Volts

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Could the US grid be brought down by Chinese hackers? To find out, I talked with Patrick Miller, who helped write the cybersecurity rules for the bulk power system and became the first person with federal authority to enforce them. We get into what's actually been hacked, why those "rogue devices" in Chinese inverters are less sinister than they sound, and why squirrels still do more damage than hackers.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:47 – What state utility commissioners get wrong about cyber risk
04:50 – Real attacks on the grid so far: Ukraine, Poland, and the US
06:57 – IT versus OT, and why grid devices are hard to protect
10:30 – The NERC CIP standards: scope, requirements, enforcement
17:40 – Distributed resources outside the CIP perimeter
20:54 – Dropping the threshold to 20 MVA, and federal jurisdiction
29:12 – Chinese inverters and the commodity board
36:09 – Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and China's intent
39:26 – Data centers as a new attack surface
43:19 – The trade-off between security and speed
47:44 – Cyber-informed engineering and analog safeguards
54:05 – AI on offense and defense
1:02:21 – Squirrels, balloons, and physical threats
1:04:24 – CISA cuts, CIRCIA, and harmonizing the rules

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State legislatures are writing data center rules faster than they can verify the demand forecasts underneath them. Fifteen states accounted for 80 percent of data center electricity demand in 2023, a single hyperscale campus can arrive as 15 to 20 percent of a utility's demand, and the transmission to serve it takes five to 15 years to build. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts works through Climate Cabinet's Taming Data Center Turmoil series with Saleem Chapman, who leads the group's electricity affordability policy work, on why Georgia's regulated utility, PJM's capacity market, and ERCOT's competitive market each left ratepayers holding the risk, and what a state can require before it approves a project, while the facility operates, and after the deal is done.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:49 – How Climate Cabinet came to the data center fight
03:58 – Three things that make hyperscalers unlike past industrial loads
07:51 – Warning signals: forecast opacity, gas dependency, unconditional subsidies
13:44 – Siting near overburdened communities and the Memphis case
15:34 – State preemption versus local control
18:31 – The same failure pattern in Georgia, PJM, and ERCOT
23:52 – Why not just ban data centers outright
28:07 – The framework, and what to require before approval
34:54 – While operating: real cost pricing and on-call load flexibility
37:39 – Scenario-based planning and the utility incentive problem
39:37 – After the deal: new and matched clean energy
43:48 – Siting standards and performance-tied incentives
50:27 – Existing facilities and the threat to build elsewhere
55:41 – Which states are ahead, and step one for lawmakers

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Volts published eight conversations in July on subjects with nothing obvious in common: an Arizona utility board election, Minnesota smart meters, land value taxes in Spokane, silicon battery anodes. Yet six of them arrived at the same constraint. What stops energy infrastructure from getting built in the United States is more often written into law than into physics. On this episode, David Roberts pulls one stretch from each July conversation into a single hour, with two Minnesota utility regulators, a Spokane city council member, a Hawaii state senator, a co-founder of a battery materials company, and more.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction: a new format for Volts
01:22 Arizona: winning the utility elections nobody watches
07:04 Minnesota: the smart meter data nobody uses
12:40 Spokane: how property taxes reward empty lots
17:31 Hawaii: the education gap in state energy policy
22:13 The data center backlash is a politics story
27:41 Why America can't build transit: procurement
32:41 Clean energy after the IRA: the glass debate
38:26 Silicon anodes: the other half of the battery
44:47 Closing: tell me if this worked

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Materials in lithium-ion battery cathodes have continuously evolved since the 1990s, but anodes have stubbornly remained graphite. Now, finally, there’s some innovation on that side: silicon anodes, which engineers have struggled to master for a decade, are finally coming into wide commercialization. They enable up to five times the energy density of graphite anodes, charge many times faster, and are poised to revolutionize the battery market. In this episode, I talk with Rick Costantino, co-founder and CTO of Group14, which is selling a silicon-carbon composite material for anodes. They’re already selling to dozens of large battery manufacturers and expect silicon anodes to completely take over the market by 2030.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction and the graphite anode problem
01:54 – Why silicon, and why it kept failing
06:26 – From pharma to batteries: Rick's path
09:24 – How SCC55 works: silicon in a carbon scaffold
14:38 – The payoff: energy density and charge speed
18:59 – A drop-in material, and scaling in South Korea
21:11 – Where the batteries go: phones, EVs, drones
24:29 – Cost versus graphite
26:20 – Cycle life, calendar life, and safety
31:26 – Supply chain and the silane bottleneck
36:26 – Pairing with LFP, DOE support, and phones
40:30 – Bringing the cost down, and competitors
43:27 – The five-year outlook

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The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) established substantial tax credits for wind and solar power. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) eliminated those tax credits. How much damage did that do to the overall trajectory of clean energy in the post-Trump world? A new research commentary argues that the damage was less than many had feared and that the road forward for clean energy is less about restoring those credits than about easing the permitting and interconnection constraints inhibiting renewable energy. Today I talk with author Lily Bermel about the modeling her commentary is based on and the somewhat controversial conclusions she draws from it.
Chapters:
00:00 The IRA, the OBBBA, and the case for optimism
03:25 OBBBA - Why Bermel ran the analysis
05:50 The headline numbers: 74, 71, 67
08:07 Decomposing clean: solar and batteries hold, wind takes the hit
12:14 The lag analysis, and the 'glass half full' perspective
15:27 2.8 gigatons, and losses you can't get back
18:01 The third scenario, and Trump I versus Trump II
21:49 What the model leaves out: manufacturing, LPO, loans
23:07 Interior's permitting campaign against wind and solar
27:22 The demand surge and behind-the-meter gas
32:15 Nuclear restarts, geothermal, and clean firm
35:31 Booms, busts, and the electrification wave
42:22Transmission, interconnection, and the ceiling
46:41 Tax credits versus permitting reform
51:46 Durability, polarization, and preemptive surrender
60:01 Can enough storage make renewables firm?
66:48 Grid utilization versus building new grid
70:52 Final reflections: 2021, and what Bermel would do with a trifecta