Climate & Energy

It's been a while since I did one of these "what I'm listening to" posts. Since the last one, a bunch of things have changed: I've gotten deeply into climate work for volunteerism (so podcast skew really heavily in that direction). Also, my commute to the Yorktown office is about 50 minutes each way, which means 2 - 3 days a week I've got a lot of car time.

Podcasts

There are a few podcasts that I keep top of Queue and listen to pretty much everything they come out with.

Space the Nation

Pure joy. Science fiction is my comfort genre, and to have a podcast where two people who both love the genre, but also bring this amazing lens of how these works interact with theories of international relations and societal critiques, is just joy.

Anna Marie Cox and Dan Dresner started this as an Expanse recap show when Syfy was still doing podcasts, but they kept with it, well beyond. Their Andor recaps are some of the best.

Volts

It hard to overstate how useful Volts is as a source of information for climate folks. David Roberts pulls in some of the most amazing guests pushing on climate solutions, be it power transformers, steam boilers, housing reform, you name it. My passion for batteries and virtual power plant solutions came form this podcast.

I particularly love that David jumps way down the rabbit hole with these guests. He just keeps asking questions, going deep into layers that you don't get a lot of other places. If you are in the climate space, you have to listen to this.

Sirens

During the first Trump term, one podcast I really valued was Bombshell. Three incredible woman talking about national security, national defense, and foreign affairs, in a way that was unique and again at a depth I was not getting anywhere else. When Biden was elected, many of them went into the administration, and the show stopped.

Now, it's been revitalized as Sirens. It again brings a level of discussion and depth to the machinations of government and foreign relations that I've not found other places.

Shift Key

Robinson Meyer wrote my favorite piece of climate content ever, about land. A few years ago he started the heatmap news outlet, focused on becoming "the wired of climate". This podcast is part of that family.

This has had some of the best recent analysis on the impacts of the Iran war on fossil fuel flows, and how the world is adjusting to that in real time. I really value the way he digs into interviews. I do miss the upshift / downshift at the end of episodes they used to do, but this remains a go to.

Books

While I do have some other podcasts in my queue, I'm not getting to them at the moment because I started listening to audio books more regularly as well. I think these all need their own posts, but I'll just tease that I'm currently in the middle (late middle) of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance. It's really making me think a lot about the stories we tell ourselves, and the way narratives emerge.

Prior to that I listened to Curtis Dozier's The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. Curtis is a dear friend, this was years of scholarship that I had the fortune to hear about in it's construction. I feel like there are parts of this book that are almost in dialogue with Palmer's in really interesting ways.

And before that, more history, Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide and Empire. I learned a ton of US history out of this book. And because I'm an engineer, the chapter on standards was fascinating and hilarious all at the same time.

All these books I purchased through Libro.fm, supporting local bookstores. Something you can do as well.

It's been over 20 months since we had to buy gasoline, because in Sept 2024, we traded in our 12 year old Subaru Outback for a Kia EV9.

The Backstory

We bought the Outback in October 2012. We needed something a big bigger than either our Prius or Civic, especially as I was getting into Astronomy and lugging a telescope around. It was also forward looking towards starting a family. It was one of the first with the vision based pre-collision braking and adaptive cruise control.

Early on we drove it on an epic road trip through the maritime provinces of Canada. It served us well.

Once we got the Chevy Bolt in 2017, our driving habits changed a lot. We tried to maximize electric miles, so whoever had the longest drive got the Bolt. Sometimes that meant hearty debate over distances to figure out who got the electric drive.

This worked well, until Covid, when we were driving very little. Because it turns out, gas cars really need to get hot very regularly to burn off all the moisture from lots of it's mechanical parts. We ended up with replacement exhaust multiple times, and other parts that were rusting through.

After nearly $2000 worth of repairs in March of 2024, I was hoping the car would last us long enough to get to my Volvo EX90 reservation. But in Sept of 2024, Susan came home one day and said "the subaru is making noises again". sigh

The Replacement

The Outback was always going to be our last gas car. The real question was what replaces it. It needed at least as much cargo space as the Outback because when we camp we fill it solid. That exact size class did not exist in EV land, so you had to nudge up to 3 row SUV. I thought that would be the Volvo EX90, but that had been delayed twice, and was at least 4 months away.

I was not going to get a Tesla. Rivian could have been a thing. But I did recently watch a video review on the Kia EV9 that looked intriguing. Looking at inventory there was a Blue one (the best color) in the trim we wanted, 20 miles away.

So I said to Susan, we need to go test drive this car before we put more money into the Subaru. If we like it, we get it. If we don't like it, we fix the Subaru and wait. And off we went.

When we walked through the door, the car we wanted was literally the show floor model. I pointed that out to her.

We chatted some with the dealer. We were pretty specific on that we wanted that car, but we needed to test drive it. They gave us one in the same trim that was on the lot. Most dealers still don't really understand their electric fleet, so there wasn't a lot of explaining, and away we went on our drive around the area.

I started, and quite liked it. We pulled over at some point, switched so Susan could drive. As a woman who's six feet tall, the space inside this was new to her, and actually not feeling crunched was exciting. She liked it a lot. We swapped drivers again, and I made sure to see how it handled on the highway.

I knew we were getting this car when she said "Well, this wouldn't be the worst birthday present you ever got me." (her birthday was 4 days out). And so we dropped one more piece of fossil fuel infrastructure in our life and switched to all electric.

The Verdict

Now nearly 2 years in, this has been a great car overall, with a couple of quirks. Let's get those out of the way first.

Number 1, the dealer didn't have the battery coolant fully topped off (it was close, but not quite). This caused us to have a few scary moments where a warning sensor would come on after DC Fast charging for a couple of days. A visit to closer Kia dealer didn't help (they didn't believe the problem). The original dealer did fix it, and after they did, it's never been a problem since.

Number 2, it's a big car that rides like a big car. Especially with so much sprung weight, the back likes to wobble a bit after hitting a bump at highway speeds. More recently (another story) I got the EV6 as my car, and I prefer it's ride. That being said, we needed a bigger car for some of our activities, so it was a known tradeoff.

On the upsides, there are a ton of them. First, the Vehicle to Load feature (V2L), which means you can pull 110V 15A back out of the car. This completely changed out camping experience last year. We are no longer bringing a propane stove, we cook off an induction hotplate. It's glorious.

High on the list of upsides is all that room and space. With a pod on top, and a hitch mounted bike rack, we can go about anywhere, and take all our stuff.

The 99kWh battery and 800V architecture means it's got 300+ miles of range in the summer (low 200s in the winter). My parents live 199 miles away in Vermont, so in all but the coldest of weather we can get there without stopping. They've gone EV now as well, so have an L2 charger. Prior to the EV9 we were still taking the Subaru for that trip.

The 800V architecture also means that at CCS DC Fast chargers it can get 210 kW charging speeds. This makes this a good road trip car. We've driven out to Rochester, NY with it, down the Jersey Shore, Vermont, Connecticut, Pennsylvania. We still mostly charge at home, but it's typically only a 20 minute charging stop to get from the 20% range to the 80% range. It does have Tesla super charger compatibility, but that's slow (90kW), because of the voltage mismatch. It's good for a pinch.

When we first got this car I'd say we were just on the edge of EV charger ubiquitousness. It was ok in 2024, but not great. That has radically shifted since then, to the point where we don't need to think that much about it. A quick plugshare search and the plan comes together. So more road trips in our future, maybe even adventures in Canada.

The last thing is, how good it felt to stop worrying about a gas car that always felt like it was on the verge of falling apart. No more oil changes, no more exhaust systems, no more gas. It felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders, and I'm never going back.

I firmly believe that Batteries are probably the closest thing to a silver bullet when it comes to our clean energy future. They are going to be the things that let us deploy a lot of solar, and use it through the night. They will ensure the grid stays reliable under stress and extreme weather. And they are going to be a downward force on rising electricity prices.

There are currently around 1 GW of Battery Energy Storage (aka BESS) Projects proposed for the Hudson Valley, and for a lot of folks this looks like it's all coming out of no where all at once. So it's critical that we provide a lot of community forums for people to come and learn more, and get their questions answered by real experts. Especially on the fire safety issue.

Last month, we had one of these in Lagrange, where I live. Members of the town CAC helped organize it, and I helped get the word out through our CCL contacts. The program had:

• Professor Jeff Seidman from Vassar College giving an overview of how Batteries work to save money and increase grid resilience, and why we're seeing them come up now.
• Weronika Polanco, Battery Energy Storage Specialist at NYSERDA, talking about NYSERDA's perspectives on BESS and the future of the NY Grid
• Dan Murray, Chief of Hazmat at FDNY - talking about fire safety and fire standards from a fire fighter POV.

We had pretty solid turn out. You can see in the below video, which was about an hour of presentation, and then an hour and half of Q&A. Critically important, a lot of the local fire department was there, so they could ask key questions. You can watch it in full below.

This is just the beginning of this story, as the Town is having a public hearing on a potential BESS moratorium tomorrow night, that I need to go out and speak up at. It's important to me that these systems get evaluated on their merrits, not just a blanket ban be constructed on them.

Sean Dague would like to use his refrigerator to lower your energy bills.

A few years ago, after buying a fridge, the Dutchess County resident did something few people do: He read the manual. (He’s a software engineer at IBM, so he does that.) In it, he learned that, when the grid was under strain, the local utility could send a signal telling it to temporarily use less power. He found similar language in the manual for his hot-water heater.

This feature could save Dague money and make it less likely that utilities would need to rely on fossil-fuel-reliant “peaker” plants, such as Danskammer, north of Newburgh. If every “smart” appliance were connected this way, it could save money for everyone and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Alas, there was a major obstacle. Central Hudson doesn’t participate.

“When you talk about what it costs to get electricity to people, you also have to talk about demand flexibility,” says Dague, who lives in LaGrange. “We have the technology to do it.”

I was recently interviews by the Highlands Current about the fight over NY's climate law, and got a chance to really talk about Virtual Power Plants, and how they change the equation for what a fully clean energy system could look like.

Nearly everyone that's looking at energy systems, and the transition, focuses on the power supply problem. That leads to a bunch of really bad assumptions about the kinds of infrastructure you nee to keep around that you're only going to use 11 hours a year. Complex machines that are mostly off... don't turn on reliably. We can do so much better with batteries and demand flexibility to make a fully clean system. It's something I think about a lot, and should be writing more about.

Read the whole article, it's great. I loved talking with Brian, and I think his article really sees me and the lens I've brought to this, for which I'll forever be grateful.

There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford presentation that mentioned a “30% reduction in hours per unit” as a benefit of producing EVs, or former Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, who said in 2019 the company would need to make job cuts due to its switch to EVs, which “involve some 30% less effort.” More recently, as the United Auto Workers strike has ramped up, a 2022 quote from Ford’s CEO Jim Farley that “it takes 40% less labor to make an electric car,” has been circulating.

But I couldn’t find any data, research, or even further explanation backing up these figures. Part of the challenge of digging into these claims is that it’s not clear what they even refer to. Are the CEOs talking about the labor required for final assembly, like dropping in the motor and putting on the doors? Are they taking into account the production of components, like the EV battery? Where do they draw the line on what constitutes EV manufacturing?

Do Electric Cars Require Fewer Jobs than Gas Cars — Or More? - Heatmap News

It's really interesting how sometimes the narrative takes over without a lot of facts behind it. Because the EV narrative has fixated above the drive train, it misses how much labor is involved in battery production. It's a key reason why battery plants also need to be considered part of the UAW, and can't just be placed in anti-union states.

Thursday I got home at 7:30, and started squaring away a few things. I checked the weather to figure out if I could leave out a package for the mailman the next day, and noticed a giant string of thunder storms to the west (so nope!). 10 minutes later huge straight line winds hit us, I could hear branches cracking in the woods, and then the power flickered and was out.

Power outages happen often enough around here (3-6 times a year), but usually it's 4 - 6 hours, which is annoying but not terrible. The house keeps reasonable temps during this kind of disruption, and the fridge and freezers can float that long if you don't open them. We loose water during that, because we have a well, but we have a rain barrel, so we can pull water to flush toilets easy enough.

However, at 5am, the power was still not back. We have a chest freezer full of meat, fruit, and veggies, as well as everything in our main fridge and freezer. This starts to get into the danger zone where we'd need to dump and waste things. So, after a few Google searches on my phone at 5:50am I was off to Lowe's to make a purchase.

Battery Backup

EGO Power Nexus with 4 batteries attached

I have a lot of EGO electric equipment that runs off their 56V batteries. That includes a lawn mower, snow blower, weed whacker, chain saw, and leaf blower. The packs are all lithium and interchangable. I had seen a couple of years ago that EGO also made an inverter which takes up to 4 of these batteries and turns them into a generator. The retail unit that Lowes keeps in stock comes with 2 additional 56V 7.5Ah batteries (I already owned 3 batteries at that capacity, plus 3 smaller capacity ones).

With 4 of the largest batteries fully charted, connect, you get about 1.5kWh of storage that can do a peak load of 3000W and a sustained load of 2000W.

Energy usage from our Sense energy meter of our refrigerator

Our refrigerator runs at about 1 kWh per day (more or less some days). The chest freeze takes less and is insulated better. But the net of it is that we've got the ability to largely float the house a day if everything is charged up.

But more critically long power outages are typically because it's lots of little breaks. Which means there are lots of places with power. So in the event of a really long outage, once a day I could go to power, charge up the batteries over a couple of hours, and bring those electrons home. Which was the plan I had crafted that morning, and was chilling the chest freezer for an hour before I did, when the power came back on.

Redundancy in Resilient Systems

People say they want a 100% resilient grid, and often complain about that when talking about renewables. In the North east our resiliency problem is trees, which fall during storms. The resilient solution is staring us in the face: bury the lines. Buried lines would drop outages immensely. Instead our utility would rather subsidize gas generators (which run off their gas network, which is buried).

But, I also work in software and the first rule of resilient systems, is that redundancy has to exist at multiple levels, because everything breaks eventually. The grid should be better, but also microgrids, where there is power generation and storage at the community level, and they can operate independently is a great idea. As are redundancy at the home level, like this battery solution. And not every home needs it. Once you get a set of them in a neighborhood, making friends with the neighbors means you can ensure everyone gets through the outage together.

The future is going to have a lot more of this. The Volvo EX90 promises bi-directional capabilities. It has a 111 kWh battery, that's 75 times larger than what I've got in this battery system. It will be able to run the whole house, including the heating system in a deep freeze during the winter, for a day. And then get down to a fast charger and pull back enough electrons to do it again. In the summer, it would go 3+ days outside of a heatwave, 2+ in the middle of one. If I had power I could also easily have neighbors come over and charge up at our house and take the electrons back home.

A better backup strategy

The thing I really love about batteries everywhere, beyond them being less polluting, is they are less noisy. When we first moved in to the neighborhood 20 years ago and there was a power outage in the winter during a storm, it was this kind of quite that you rarely ever get. And then the neighbor across the street put in a loud whole house generator. And then another, and another.

When the power is out now there is a chorus of propane generators booming through the neighborhood. Probably 1 in 4 homes have them. They automatically kick in on an outage. When our house goes out, I step outside, and if I can hear the generators I know it's not just us. Based on the level of din I can tell how extensive the outage was, before the facebook group thread gets rolling.

But, I do look forward to the days where the quiet of the storm comes back. But this time, folks are protected by quiet renewable energy discharging from their backup batteries, keeping them warm and safe while the power company brings back the grid.

Potatoes are the most grown vegetable in the United States, followed by tomatoes, sweet corn, and lettuce. They’re also growing increasingly threatened by rising temperatures, which can lead to a drastic reduction in yield. In 2022, the U.S. grew an estimated 397 million cwt (44 billion pounds) of potatoes, the first time since 1866 that the annual potato production declined for five consecutive years. Last year, Idaho — which grows more potatoes than any other state — saw its lowest yield since 2001. In recent years, heat and drought in the West have hindered potato production so much that Maine sent millions of pounds of the crop to Washington processors in need of supply.

The Race to Breed a Better Potato Chip | Ambrook Research

Fascinating look at the impacts of climate change on the potato landscape in the US. Climate stories are everywhere, even in your bag of potato chips.

For the last decade I've been an avid bike rider. When I was still working in an office a co-worker started riding his bike in, and I figured out there was a 9 mile route I could take that larger avoided busy roads. The last summer I worked in an office 5 days a week (2013), I road in 27 times. It was great.

Switching to largely work from home, with a rail trail 3 miles from the house, means I can get out and ride regularly. I have a standard 12, 18, and 24 mile ride based on the time I've got in any given day (I'm pretty much 12mph on my bike, so that's convenient blocks of time).

The only real downside of riding from the house is we live on a hill. So in the last 1 mile of riding I've got about 200 ft of climbing. Which is also when I am most tired. The first part is on a road without much shoulder. About 2 months ago when riding home, I got wizzed by a car I didn't realize was behind me that had drifted a solid 6 inches over the white line. That had me freaked out a bit. An unrelated set of google searches doing wish shopping for bicycles made me discover bike radar units are a thing.

Enter Garmin

Garmin, makers of GPS systems, have a bike radar unit that's integrated with a tail light. The Varia 515 (that I got) sees back roughly 500' on objects that are closing on you. You can pair it with a head unit, or a phone. I splurged and got a Garmin bike computer as my road bike has been lacking a functional bike computer for 15 years, and my birthday was coming up.

First Impressions

This is really good. I've done 3 rides now since I got it, and it sees every car, often well before I can recognize them in my mirror on my helmet. Today I had an instance where I thought it false positived on me, but then I looked harder and nope, there was a car coming up on me.

The interface on the Garmin 840 that I've got is as soon as a car comes into range, the screen flashes red, beeps at you, and then shows you an overlay of a series of dots coming up the right side of the screen. That gives you a relative sense of distance.

I've seen it track up to 3 cars at once (that may be the max). It has picked up ever single car behind me, well before I knew they where there for other reasons.

It's really good. It's better than I imagined it would be. And it's definitely given me a lot more confidence to be out on the roads.

Definitely worth checking out if you are an avid rider. It sucks that to be safe as a cyclist with distracted drivers in 3 ton mall crawlers you need gear like this, but it's where we're at. So highly recommend.

As I've said before, we did a piece of this trip 10 years ago, in the same Subaru Outback we took this time. 10 years ago it was a new car, purchased in 2012. Now it is not. So inevitably, once we're 50 km over the border to Canada, and our cell phones aren't working (different issue resolved later that day), I get a low oil light on the car.

I take the next exit that says there would be a gas station, but their isn't. I get back on the highway. Another 20km and there is another exit marked with a gas station. I get off, and wander a bit, finally landing at this Irving station. Inside the only 5W-30 oil I can find is in a 5L bottle (I need 1L). So $60 CAD later I've got oil.

Sitting in front of my car where I parked to go in is a DC Fast Charger, with CCS and CHADMO plugs. I'm am so over gas cars.

It taunts me

EV Infrastructure

From our balcony in Maine we were staring at 4 Level 2 chargers at the College of the Atlantic. In Fundy there were Level 2 chargers in 3 locations in the park, plus another bank in the beach in Alma that we could have walked to.

Level 2 chargers in Fundy National Park

I had gotten asked multiple times if we took our EV on this trip. The answer is no, because it's a Chevy Bolt, which disqualifies it for 2 reasons. The first is that it's fast charge is real slow. I only does 50kW, so the battery refills would have been 45 minutes to an hour at fast chargers. Secondly, it's small. We filled the Subaru, plus the pod on top, for the trip.

But what it made me realize is that in a more reasonable EV we totally could have done this trip. We're looking to replace the Subaru next year with an all electric, and the chargers in this corridor would have made this trip a breeze.

What was curious though, is we didn't see hardly any EVs in New Brunswick. I has a conversation with an older couple near the chargers above, who were thinking about getting an EV, but said they basically never saw them anywhere. They had never seen a Tesla in the wild. Given the charge infrastructure we saw, that surprised me. It appears that only the provinces of Quebec and BC actually provide incentives for EV purchase. But it was a pleasant talk, and I helped dispel some myths for them.

Camping with an EV

We brought our Coleman propane camping stove on this trip so that we could cook in the park in Fundy. One of it's igniters is no long working, and doesn't look very fixable after I took things apart later. So when we were coming back we stopped off at LL Bean in Freeport and looked at all kinds of fun camp goodies. Which included a new camping stove.

But a few days later I started doing the math. We're looking at getting the Volvo EX90 as our large EV to replace the Subaru. That's supposed to have some bi-directional charging features. An induction hot plate peaks at 1500W (though it would typically run much lower). Running it for an hour on max would use up about 4 miles of range on the Volvo. Realistically running a fully induction camp kitchen for the weekend could be done by giving up 10 miles of range or less.

I am no longer going to even consider new camp stove. And have been excited all week by the idea that we've only got one more year of propane cylinders camping before I'm instead packing my induction hot plate and maybe and extension cord.

Back in the US of A

The notable lack of EVs in New Brunswick was rapidly changed once we got to Freeport, where there were piles of them, including getting passed by 2 Rivians in short order on I-95.

The clean energy transition is happening. We need it to happen faster, that would be better for all of us. But it is now inevitable, and the funding from the IRA is going to massively accelerate things here in the US. Seeing all those signs of the transition while out on vacation this year made the trip that much better for me.

It's a 5 hour drive from Bar Harbor to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, plus a border crossing that went very quickly. We set out early to make sure we had plenty of time to settle in once we got there.

One thing I was sad that we would not see was this giant wind farm in Nova Scotia, right after the NB/NS border. 10 years ago I was so struck by this. We took a break at the near by rest stop and just watch the dancing of the turbines for a while.

SP Amherst Wind Power LP - from Google Street View

But we were not to be disappointed. On the drive to the park we saw 3 new wind farms (1 in Maine, 2 in New Brunswick) that weren't there 10 years ago. Progress!

The first one in Maine was breathtaking. After seeing a few off to the side of the road, we start our accent up this long hill. Right in front is a turbine that grows in your field of view as you climb. Your sensation is that you're going to drive right into it, then you take a bend to the left and pass it by. My heart leapt. It was moving in a way I hadn't expected.

Weaver Hill Wind - from Google Street View

The Awe of Great Machines

Wind Turbines create 2 incredible kinds of awe for me. The first is that of any great machines. Machines that are not of human scale. Last summer we saw the giant iron mining ports of Lake Superior, and they evoke an awe just from their scale. They are marvels of engineering. And they aren't static like a building. They move. They are dynamic. And when a great machine moves, it seems like it does so so slowly and deliberately because the scale of the thing is so different from normal experience. It feels like it breaks physics because it's operating beyond a human scale. And we built that.

The second kind of awe is what Wind Turbines themselves represent, progress. Every time I see a new solar farm, a rooftop with panels I hadn't noticed yet, a mini split condenser, an EV on the road, I have a spark of hope. They are climate solutions made manifest. And in noticing them, and how they grow over time, we can see the clean energy transition happening before us. Wind turbines are this at a whole other scale.

US Wind Turbine Database

The turbines we saw in Maine were the Weaver Project, installed in 2020. Those are 3.3MW towers, which are the biggest I've seen in person (the ones in the Berkshires are < 2MW). Every couple of rotations of the blades of these great machines is all the power a home uses in a day. As you drive by you see multiple homes worth of power be generated before your eyes.

Symbols Made Visible

One thing that frustrates me is how much we try to hide the infrastructure of progress. In my area of New York ground based solar needs to be hidden with hedgerows, while a lot of community solar is going in, you don't see it. Wind is off the table. In Vermont 2 decades ago they passed a low that prohibits ever putting wind turbines on the ridge lines, even though it's some of the better wind in New England.

I want to see Wind Turbines. They are progress. They are beautiful. They show us that we can make a change and bring in the future.