price of a service, which then increases demand for the service, which then wipes out some of the energy and environmental gains of the efficiency. I wrote it in 2012 for Grist.* Jesse’s old blog Watthead, with posts going all the way back to 2005.* A 2015 post of mine about how the International Energy Agency (IEA) consistently overestimates the cost of renewable energy.* The Princeton University Net-Zero America project, an effort to model a variety of pathways to deep decarbonization in the US. * A presentation on the Net-Zero project with Jesse and Princeton’s Eric Larson.Question for the type of folks who read to the bottom: would you be interested in a written transcription of this episode? It would be some work, but if enough people want it I’d be up for doing it, perhaps as a bonus for community members. Let me know in comments or at david@volts.wtf.Thanks for reading. If you value work like this, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. 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

Hello there, Voltron! It’s been an interesting week, hasn’t it? A guy writes a tediously long and wonky series on energy transmission and, next thing you know, transmission grids are dominating the news. By now, the story of what happened in Texas last week is familiar: an extraordinary cold snap simultaneously a) raised demand on the grid to well higher than the grid operator’s worst-case winter projections, and b) knocked out more than 30 gigawatts worth of energy generators. Supply and demand must be kept in perfect balance on a self-contained grid like Texas’, so when demand spiked and supply plunged, something had to give — thus the not-so-rolling blackouts.Most of that lost generation was natural gas and coal. Freezing afflicted not only the water used in power plants but the mining, distribution, and storage of fossil fuels. And, yes, some wind turbines froze, though wind actually performed better than the modest expectations set by ERCOT, Texas’ grid operator.I’m not going to go through the story in detail. I just want to talk a bit about what it means and what we can learn from it. To learn more about what happened, those affected, and the role Texas’s grid and regulations played in events, I recommend reading the following:* The Houston Chronicle had a great story on the events as they unfolded and is, in general, all over it. * In The New Republic, Kate Aronoff has a great overview, with crucial historical context for why the Texas grid is isolated and why it has an energy-only power market.* In the Atlantic, Rob Meyer has great coverage of the Texas planning failures. * The team at ProPublica has a piece on how Texas regulators “have repeatedly ignored, dismissed or watered down efforts to address weaknesses in the state’s sprawling electric grid.”* In the Los Angeles Times, Sammy Roth has another great wrap-up, with a focus on grid vulnerability.* In the New York Times, a team of journalists pulls together a great backgrounder on Texas’s unique power market structure and grid independence. * In the New York Times, Princeton energy analyst Jesse Jenkins has a piece on the crucial failure of Texas utilities to future-proof their assets. * In the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold have a story on the implications of the disaster for the energy-only market.* In Utility Dive, Alex Gilbert and Morgan Bazilian write on what happened and what it means for Texas grid regulation.* The New York Times’ Brad Plumer explains what climate impacts will mean for the nation’s power grids.* At Gizmodo, Molly Taft reports on how much the oil and gas industry is paying Republicans to lie about what happened.* And here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board lying about what happened.Any handful of those stories (save the last) will fill you in on what happened and why. Now let’s talk about what we can learn from it.It was going to be bad in Texas regardlessOne thing worth emphasizing up front is that Texas just faced an extremely unusual event. It got much colder, much faster, and dumped more snow and ice, for longer, and took out more energy infrastructure than even the grimmest forecasts predicted. Yes, the state has had cold snaps before — including in 2011 and 2014, producing a set of recommendations and guidelines that state regulators made voluntary and state utilities largely ignored — but this was extreme even in context. We’re going to touch on better planning, helpful technologies, and reformed regulatory structures, but the grim truth is that there is probably no alternative set of planners or regulations that would have adequately prepared for what took place last week. They certainly could have done better, but this event was fated to be rough.If we’re going to start seriously preparing the electricity system for long-tail, low-probability events — the kind climate change is making more likely — it will be a new thing, not something that’s been mastered by any current entity or regulatory body.Small picture: Texas electricity and natural gas systems need to be weatherized The Texas mess is being characterized as a grid crisis, but it was actually a generation crisis. Two-thirds of the state’s power comes from natural gas, and a) natural gas wells and pipelines froze (cutting normal production by about 20 percent), b) commercial and residential heating got priority access to natural gas, per state policy, and c) natural gas power plants froze. [Clarification: national natural gas production fell by 20 percent; Texas production fell by 50 percent.]Some coal plants and wind turbines also froze up, and one of the state’s nuclear plants went offline for unrelated reasons, but the bulk of the 30+ gigawatts of energy generation that went offline was natural gas power plants (many were also down for scheduled winter maintenance).Natural gas production and distribution falls under the purview of the Railroad Commission of Texas, so it is the RRC that will need to update regulations to make sure this doesn’t happen again on the production side. Given the RRC, that seems … unlikely.As for power plants, after the 2011 rolling blackouts, Texas should have required all generators to weatherize. It’s perfectly possible for natural gas plants and wind turbines to operate in the cold — there are wind farms in the Arctic. But the weatherization recommendations released in the wake of the blackouts were made voluntary and very few generators followed them.Some have argued that this failure to prepare can be laid at the feet of Texas’ energy-only market — the only such market in the US.In other restructured areas (like PJM in the Mid-Atlantic), alongside energy markets there are capacity markets, through which generators can get paid to maintain generation capacity in reserve, in the name of reliability. Texas has no capacity market. The incentive to maintain reserve capacity is supposed to come from the fact that the price of energy is allowed to swing with supply and demand. In times of high demand and/or constrained supply, prices rise, sometimes to many multiples of their normal level. Generating energy during those times can be incredibly lucrative. That’s supposed to induce generators to set aside (and weatherize) some capacity, to take advantage of those rare moments. It’s not a “free” market — no electricity market is — but it is more lightly regulated than its regional neighbors.For the past 10 years, the Texas grid has generally maintained lower reserves than, say, PJM, but it has performed quite well, despite persistent predictions to the contrary. During that time, Texas ratepayers saved quite a bit of money with their lean system. It’s not clear that if Texas had a capacity market, it would have avoided what happened last week. If a generator is set aside as reserve but it freezes, it doesn’t help. Capacity markets could impose regulations or mandates requiring generators to weatherize, but then again, so could regulators in an energy-only market. It is perfectly within the power of the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) to require weatherization. It just didn’t.Any regulatory system is going to need conscientious regulators and good planning. The larger lesson of the cold snap is that Texas, like the rest of the country, needs to plan its grid around resilience and redundancy rather than optimization, market or otherwise.Big picture: the Texas grid needs resilience in three directionsThe basic climate forecast for Texas is that it’s going to get warmer on average, but there’s a decent chance these freak cold snaps will get more frequent and nastier. (Like all climate science trying to pin down temporally and geographically narrow effects, this is provisional and there is disagreement within the science community.)That is a brutally wide range of conditions for which to plan and prepare. And the same basic problem will face grids in every region of the country. Climate change means a less predictable, less stable set of futures. Texas needs to work toward resilience at three levels.Improving the existing energy systemEven assuming it eventually wants to, or is forced to, it will take Texas a while to decarbonize its grid, working its way free of natural gas. In the meantime, it needs to take steps to ensure the security of supply, including weatherproofing major wells and pipelines and bulking up reserves.Clearly all power plants need to be weatherproofed, something that falls entirely within the jurisdiction of the Texas PUC. The Texas grid needs to be better and more finely segmented, so power outages can be more targeted, rather than akin to a lottery (homeowners who happened to be on a circuit with a hospital retained power). And ERCOT, like all transmission grid operators, could investigate the many ways of increasing the capacity and performance of existing transmission lines (see: transmission month). Improving local resilienceOne thing this crisis highlighted is the desperate need for demand-side resources on the Texas grid (measures the PUC and utilities have traditionally resisted). The state is way behind on “demand response,” whereby large groups of customers can be coordinated to reduce demand at times of grid stress. (FERC recently gave demand response access to capacity markets in areas under its jurisdiction, a decision the Supreme Court backed.)Perhaps the most basic step would be to better weatherize and insulate Texas’ homes and buildings, so they don’t require as much energy to heat and cool and they don’t lose heat as fast if the power goes out. Solar panels wouldn’t do much good in a snowstorm, but other distributed energy resources like batteries and electric vehicles can provide emergency power. At the community level, larger battery or other storage installations (perhaps fuel cells or flow batteries) located within distribution systems could help run community resilience centers, where at least people could congregate to stay warm.And microgrids that could island off from the larger grid and run on stored emergency power in the event of a blackout would have helped many Texans through the worst of the cold. I recommended the same set of local resilience and distributed energy solutions for California — which has had its own grid woes, despite not having an energy-only market — in a much more detailed piece, if you want to dig in.Improving interconnectionTexas, notoriously, runs its own grid, an island between the Western and Eastern Interconnections.There’s a long history behind why this is so (read Aronoff’s piece, and also this), but the gist is that, by not transporting electricity across state lines, the Texas electricity system escapes federal jurisdiction, in the form of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Texas has long been, and remains, ornery about federal authority. Because its grid is an island, Texas could not import power from, say, nearby Southeast states, where conditions were somewhat better. It could only cut power to customers.(Notably, El Paso — which for quirky historical reasons isn’t on the ERCOT grid, but rather on the larger Western Interconnection — survived the storm just fine, because it could import power from neighboring states.)It’s difficult to envision Texas allowing this arrangement to change. A transmission developer would have to propose an interstate line and ERCOT would have to approve it, at which point FERC could reasonably assert authority. But Texas has fought off such attempts in the past and shows little appetite, even in the face of this crisis, for submitting to the feds. It might bring the dread Green New Deal to the state!A few years back, a project called Tres Amigas proposed to connect the three US interconnections with HVDC lines. Even though it argued that it wouldn’t trigger federal jurisdiction over Texas, the project ended up dying.Nonetheless, it’s at least worth noting that it would be to Texas’ benefit to build HVDC lines to the other interconnections. Among other things, it could import power when 30 GW of generation goes offline. Building a few HVDC connections would probably be cheaper in the long run than trying to up-armor the state’s entire natural gas infrastructure and all its wind turbines against once-a-decade cold conditions. That’s the beauty of a national transmission grid: no region has to prepare for every conceivable weather pattern. When extreme or unusual conditions strike, any region can draw power from elsewhere in the country. All things being equal, interconnection boosts resilience and reduces prices. Perhaps ERCOT and FERC could work out some sort of deal, whereby the feds promise not to impose a capacity market or other dramatic market changes on the state as long as it meets basic North American Electric Reliability Organization (NERC) reliability standards and takes steps to interconnect with the rest of the country. Everybody wins. Resilience costs moneyAll the recommendations for Texas above apply equally to every state and regional grid. They all need to quit planning based on past conditions and instead plan for a future of wider variation, less predictability, and more frequent extremes. That calls for resilience: improving the performance of existing infrastructure, improving local resilience through efficiency, weatherization, and distributed energy resources, and improving interconnection with neighbors through HVDC lines. All of that costs money. Texas has been demonstrating for a decade that it’s possible to operate with slimmer reserves, closer to a just-in-time delivery model, and save quite a bit of money for ratepayers. It works pretty well most of the time, except for once a decade or so, when it catastrophically fails.In the wake of such failures, with the human costs evident, it’s easy to blame regulators and demand more resilience. But imagine if, five years ago, Texas legislators and regulators had approached the Texas public and proposed to substantially raise its electricity rates in order to weatherproof its electricity system against once-a-decade (or in this case, maybe once-a-century) conditions. It would not have been popular.It’s just difficult to spend money wisely, with an eye on long-term resilience. The short-term incentives align against it — not just the market incentives, but the political incentives. It’s difficult for Texas, it’s difficult for California, it’s difficult everywhere.And it’s especially difficult in the US thanks to the fundamental misalignment between our current social and environmental goals — lower carbon, better performance and efficiency, increased resilience and security — and the regulatory incentive structure within which US power utilities operate. They make money by investing in capital projects. They don’t want to do more with less; they make money by doing more with more.The US utility regime is designed for expansion, for building out electricity infrastructure to a country without it. Now that the electricity system is built out, now that it needs to be ruggedized and fine-tuned, now that local distribution systems need more autonomy and intelligence, that regime is no longer serving us. We end up, again and again, working against utilities, trying to kludge together artificial incentive structures to persuade them to do stuff they simply aren’t designed to do.Getting to resilience and national interconnection by fighting through 50 public utility commissions is going to take forever. What’s needed are some federal performance standards and a large-scale program of public investment into electricity infrastructure. Congress needs to step up and act like climate change is a national emergency.Texas may lose some of its treasured autonomy in the process, but it will gain a more effective and resilient electricity system. 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

A rundown of why big, long-distance power lines are crucial for decarbonization and grid relief. A look at the political, planning, and financing hurdles that stop ambitious transmission projects. Ideas for avoiding siting fights by burying HVDC lines along rail and road. Fast wins from grid-enhancing technologies, storage-as-transmission, and converting existing corridors to boost capacity.

Greetings, faithful Volts readers! Welcome back to the Transmission Week that never ends. The news these last few days has been filled with talk about electricity grids. Texas is suffering from an unprecedented cold snap that has left more than four million people without power for days. It’s a terrible situation. There’s a lot to say about it, what can and can’t be learned, and perhaps I’ll get to it next week.But you didn’t sign up for a breaking-news email, you signed up for Volts! So today brings what I believe what I believe will be my last big transmission post, though I may do a wrap-up after this. Thank you for traveling with me on this longer-than-expected journey.Today, we’re going to look at a couple of final ideas to make the transmission grid work better, short of building new lines — a remainder bin of grid-enhancing technologies, if you will. Idea #1: Using energy storage as a transmission assetAt least since the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the US government has acknowledged that energy storage technologies can be used to ease grid congestion and increase the reliability and flexibility of energy transmission. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in “storage as a transmission asset” (SATA), which refers to energy storage installations that are treated as transmission assets — meaning utilities can “rate base” them and receive a guaranteed rate of return plus any tariffs or incentives for transmission assets. Basically, it means allowing some storage to be treated — legally, financially, and operationally — like a piece of the transmission system.SATA projects — sometimes known as “virtual power lines” — offer a range of benefits to regional energy grids. When a line is congested, it can offload some power to storage. At times of lower congestion, stored power can be injected to maintain high line utilization. Storage can thus relieve congestion and make the grid more reliable. It is much cheaper and quicker to deploy than new transmission, its footprint is much smaller, and it faces a much less onerous regulatory process. It is extremely modular and scalable, which means it can start small and be scaled up precisely to need, and even relocated as grid needs change.Congestion on a power line often causes “inefficient dispatch,” meaning grid operators must ask generators on one side of the line to curtail their output and generators on the other side of the line to ramp theirs up, even if that isn’t the most cost-effective option. Storage on either side of the line can help reduce inefficient dispatch.Another key service storage can provide is to free up unused line capacity. A grid capacity standard called “N-1” holds that the grid must maintain safe operation if a “contingency event” takes out one of the lines. This means all lines must maintain some reserve capacity to absorb energy in the event of an N-1 situation. But storage can serve that purpose — rapidly injecting energy into, or absorbing energy from, the grid in the case of a contingency event — even better than power lines. Adding SATA projects can free up some of that reserve line capacity to carry more power. As with most things transmission, Europe is way ahead of the US on this. Most notably, Germany is developing 1,300 MW worth of SATA in a project known as Netzbooster (grid booster) to free up line capacity otherwise reserved for an N-1 contingency. (Germany has notorious congestion between the wind-heavy north and load centers in the south.) The US has nothing at the GW scale like that, but a few RTOs are moving forward. In August 2020, FERC approved MISO’s proposal for the rules and processes by which it would integrate storage into its planning and project selection.One twist: FERC has indicated that it is “permissible as a matter of policy” in the US for a storage project to be “dual use,” to serve as a transmission asset and receive fixed returns and simultaneously to participate in wholesale energy markets and receive market returns.This move has drawn some criticism, since it seems to blur the canonical separation between energy market participants and the “wires companies” that are supposed to offer them non-discriminatory access to the grid. If a wires company owns a storage asset that is drawing market returns, it has every reason to give that asset privileged grid access.FERC has said dual use is subject to the following four principles:* must be cost-competitive with transmission,* must avoid double recovery for providing the same service,* cannot suppress market bids, and* cannot jeopardize ISO/RTO independence.It’s not entirely clear how dual use storage could, in practice, avoid bumping up against those principles. So far as I know, none of the big RTOs/ISOs has yet hashed out exactly how to make the dual-use thing work. (Here’s an issue paper in which California ISO wrestles with the problem.)There are reasons to remain skeptical of SATA projects. Batteries are still relatively expensive compared to other types of assets. “Many areas of congestion are better served by a new power plant, fuel cell, or demand response asset than a big single-purpose battery,” says Cody Hill, who analyzes and deploys storage projects for LS Power. The California ISO has been skeptical too. It reported in 2018: “Over the past several years, the ISO has studied 27 battery storage proposals and one pumped hydro storage proposal as potential transmission assets. To date only two proposals have resulted in storage projects moving forward, both in the most recent 2017-2018 Transmission Plan.”But utilities are allowed to rate-base SATA projects — receive a guaranteed rate of return on them — and they love rate-basing stuff, whether it’s cost-effective or not. They make money by spending money. (See: Texas utility Oncor’s $5.2 billion SATA proposal, which was never approved. I wonder if grid regulators regret that in light of current news!)“A company that gets a SATA project approved gets a guaranteed profit on every dollar spent,” says Hill, “so utilities have an obvious incentive to get lots of these projects approved and put into the rate base, and not much of an incentive to keep the costs down.”Hill warns that utilities are working in regulatory proceedings “to guarantee that they will have a monopoly on new SATA projects going forward” — sheltering them from competition under FERC Order 1000, the same way they’ve been sheltering transmission lines from competition (see this post for more on that). “Now that storage is getting cheap enough to pencil in more locations,” Hill says, “this would be a terrible outcome for storage developers and utility customers alike.”Hopefully FERC will take steps to implement performance-based incentives for utilities and force true competitive bidding in both transmission and SATA, allowing merchant projects to compete on a level playing field. Here’s what the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says is needed (quoting its report):* Clear rules on the ownership and operation of the Virtual Power Line (VPL).* Compensation structures that reflect the costs of the VPL.* Regulations enabling a multi-service business case, so that the social welfare benefits provided by the ESS is maximised.* Regulations that enable network operators to consider battery storage systems in network planning, together with conventional investments in network infrastructure.The Energy Storage Association has laid out a set of positions and policy recommendations that get into more policy weeds, explaining how FERC could meet those conditions. In the meantime, a 2020 study found that, in a system with high renewable energy penetration, “storage value originates primarily from deferring investments in generation capacity (VRE, natural gas) and transmission.” SATA can do that — make the existing transmission system work better, thus cutting down the need for new lines.Anyway: storage as transmission! It’s all part of the process of making transmission grids more networked, dispatchable, and intelligent.Idea #2: Converting AC lines to HVDC linesFinally, here at the very end, let’s quickly look at a proposal that I probably should have put very first, since it may be the quickest and easiest way to boost transmission grid performance.Here’s the idea: existing AC (alternating current) lines have already fought all the siting battles. The land has already been claimed. In some cases, it is possible to convert AC lines to HVDC (high-voltage direct currect) lines. It turns out the actual wire used is the same — it just needs to be reconfigured. “If you are using an existing corridor, you can use the existing lines and just change the bundles,” says Dr. Liza Reed, research manager for low carbon technology policy at the Niskanen Center. “So if you have three phases of four lines each, you've got 12 lines, and you can turn that into six lines on either side of the DC bipole.”In some cases that will mean slightly extending the height of the tower.But the costliest part is replacing AC substations with converters to shift the AC power to DC and vice versa (and in some cases, boosting the capacity of nearby substations to handle the additional power). Ideally, the new converters will be Voltage Source Converters (VSCs) using solid-state electronics. (This this post for more on VSCs, which Reed thinks are close to being the default choice for HVDC developers.)Even with that cost, converting lines “is surprisingly cost-effective, even over relatively short distances, and, in some cases, may be the only way to achieve dramatic increases in the capacity of existing corridors.” That’s the conclusion of a 2019 study on which Reed — who did her PhD dissertation on converting lines at Carnegie Mellon — was the lead author. In another study, Reed and colleagues looked at five options for expanding transmission capacity: reconductoring (replacing conductors) to increase current, increasing voltage, installing a FACTS (see previous post), converting to HVDC, and building a new line.“In the normal course of operations, utilities have to replace lines as they age anyway,” Reed told me. “Replacing lines with high-temperature low-sag options can increase capacity quickly and at low cost compared to other solutions. The capacity increase is limited, but often still has substantial benefits to power flow.”Converting lines has been a subject of discussion among power engineers and scholars for decades (see this 1997 paper), but as with previous technologies we’ve discussed, things are finally now beginning to come together: costs are falling even as grid congestion and the need for relief rise. Reed says it’s difficult to pin down the total national potential of replacing lines, since projects are so dependent on specific line conditions, which in many cases have not been analyzed.The most promising lines for conversion are double-circuit 345kV lines. The map below shows the roughly 25 percent of US transmission circuit-miles that are over 300kV. About two-thirds of those, something like 16 percent of total US transmission, is suitable, at least in theory, for conversion. That’s not going to solve US grid woes, but it does represent a crucial opportunity to quickly expand the existing grid and relieve congestion while other solutions are being developed. And that’s it, folks! Transmission! I can’t guarantee I won’t return to the subject in the future, but I think I pretty much covered the waterfront. I hope it was helpful.Later this week, I’ll send a transmission wrap-up post, linking to all the previous posts in one place and summarizing what we’ve learned.As a reward for sticking with me this far, here’s Mabel with a bloop of snow on her nose: 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