Volts

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The Senate’s bipartisan permitting bill got a manager’s amendment last week — 77 pages meant to answer objections from environmentalists, tribes, and utilities. Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures returns to walk through what changed: narrower permit certainty provisions, a stronger transmission title, partial wins for tribes, and tighter rules making data centers pay. We also debate whether Democrats, fresh off a landslide, should take this deal or wait for a better one. We recorded Monday, hours before the Senate voted 73–25 to open debate.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:19 – Where the bill stands: the cloture vote
05:55 – Politics 1: who’s for the bill and who’s against it
11:41 – Politics 2: why not wait for a better deal?
18:58 – Politics 3: affordability and the modeling
25:11 – Transmission 1: the planning fix for utilities
29:30 – Transmission 2: the backstop, FERC oversight and PJM
37:10 – Certainty 1: what changed in Section 1401
48:29 – Certainty 2: what’s left, plus 1402 and 1403
56:51 – Tribes 1: the Section 106 changes
1:05:58 – Tribes 2: the vacatur fight and where tribes land
1:11:35 – Data centers: making them pay their way
1:21:03 – Environment 1: ESA and the Clean Water Act
1:25:10 – Environment 2: NEPA and the state-NEPA test
1:31:18 – Odds and ends: nuclear, prescribed burns and more
1:34:57 – What Palken would change
1:38:32 – Politics 4: who moved, and Trump’s endorsement
1:44:15 – Politics 5: the House, and what happens if it dies

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Last week’s election was a blue wave all the way down the ballot: Democrats took the House and Senate, went from 16 state trifectas to as many as 22, flipped utility commissions, and rejected data centers almost everywhere. Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet, which won more than 100 of its 120-plus races, joins me to sort through the statehouses, PSCs, and ballot measures. Then we ask the harder questions of whether these new majorities can actually bring down costs and what it all means for climate and energy policy.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:20 – How Climate Cabinet’s races went
04:31 – The national results and historic firsts
07:21 – Trifectas 1: which states flipped
12:25 – Trifectas 2: Pennsylvania and going big
18:21 – Trifectas 3: North Carolina, redistricting
22:47 – Regulators 1: Georgia’s new majority
26:09 – Regulators 2: Arizona and Louisiana
28:32 – Regulators 3: Texas Railroad Commission
32:22 – Undervoting and other down-ballot wins
38:05 – Data centers 1: the ballot-box backlash
40:27 – Data centers 2: is clean energy next?
45:09 – Ballot measures 1: Michigan and Colorado
49:13 – Ballot measures 2: Ann Arbor, Eugene, AZ
55:56 – Housing and transit
1:01:44 – How states can cut energy bills
1:08:46 – Quick fixes, lasting fixes, and EVs
1:13:11 – Looking ahead to 2028
1:20:14 – Final thoughts

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Volts published eight conversations in October, which is a lot for anyone to listen to. We’ve rounded up the highlights into less than an hour. Enjoy!
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
01:52 – Leah Stokes on passing the IRA
07:52 – Daniel Palken on the permitting bill
13:26 – Matt Traldi on local clean energy fights
19:38 – Kristian Jensen on Denmark’s utilities
24:56 – Nick Chaset on consumer protection
30:11 – Sam D’Amico on engineers and factories
35:41 – Tom Matzzie on the clean energy super PAC
41:19 – Ketan Joshi on data centers and climate

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Power electronics have taken over almost everything in our lives, with the exception, oddly, of the power grid itself — it is still held together by tens of millions of analog, iron-and-copper transformers, the design of which has barely changed in a century. Solid-state transformers replace the dumb gray box with something that can monitor and steer power or convert it from AC to DC and vice versa. In this episode, Enphase co-founder Raghu Belur, who built his company by dividing big solar inverters into thousands of small ones, explains how he’s trying the same thing with transformers, why AI data centers and big solar and battery projects are the first markets, and what it would take to put a smarter transformer on every pole.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
03:02 – What a transformer does
07:53 – What conventional transformers can’t do
11:43 – What makes a transformer solid state
15:27 – How much is software, how much is hardware
19:40 – Why power electronics hasn’t reached the grid
23:54 – Enphase’s distributed approach
31:23 – Building transformers from 5-kilowatt modules
34:58 – Copper, gallium nitride, and supply chains
43:44 – Cybersecurity
47:23 – Data centers and 800 volts DC
59:29 – Solar and battery storage
1:05:18 – The cost question
1:07:02 – Neighborhood transformers and the utilities
1:15:37 – Efficiency, lifespan, and heat
1:22:24 – Handling grid faults
1:25:27 – Standards, policy, and the next few years

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Volts guests have argued that data centers can be good for the grid if they’re built right. Here I hear the case against, from Ketan Joshi, a former wind-industry analyst who now tracks Big Tech’s climate claims. He sees data centers as the wrong kind of demand growth: lumpy, concentrated, unwanted by neighbors, and largely met with gas. Underneath it all is the worry that the backlash against data centers will become a backlash against electrification itself.
Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction
02:14 – How Ketan became a big tech critic
06:01 – The case against data centers
07:39 – What data centers add to emissions
11:57 – Isn’t more electricity demand good?
20:12 – Backlash and the NEXTDC power-pole protest
24:21 – AI claims 1: will AI help the climate?
27:53 – AI claims 2: machine learning vs. generative AI
33:47 – AI claims 3: inflated climate wins
36:51 – The gas rush: how much gets built?
44:49 – Would easier renewables fix it?
49:14 – Can data centers be flexible load?
55:41 – Do we actually want AI data centers?
59:39 – What should data centers do to plug in?
1:05:31 – Fake crackdowns and the risk to renewables
1:09:24 – What if AI is a bubble?