Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Volts crossover: Six big energy questions

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

They’re at it again. Two years after they last teamed up for a Volts/Catalyst crossover episode, David Roberts joins Shayle for another far-ranging conversation exploring the future of energy. Their prompt was simple: Each host brought three critical questions they want to see answered in the next decade. From “data center fever” to closed-loop critical mineral economics, Shayle and David take the opportunity to dive deep into a myriad of second-order effects of the clean energy transition. In the hour-long conversation, the two hosts cover topics including: The coming explosion of self-driving cars, and whether it will fuel urban sprawl The feasibility of "electrifying everything” and whether a proliferation of “micro-DERs” in home devices will create create a more efficient grid or a software-fueled dystopia The future of off-grid data centers Whether the pros of geoengineering and solar radiation modification, or SRM, outweigh the potential moral hazards Resources: Catalyst: The Volts crossover episode Catalyst: The plug-in DER case for small businesses Catalyst: AMA: Geoengineering, nuclear, power prices, and more Open Circuit: Tesla’s fork in the road Latitude Media: The growing free-market push to let data centers go off grid Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Uplight. Uplight activates energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy—improving grid resilience and energy affordability while accelerating decarbonization. Learn how Uplight is helping utilities unlock flexible load at scale at uplight.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate, energy, and infrastructure leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Latitude Media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst. This is the scary thing about solar radiation management. You could stand up and do a reasonably large-scale test on your own without a ton of money, arguably without being detected, doing so by the world. You know what I mean? Coming up, six questions, the David Robert. the volts of the Volts podcast, and I want to hear answer the next five to ten years.

When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com.

Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning

PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. I'm Shail Khan. I lead the early-stage venture strategy at energy impact partners. Welcome. All right. So this is the second crossover episode that I've done with my friend David Roberts. He's a longtime journalist and thinker on lots of things, politics, but also clean energy. and he hosts the Voltz podcast, which I like as well.

And he and I get together periodically and just riff on a bunch of stuff. So that's what we did here. The prompt we gave ourselves was we each came up with three questions that we want to see answered in the next five to ten years. So we talked about those three from each of us, and then it led us down a bunch of paths from there. Anyway, fun conversation as always, here's David. David, nice to be back with you. Awesome. Glad to be doing this again.

All right, so we gave ourselves a prompt here, which is that each of us have come prepared with three questions we are eager to see answer to the next five to ten years. I assume we both came with backups as well in case we overlap. I don't think, I bet you we're not going to overlap. I tried not to overlap with you, so I think we will, it'll be funny if we both tried so hard that we're going to leave some very obvious questions on answer. We probably will, yeah. I didn't try to go super esoteric, but I at least tried me. I tried to get like medium esoteric. So we'll see. We'll see. You want me to go first?

Yeah, you go first. Okay, so just to review for listeners, the prompt here is questions, important questions facing the clean energy world that you might reasonably think will get some kind of answer in the next five to ten years. And that turned out to be really interesting, really difficult, because I kept thinking of questions. that I was like, well, will we really know in 10 years? You know, there are like lots of big, there are lots of big questions where I don't think we'll really know until like 20 or 30 years out. So that was sort of interesting as a way of bracketing my thinking about this.

So anyway, long story short, my first one is, so self-driving cars are here, which is puzzling in itself since, there was all this chatter and talk for years in anticipation of their arrival. And then they arrived and nobody talks about it. Like they're operating in several cities now and nobody talks about it. So it's a little weird. So but there are lots of really, I think, interesting questions about the macro effects of self-driving vehicles that I think we will get answers to pretty soon because, you know, now that.

San Francisco has been doing it a while, and it seems to be working, basically. And I think Seattle's starting a pilot. There's like pilots starting in a bunch of cities. We're very close, I think, to basically widespread adoption. And then we'll start to get answers to some of these questions like, you know, the fear that I have that I think a lot of people sort of climate people have, Greenies have, is that making it easier to take a car around is going to result in a lot more people taking a lot more cars around, basically. Like, even though people might not necessarily own their own vehicle, even if these are, even if they're shared vehicles,

just the level of the level of use of cars is going to rise sharply when it becomes so easy and so convenient, which will translate mathematically into greater congestion. So, like, you could see, like, deaths going down, as I think we're already seeing in San Francisco. You could see noise going down, if they're all electric. You could see pollution going down, if they're all electric. But on the core issue of urbanism, they are going to, the fear is. is that they are going to work against density, basically. They're going to make it easier to live far out.

They're going to make it easier to commute. Like a commute, you're not going to dread an hour-long commute if you can just chill and read and tap on your phone or watch a TV show or something. So that's just going to make it a lot easier to decide to live an hour outside of town. So anyway, I think within five, to 10 years, we will at least see cities where these things become ubiquitous. And then I think at the very least, we'll have directionally answers to some of these things. I'm very curious, Shale,

from your perspective, what your level, like, of anticipation versus dread versus, you know, now that it's here, it's just not that big of a deal either way. I'm curious what your disposition is on self-driving cars. Good question, and so many things to say about it. Okay, let me offer you a few bits of exposition first. So I live in the Bay Area, as I think you know, I don't live in San Francisco, but I live outside the city and I'm not in the city. You've taken...

Of course, I'm Waymo as a regular... I use Waymo as a verb regularly, yeah, of course. And you're right that, like, it's just not a thing in San Francisco anymore. Not a thing in the sense that, like, one out of every three cars in the city is a Waymo, and that's just how it is, and it's become pretty normalized to any of it. but he's not a tourist. And I agree with you, it's coming everywhere. And I think five to ten years is also,

it's kind of the right time frame for this. My other tidbit for you, I have a four-year-old son, and I've been making bets about his future with anybody who wants to take them with me since he was born. And one of the bets is that he will never drive a car. He'll never get a driver's license.

I mean, he's growing up in kind of suburban Bay Area, California. So take that into account because this is specific that to my son. But, you know, I think 12 years from now when it would be time for him to get his driver's license, he's not going to need to, right? And already lots of kids are just Ubering around. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That said, with your question, it's interesting the framing of it to me because I had anticipated you were going to raise a climate concern, which you're not, right? Well, it's a second order. I think urbanism and density are climate-related. Like, I think if you lose density,

even if the cars aren't polluting, you're still going to get greater pollution and greater impact. Like, I think there are second-order climate effects. Probably, but I would bet, I don't have data on this, but I would bet that those effects, one of the main reasons

why density is lower emissions per capita is transportation. That's a big part of it. Yeah. And so if it is true, the benefit of self-driving vehicles from a climate perspective is that it makes a lot more sense for them to be electric.

Yeah. Like the utilization pattern. They're all Waybos. They're all electric. They're all the extant, all the extant self-driving cars on the road are electric today. They're pure EVs. And it just makes more sense, right? You drive high utilization, you pay back the added capex of the EV much faster.

It's better for a bunch of reasons. So I think if you assume that our self-driving future actually accelerates vehicle electrification, than to a first order from a climate perspective, it's not inherently a bad thing. Now, that would be weighed against your question, which is, I think, a question of, like, will there be more vehicle miles travel total? Yes.

And so those kind of weigh against each other to some extent. But it's not obvious to me that a transition to autonomous vehicles is bad from a climate perspective. It might even be actually good. I would not, I mean, I would not have the arrogance to put my flag on either side of that. I don't think, like, I think we just genuinely don't know. I think that's right that it's going to eliminate a huge chunk of emissions of emissions. The question is all these second-order effects and how you even really trace them.

But, like, I do think that continuing to sprawl outwards is bad for a number of reasons extraneous to climate. Yeah, I guess I don't really have an opinion on that. I'm not an urbanist, I guess I would say, in that way. way. And so I don't have strong opinions on whether adding more sprawl is bad. I could see it happening. I actually have a I have a friend who's a long-term real estate investor who is amassing a portfolio of land in the excerpts of certain cities under the bet, under like a multi-decade decade bed of exactly what you're describing. So I totally could see that happening. I guess I just don't inherently see it is a bad thing.

Well, the question of whether excerpts are bad or not, it's a large question that we don't have time to address here. So, you know, so, so, I mean, this, and I think this, I think this would just reinforce the worries of the urbanists, which is that they see the tech guys pushing this, and I don't, I don't see any sign from the tech guys that the tech guys care about this. They drive themselves, they drive themselves everywhere. They drive themselves everywhere. They don't live in walk-a-bo places.

I don't like Silicon Valley, the physical form of Silicon Valley is so gross. It's so gross and deadening. But I guess that's all they know. Anyway. But at the very least, like, we'll be able to see if that sprawl happens. And then I guess we'll be able to, you know, answer the question of whether we like the effects or not. I think what we can measure to answer your question of will we know. in five to ten years, is in the cities

where there is high proliferation of autonomous vehicles, so San Francisco and five to ten years from now, probably a bunch of other cities, will total VMT have gone up over that period? Yes, because they are pushing in the other direction in California with

policy. They are trying to restrain sprawl with a lot of other policies, so how will that balance out? Or it might even be more interesting to see, like, what would happen to a city like, you know, Cleveland, or whatever, if they get a bunch of AVs, because they do not have a strong overlay of other laws restraining them.

So it would be more of, I guess, like a clean, like a clean experiment. And we'll probably see something like that. Phoenix has been the test bed for autonomous vehicles. Oh, are they a thing there now? Oh, yeah. That's where a lot of the early testing was. In some ways, because it's obvious. Phoenix is a simple grid.

It's not really. The weather's good. Yeah. So it's kind of the opposite of San Francisco. San Francisco was like trial by fire for Waymo, but Phoenix is, you know, the kind of thing. Phoenix is already sprawling, like crazy. So it's a little tricky to separate the signal from the noise, but. Yeah.

Okay. Can I give you my first question? Let's hit your first one. Okay, so I think the obvious question that, of course, I'm going to ask, I'll try to ask a different version of. The obvious question that I'm going to ask is, how hot will data center fever get and will it break in the next five to ten years? Five to ten years is probably the right time frame to ask that question. I was wondering about that. You could argue it could be sooner, but who knows, right?

But within the next ten years, we'll see some directional thing here. But instead of asking the question of how how will he the data center fever get and will it break, ask a different question, which I think is a second order effect of that, which is how much large load goes off grid? in the next five to 10 years. Because to walk through the chain of logic, the kind of going assumption right now of what's happening is that there is so much demand for a new data center capacity that we're going to be bursting at the seams on the grid

in any market that has demand for data centers. We're basically going to tap out everything we could possibly do on the grid. And so much so that maybe we need to go to space, right? But I think before we go to space in significant volume, there would be a good chance we would go off grid. We've never seen a lot of large industrial loads go off grid, apart from, like, mining and things like that. We're starting to see glimmers of it right now in data center world. Are we not saying law? Like, didn't either someone just proposed or passed a law that basically said you have to?

Josh Hawley in the Senate and somebody else, I think, introduced a bill that would essentially mandate data centers to go off. off grid. My presumption is that doesn't pass. Well, like I've said several times, like, there's a world of difference between bring some generation and bring enough generation to cover yourself if you go off grid entirely. That's a very, you know what I mean? I know. And I'm asking you about the lads of megawatts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what's happening now, to be clear, there's an enormous amount of bring your own generation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No question about that one. That's an answered question. The question that has not been answered is, and actually, to add to that, there's also an enormous number of projects that are

saying, okay, we'll do bridge power. So we are going to be off grid until we get the grid connection, and that's going to be a year, three years, five years, whatever might be. I'm saying, forget the grid. How many large loads will just be fully off grid with no intent to get a grid connection? Will that happen in significant volume? That is an interesting question. It is interesting. I'll just say my gut instinct strongly says no. I just think, like, the arguments for a grid, like a grid is handy. You know what I mean?

Like, grids are extremely useful. And, like, a lot of policy discussion right now is being forced into weird shapes because it's trying to work around the fact that we can't do the obvious thing, which is just build more grid, right? Like, that's, like, that would solve all the problems. That's what everybody wants. It's what everybody needs beyond data centers, even, like, for the future, period. We just need to do that. And we're, like, torn between trying to make that happen and then trying to sort of

weasel our way around it. You know what I mean? And so I guess how that question... Well, you're making the case, right? Like, the fact that we're not solving that. I mean, you could make a case that we will solve it. But if we don't solve it... then what happens?

Yeah, well, I mean, this, this, that's an interesting, even broader question. Like, what could it, I could, I could imagine a story where our sort of social and political dysfunction, our inability to build quickly, forces these weird around the edges solutions that end up like growing and developing in ways that we can't anticipate now and like bringing new things into the world. You know what I mean? It will spawn invention and innovation, I think, even though, like, if you had your druthers, you would not choose this situation. But I do think it will force some very creative thinking. Yeah, I mean, I think to me, it really comes down to this question of, is it really true that for an extended period of time into the future, we're going to have dramatically more demand for data center capacity than we have ability to serve it on the grid? With money attached to that demand that is willing to take some risks that maybe hyperscalers wouldn't have taken in the past, for example. And if those things are true, then it is kind of inevitable to me that some amount of it, and I don't know how much, is going to take the one risk that is introduced by not being on the grid, which is largely reliability, right?

You don't have as many nines of reliability unless you really overbuild a bunch of on-site stuff. But what you get in exchange is you get unleashed from a siting perspective. I mean, imagine how easy it is to cite something if you remove the constraint of the transition. But you are, I take it, imagining very large gas plants. A lot of them. I'm watching them get built right now. A lot of them. I would, you know, I don't, I have not accommodated myself to that.

yet, I don't want that to happen, you know. Oh, but that's happening, right? I know. I know it's already happening. And by the way, it doesn't inherently have to be gas, right? Like, there's a good study that paces and scale microgrids put out a while ago that was, that was, you know, what would it, can you actually run at high utilization, a data center fully off grid with mostly solar and storage?

Yeah, yeah. You generally do need a little bit of dispatchable generation, so you mix your things together and you end up with some gas. but like it, you know. It's just a microgrid, right? It's the same question. It's the same question that faces any microgrid. Like you, you, the same question that faces any grid, really.

Like, you can do X amount with variable and you need some marginal amount of dispatchable to firm up. Like, it's going to be the same in miniature. Or more batteries. That's what that's what I want to see. Like, that's what I think could straightforwardly, more straightforwardly substitute for natural gas is more and bigger batteries. But they're like, as, as. you know, because like half of your shows and my shows are about this now, but like this question, the way you ask it, is also tied up intimately with a bunch of other super fascinating questions

like, are data centers going to continue evolving in the direction of gigantism, or is there a serious prospect for distributed, more distributed, more modular, more grid edge data centers? That's a super interesting question. Then there's the bigger question of like, will there be radical efficiencies in chip design that mean we don't need the sheer quantity we think now? Or will the bubble pop or something? You know what I mean? Like the question of how many data centers there will be is, is everybody, lots of people want to know the answer to that question. Not just the power people and the grid people.

But so how do you think about, and this is something I, and then we can move up. on to the next one. This is something I try to think about how I talk about. Like I, what I want to say, here's another note I would put, before they take the extraordinary step of trying to build their own, I mean, if you've got a gigawatt, gigawatt data center and you're trying to go off grid, you're basically building like a pretty large grid. Like you're building like a city's worth of like electrical infrastructure. It's a pretty extreme step. I would like to see them, because they can't get nuclear plants quickly or coal plants quickly or natural gas plants quickly, I would like to see them get serious about exploiting distributed capacity.

I think that's faster and cheaper than on-site generation if we can get the financial and institutional arrangements lined up the right way. I think this is all – the whole scenario here is all a yes and. The presumption is there will be enough demand. We're going to tap out every available possibility. We're going to do gets and we're going to get more on existing lines. We're going to do some distributed capacity aggregation, which is all these things are starting to happen. I think they're going to continue to happen.

And yet, in the absence of building out like an entirely new transmission system on top of our existing transmission system, we're going to hit a ceiling, basically, or at least we're going to hit a ceiling from a time. Yeah. Yeah, and I guess the fact that all these forecasts are saying, we're going to build more data centers than we could conceivably power, like, is just good evidence that it's not going to happen. Like, I'm just very skeptical. Like, what, I guess I would just ask you the central question. What do you think?

Like, do you think demand is going to get even close to the sort of higher end projections? Or are you kind of a deflationist on this? I don't think I am smart enough to me. know the answer to that question. I don't think anybody really knows the answer to that question. I do think that it's, there is pretty universal agreement amongst people who are building these models that we're going to need, to your point on sort of the like, will it shift to the edge? Yes, inference might, and that's like an open question. There is going to be for some period of time in the future demand for more and more and more powerful models. Those require the centralized

big-ass data centers, we are already starting to have a harder time to find sites on the grid to power those in the time period that people want. And so I think there's going to be some period of time where we are bursting at the seams from an electricity perspective. I don't know how long it lasts, right? And I don't know whether it gets to the point where, like, Elon wants to put 100 gigawatts a year of orbital data centers in space.

Do you think there are going to be space-based data centers? You did a pod on it, didn't you? We've talked about it a bunch. I'm doing more on it. I've spent a lot of time now, like, understanding the economics. It's sort of, to me, the answer to that question is the answer to the question you asked me. Because I think that Orbital Data, I mean, Elon says he thinks that they will be the cheapest way to get new compute in like three to five years. I do not think that is possible.

He says a lot of things. Yeah. But if. But if you do think that there is going to be this insatiable appetite, and we're going to need to scale to hundreds of gigawatts a year, and we are not going to have the ability to do that on the grid, then I think the interesting question is your options are kind of off-grid or off-world. Yeah.

And then it's a different comparison. And, you know, it's interesting to think about. We should get off of the data center thing. Yeah, the final thing I would say about it, and this is the note I wanted to say earlier, it's just when I talk to people who are, as you know, there's a very loud constituency to the left that hates data centers, hates AI, hates the whole discussion. All I would say is a final note is, even if you think that data, short-term data

center demand is radically overstated and that these data centers are not going to, you're not going to end up with many as currently forecast, it is nonetheless the case that we're electrifying transportation, and we're electrifying heat and cooling, and we're electrifying. And we're electrifying, industry, and we're just going to need lots, lots, lots more electricity and a much stronger, better grid in the future, regardless of what happens with data centers. So I just think like that should be, I don't want those two questions to start to be conflated in people's minds, basically. Actually, I, okay, put a pin in that when we get back to my next question. Okay. This is another one that I sort of brought because I don't think.

tech people are thinking about it enough or taking it seriously. I love that I represent tech people. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I've drafted you into this uninviable spokesperson job. So here's my thought. Basically, you and I know that the way the long-term evolution is that basically everything that is plugged in is going to become a resource eventually. Like the notion of DERs as a kind of distinct category, I think is just going to kind of fade away.

Because eventually, like everything that plugs in is going to be managed by software that is in communication with larger grids, basically. That's just going to become kind of the default. On some time horizon, we can talk about how fast we think that's going to happen. But it's going to happen. Basically, so, to me, what that means is that a lot of things that we have held as distinct from software are going to become software, like driving and cars and living and homes. And on the one hand, I think there's immense potential there, as I've done a cajillion podcasts on. I think it's going to be extraordinary, going to have a much more stronger grid. We're going to make each electron go further.

We're going to utilize our grid better. We're going to like everything's going to have a more small D democratic grid, et cetera, et cetera. For the most part, I love this trend and I'm very hopeful for it, the internetification of the grid. But capital B, but when I think about software as it exists. Today, it's awful. You know, the situation is awful. I think, and I'm not far from the only person saying this. It feels these days like tech, the tech sector, which is basically we think of as the software sector in public, is kind of exploitative, out of touch.

you know, like kind of getting increasingly deranged, talking about their bunkers on their islands, talking about the Antichrist, like all fucked up on ketamine, just off in la la land. Basically, software feels exploitative these days, almost everywhere you encounter it in shittification. You know, I did a whole pot on in shittification.

Basically, platforms enter what seems, like this inexorable cycle where they insuredify. And so this trend of your house in your car becoming software, I don't see enough people raising red flags saying do we want

intrusive, ad-based, ad-supported, subscription, nagging, different tiers, you know, real-time, variable pricing,

all these sort of exploitative things that we're running into. Do we want that in our cars and in our homes? Are we going to end up within shittified homes? You know, is the promise basically of coordinated, distributed energy going to manifest in reality like just another chapter of sort of chintzy exploitative and shittified software that ends up exploiting the people who get stuck with it? I worry about that. And I don't hear any, hardly anybody else worrying about that. Do you worry about that. Do you have a nest thermostat? I do not. My house is so analog and primitive, my current house. I guess I don't see, so if I think of like what are the things in the home

that tie to electricity that have been softwareified? Thermostats are the obvious one to me, via Nest and EcoB and other companies like that. People who have EVs have an EV charger, and then they have a software platform that goes on top of that. So they're EV owners, I drive an EV-9. I'm sure you're an EV-9. A-Kia? The big one? The big one?

Is it nice? It's super nice. It's the best. Yeah. So there's the vehicle. There's the thermostat. I mean, if you want to go newer age, I am an owner of a quilt, which is a version of a heat pump.

EIP isn't an investor, so I was actually customer number seven of quilt. Do you have one of the newer? Because didn't they just sort of like refresh? the look of their of their wall units i feel like am i making that super cool looking um but but it is what you're saying right it's like softwareification it's got an app it's much more controllable i mean my personal experience with all those things is that they're better uh and i don't know that anybody i've heard anybody saying like oh nest and shittify the thermostat well or the tesla app and shittifies my if you're charging or my charging experience if you're familiar with corey's work

you know that always stage one on the platforms is that they're good to users and that they offer genuine value to users. That is step one of this process is you attract the users with genuine value and then over time work to make leaving the platform difficult. And then when people are locked in, that's when you start exploiting them. And like I will I will happily agree that all of this is so nascent and new and barely there that were just on the front end of this. So a lot of this is speculative, but like it sure seems like that is the direction everything travels. And like one way I think about this, and this is probably something you've heard me you talk about before. Like one thing that I'm just waiting for is if the self-driving cars

become ubiquitous, what is to stop them from offering? a free tier that is ad-supported, which everybody then chooses because nobody wants to pay up front. And then that's one more little area of our lives where we are constantly beset with customized advertising. Like, that's one way. Well, this is where, yeah, maybe I'm going to, okay, I'm going to own my tech broiness. I, if I decide to choose to take, to get free rides around in my future Waymo or whatever it is in exchange for being served ads, that's a trade I make deliberately and happily, right? And I get free rides and that's worth it to me. I don't, I don't see that as being inherently a bad thing. I mean, I think they, there are challenges, obviously, to the ad ecosystem. But you, you, you, you recognize. recognize in shittification as a thing that happens on other platforms? Are you skeptical more broadly about Corey's work?

I don't know Corey's work, so let me preface with that. But I would say, I think I see what you're talking about, and I think I can come up with examples of it. I don't know that I see it as like the inexorable direction of travel when things become softwarey, particularly as it pertains to me. It's less software than platformy. It's the platforms. So this is like, this is why I want, if you're on, like, if your water heater is signed up to some VPP and your thermostat signed up to another one, they're both on different platforms, I want interoperability and I want the ability to move from one platform to the other without penalty, basically. I don't want lock in. Like, that's what leads to platform and shittification is lock in. And I think we could, I think we could avoid a lot of that up front if we just went in with some. clear privacy laws and some clear rules and regulations about interoperability and transparency. I guess I don't disagree with that. I think that's a pretty innocuous statement to make.

To me, I guess at the high level, the things that I actually think about that are in our homes, I'll just focus on the home for now, that like are hopefully going to be transformed such that, as you said, eventually all of them are software-enabled, interact with the grid, enable them to be responsive to the needs of the grid, but also have more capabilities to the customer. Like, when I think about them one by one and what I think the future of those things are going to be, I generally think it will be better. And certainly the ones that I can think of today that have already started to be that way feel better to me.

I can see how it could go off the rails. Like, I've watched idiocry. But as where we stand today, I don't see evidence of that. Yeah, I guess it's early enough now that I don't have a lot of. of concrete examples to hang this on. So mostly it is just a generalized fear, but I look at the exploitation and the crappiness around us in every other area,

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you wanted to be careful to separate out the, we need to improve the grid because we're going to be electrifying all these other loads from the like, you know, some people just don't like data centers thing. And I sort of agree with that generally. But here's my question that I, here's my concerning question, I will say, that I think we may or may not have fully answered the next five to ten years, but we will know the direction of travel, which is, is electrification dead, or will electrification be dead as a pathway for industrial emissions reduction? So just to walk through the logic here.

Will it be dead when? For what reason? Well, for what when? I mean, will it appear dead over the next five to ten years? And for what reason is because you have two things happening in my mind right now that are pushing against it. By the way, for a long time, I've always said, like, to a first order, the simplest way to solve climate change is clean up electricity, electrify everything that you possibly can, and then go, like, go. fill in all the pieces of the stuff that you just can't possibly electrify. So that implies electrifying a big portion of heavy industry, for example.

Yep. Okay. If you are trying to electrify something in heavy industry right now, you're trying to build, or even not something that hasn't been electrified, but is already electrified. Take an aluminum smelter. Right? You just want to build new aluminum smelter. It uses hundreds of megawatts of electricity.

You can't find a site because every site is being taken up by a data center, and your prices are higher, and you're super sensitive to electricity prices. Oh, I see where you're going with this. So the premise of industrial electrification is you get cheaper, you know, operating costs because it is electrified. You're going to get probably higher capital costs. This is the trade with everything that you electrify, and then you save money over time because it's so much more efficient. And that is a function of the spark spread. It's the difference between the price of electricity and the price of natural gas.

And I also think less waste and less regulatory compliance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, easier to permit. But in a world where you have a really, really hard time citing, because there are not that many places to put 100 megawatt, multi-hundred megawatt loads, and where there is inflationary price presser on electricity, which there certainly is today, that value proposition is eroded. And so I wonder what happens. Yeah, I mean, more broadly, both of us wanting to electrify everything,

I think naturally leads to both of us being daunted at the fact that electricity prices are high and rising. Those are very obviously at odds on every level, industry particularly, but also residential, also transportation, also everything else. Which gets us, of course, to the question of the day, the political question of the day of the decade, really, which is how you bring down electricity prices. while continuing to rapidly and aggressively electrify. Yeah. And another question I had about industry that I almost brought, I'll just throw in here. One is, does it in fact start electrifying

in this circumstance where electricity is expensive and data centers are bullying them out of the way and grabbing all the electricity? Yeah, yeah. And then another question is that I have that I didn't bring today because it's definitely like a 20 year plus question is when we say electrify everything, do we mean industry too? And by that I mean how much faith do we have in electrochemistry to replace? Like right now, you can make steel with zero emissions electrochemically. It's just wildly expensive. Same thing with, you know, the concrete or concrete you can do. Same thing. Like electrochemically, you can do. it with zero emissions. It's just much more expensive. So is electrochemistry going to come along enough, fast enough that we could really electrify everything, everything?

The reason I didn't bring that question along is definitely like a 20 plus year question. But I think hope, think slash hope, let's call it a 50-50 split. that in the long, long term, I really think we're going to let's try everything. I'm an absolutist. I don't think, I think once you've built a single unified system that is providing power to 98% of stuff, whatever that 2% is. It's the same question. The benefits of just being able to hook into that system are so immense that it's just going to overcome whatever barriers they are. I mean, I think I agree with you in the long term. I mean, right now, we're at 25% in the U.S., right?

Like, 25% of final energy consumption is electricity. 75% is not worth remembering that. But yeah. It's a long way to go. Yeah, it's a long way to go. And for a long time, I think people who were seeking to electrify, particularly industry, sort of rested on this belief that the marginal price of electricity was plummeting towards zero. Right?

Yes. Electrochemistry, in particular, very much dependent. depends on copious cheap electricity. And that is not the world we're living in right now. It's probably not the world we're going to live in for the next few years. Now, it may turn back, right? This could be cyclical and five years from now it'll turn back. But like, the current state of affairs is electricity prices are going up, not down.

I mean, one thing that might be answered in the next 10 years is everybody's freaked out about electricity prices now, right? The entire Democratic Party is seized with this. Right. So will we actually be able to pass policies that reduce the price of electricity in an enduring way? Like, you know, reform utilities and like infrastructure. Permitting reform, build more transmission. Permitting reform, stuff like that.

Like, will we be able to actually, will we be able to do that? That's an open question. Yes, I don't know. And maybe, right? And so I think five to ten years is an interesting time frame under which to think about this question. But I could tell you, I think, over the next. three years, you know, electricity prices are probably going up, not down. Yes.

And that's going to just make that value proposition. And that's bad. So I think everybody in our world really needs to uprate the question of making electricity cheaper. It really is kind of a pivot on which everything else turns. And that alone could screw us, could screw everything else if we can't deal with that. I agree with you. But to your point, I think actually a glimmer of hope here is that there is alignment.

Everybody. The word affordability is going to be the key word in many, many, many circles for the next couple of years. It has become, as you said, a political hot button thing. It's the word of the day amongst utilities, amongst data center companies, and amongst everybody else. Like, affordability is the thing. So there will be a big focus on it. And we are in the lucky position that the kinds of energy we favor are the cheap ones. So, like, you know, like, you can take climate out of the, take climate out of the, take climate out of the. the picture. There's still going to be a lot of moneyed interests pushing for lots more clean energy and batteries for reasons having nothing to do with the environment. Okay, so I'm on my third one, yes? I think so. Okay, my third and final one. This is something I've been thinking about. So here's how I'd phrase it. Is J.B. Straubble going to turn out to be, as are more significant to the long-term fortunes of clean energy than Elon? Musk, by which I mean, you know, J.B. Straubles set up this big recycling company, this big battery

recycling company, set it up, Redwood, set it up arguably before there were many batteries. Enough batteries to recycle. So they had, they were like, you know, they were like scrabbling to like collect, you know, old vacuum cleaner batteries and double A's and stuff just to keep going along enough for the batteries to show up. But now, I think we're just on the cusp of the first kind of wave of used up batteries coming in. And the reason I raise all this is that, you know, there's this whole question about critical minerals, about materials, and about who dominates supply chains. As you know, everybody in the world is freaked out because China dominates all the supply chains, they mine all the critical minerals, do all the processing, etc.

And so we're very dependent on them. And so there's been a lot of talk about how the U.S. can sort of stand up a supply chain of its own. And so there's been lots of talk about mining and stuff like that in the U.S., although not a ton of action. But I think we should start viewing electronics themselves, Clean Tech. as a, like, a source to mine. Do you know what I mean? Like, if we can capture those materials and reuse them effectively infinitely, then when you buy a solar panel from China, it is as though you are both buying a solar panel and mining a certain quantity of materials that will be available after the solar panel is dead. Do you know what I mean?

So, like, recycling is a source of critical minerals, basically. Like, it is a strategic source of critical minerals. And I think once you, you know, if you take the sort of growth numbers of EVs and solar panels and all the rest of it, seriously, it's going to be a very large source of minerals, large source of raw minerals and raw materials, which means, all of which just means that I think that recycling is going to go from a sort of like environmental, nice to have, which is kind of how I think people are thinking about it now, to something like a national security, energy security imperative. In other words, like if you get your hands on some of these materials, it is absolutely in your interest to make sure that you keep recycling those materials through your economy forever, basically. I just think, so I think recycling in the next five to ten years is going to, A, take off, and B, just become much, much more, I think,

viewed as much, much more strategically important. Wonder whether you think so. I wonder whether you agree. I do agree, generally. I mean, and I think it's not just EV batteries either, right? So Redwood is recycling EV batteries and a bunch of other old batteries and getting out of it, the lithium, nickel, cobalt, stuff like that. We invested in a company called cyclic materials that's doing recycling for rare earth elements. Warrath elements are like the least recycled critical mineral, which is crazy. Out of coal piles?

No. Or is that a different company? No, no, not tailings or coal piles or anything like that. This is out of end-of-end-like motors and magnets and stuff like that. There are companies that are now doing solar panel recycling. Yeah, I mean, I think that where I agree with you is I'm like a recycling maximalist. We should recycle all this stuff.

It has high value at end of life, and we should take advantage of that value, and that should mitigate the amount of new virgin-mind stuff that we need in any category where we possibly can, particularly in those where there is a geopolitical reason that we want to have our own sovereign supply. The only thing I would push back against, I guess, is just that the challenge,

let's just take battery recycling, if you believe that we're on a steep upward trajectory of demand for new batteries, then you're forever going to be in a position where the amount of supply that you have to recycle is the amount of demand that there was 10 years ago. And so you're never going to catch up. Well, not literally forever, but until you hit the top of the S curve. That's what I mean. Right. So unless you think we're already at the top of the S curve, which I don't think either of us do

think, then it will matter some, but it is not a solution to our sovereign mineral supply problems. I would just say that my, I guess my prediction would be that in 10 years, maybe in or in 20, that just a unit of critical minerals drawn from recycling will be cheaper than a unit mind, I think, I think, eventually. Like, I think it will end up being our primary and cheapest source of those. Like, we're never, I don't think we're ever going to, I mean, maybe you disagree, but I don't think we're ever really going to be in a position where we're fully, like an autarky, where we fully have a contained and complete supply chain.

I think mostly this is just about having a little bit of a buffer. But, like, I just think people need to start rethinking, thinking of recycling like they think of mining, basically, like, as a source of, as a large and probably the cheapest source of those materials. Yes, I agree with that. And I think to the point on, it should be cheaper. I mean, I'll give you a specific example in the rare earth context, right? Which is that there are actually 16 rare earth elements that are grouped together. We really only use four of them, actually.

Like, we only care about four of them out of the 16. If you're doing mining, virgin mining, you get this basket of all of them, And you have to do this complicated separations process to get the stuff you want. If you're doing recycling, you're only getting the stuff we were using in the first place already. So you've already cut out a bunch of expensive separation steps in the value chain there. So there's a bunch of reasons why fundamentally I think it should be cheaper. And again, I think it'll be such an economic push on that that, again, there'll be tons of innovation. And we'll get something closer to an actual closed loop.

We'll be moving. Because this is like, to me, this is like 50% of the future sustainability. You know, we focus so much on the energy part, but also the closed physical loop, the reducing physical waste and physical throughput, I think, is like the other half of the equation. And this is, you know, so like creating something like a closed loop of minerals where you're, because the one thing that offsets that dynamic that you very accurately lay out, right? Like the demand is going up faster, so sort of by definition, your recycling is behind your new demand. One force does slightly offset that, which is the lithium you get out of the old batteries will go farther in the new batteries than it went in the old batteries, just because batteries are always constantly improving.

So you will actually get more. I don't think you'll catch up to demand, but you'll get more, let's say, than, you know, it's not a fungible. Yeah. Yeah, right. I think the place you want to end up in all these other critical minerals is kind of where we are maybe a little better than where we are today in more mature supply chains, where, like, aluminum, copper.

We actually do recycle a lot of that stuff. That doesn't mean we don't still need a lot more, so it doesn't solve your problem, but it's meaningful. All right. Can I do the last one? I think this is the last one. Yes, last one. Question to answer in the next five to ten years?

Maybe not next five to ten years, to be honest. Maybe this is a question that gets answered in 20 years, but nonetheless, I'm curious. Will we see a meaningful, scaled geoengineering demo? I thought you were going to say, I was like for sure you were going to go geothermal. Geothermal. That better get answered the next five to ten years. I know. That one, I think, will be, I think in ten years, will know whether geothermal is big.

Going to pay off the promise? Do you think in ten years we'll know? We'll know. Well, no. Yeah. I mean, at least like traditional, it's for sure traditional hydrothermal, probably EGS.

Who knows about, you know, super hockmock. Anyway, I'm not asking about geothermal. I'm asking about geoengineering. Will we see somebody go do like a big solar radiation management experiment? Yeah,

I have a solar radiation expert coming on the pod in a couple of weeks to talk about just this. I'm so torn on this question. Like, you know there are like, a bunch of cowboy jerkoffs in Silicon Valley doing this already.

Like, they're doing little, I mean, I don't know what counts is like a... It's really one set. I just want to defend my, apparently my people in Silicon Valley. I would not say that the group... Answer for them, show. The group you are referring to is not of Silicon Valley. They are not... They're not of...

And that's just like one balloon at a time or whatever. I'm not super clear what they're doing. So I guess I don't know if that counts as a test at scale. Like, I do wonder, I'm so torn about this and I'm so curious what your thoughts are on the moral hazard side of things. Because, like, you know, like, depending on what side of the bed I wake up, I could take different sides of this argument. Like, on the one side, and this I suspect is your side, a lot of people's side, which is just, this is pretty cheap. Somebody's going to do it. You know, climate change is going to get so bad.

Somebody's going to do it. so we might as well do it in a conscious planned controlled way. The other side is just, you know, in a sense, the whole field is protected by being kind of obscure and not a lot of people know about it. Like what happens if you start doing high profile tests and experiments and make this a real thing? Suddenly then everybody around the world is going to be told, hey, you could. like, you know, with like 150 bucks, you could go fiddle with the climate. And then you're like got a whole Pandora's box thing going because you really, this is the scary thing about solar radiation management.

You could stand up and do a reasonably large-scale test on your own without a ton of money, arguably without being detected, doing so by the world. You know what I mean? And the fact that no one's doing that yet, I just think they don't know they can yet. So, like, I kind of don't want them to find out. Like, what do you think about that aspect, the moral hazard part of it? It's so tricky, right? I mean, to fearmonger you a little bit more, I'm going to use a dirty word to you, I suspect,

which is that a billionaire could probably get us half a degree C of cooling globally, personally. Like, that's the crazy thing about SRM, is that, the estimates, like we don't really know, we don't exactly know efficacy, blah, blah, blah. But the rough estimates just to an order of magnitude are that, at least what I've seen, it might cost a couple billion dollars to deliver something like a half a degree of cooling,

half a degree centigrade of cooling. Yes, but as you know, I'm sure, if you follow the literature, the cloud of uncertainties around all of this, like unanticipated effects. 100%. This is all the risk. Second order effects.

Yeah. Like things could go so horribly wrong. And that is, I mean, that is precisely, precisely the kind of question. I don't want random individual billionaires answering. You know what I mean? I totally agree. But this is, like this to me argues for really wrapping our heads around and doing it explicitly just because somebody needs to wrap their hands around and start controlling it.

It's the kind of thing where like you want. the equivalent of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Like, you want, like, the UN to take charge of this and say, look, for the sake of the world, we need to explore this, but it should only be done in a coordinated fashion or something. Yeah, but think about the difficulty that nuclear arms, like, you know, regimes have had ferreting out and finding out whether a country is actually doing a nuclear program. and a nuclear program is big and expensive and requires very specialized knowledge.

It's very difficult to do that without being noticed, and people are pulling that off. Like, I can't imagine an international enforcement regime that could enforce this. Like, it's so easy to do. And then if, like, a billionaire does it and another billionaire doesn't like the way the billionaire does it and decides to undo it or do it a different way. Or redo it. You know what I mean? Like, do we want billionaires? Getting the idea that they should be involved in this field?

Well, yeah, I was going to trigger you with billionaires. But I don't know. I think we have to – the problem is I think the solution is not to put our heads in the sand. Because the more we collectively put our heads in the sand about it, the more likely it is that that's the way it gets developed, ultimately. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess trying to do it on purpose and with eyes wide open is the best is the best we can do.

But boy, am I nervous about how that plays out. I guess there's no, I mean, you can't not do it. You can't put a lid back on it. You can't unknow what we know about it now. So like, I guess the only way out is through. But anyway, so we have three minutes left. You want to toss out one of your spares just to just to intrigue the audience, just titillate an audience with a question we didn't. get to? My spares weren't great, actually. I want to hear what yours were. Oh, I had some really good spares. Yeah, hit me with some spares. Well, one of my spares, I was surprised you didn't bring up, I almost brought up, which is what's going to happen with permissionless D.E.R. Oh, I just did an episode on this. I know. I listened to it. I listened to it. And I, you know, I did one on the balcony solar, not long before that. So people know this as balcony solar. Basically, it's any

distributed, you know, generation or battery that you can plug in without getting permission from a utility, or from anybody, really. You can just plug in. So, 20, last I heard, and this literally changes week to week, but last I heard, 25 states had laws either proposed or announced to be proposed to legalize balcony solar. in 20 that's that's half the country right there that's 25 six that's probably pretty soon and i'm sure many more will follow in the wake and i just think this so like i'm just fascinated by what effect it's going to have i think you and i probably agree that the net megawatts produced by this stuff

is probably not going to be you know it's not going to be huge the question is like will the ability to put your hands on it and fiddle with it and play with it in a DIY way like Legos in your backyard, is that going to spark a kind of subculture? Is that going to spark a lot more people to care and get involved and just be aware, just be aware of solar? I'm curious what you think how you think that's going to play out. Balcony Solar Punk. I don't know. I need to learn more about Germany. Like, I haven't spent enough time understanding, like, what, Balcon's always a huge thing there. It's a gigawatt. Yeah, like a gigawatt. So I guess it's not that small of a, of a net amount. They have like 400 million or something like, are four million? I shouldn't say 400 million. That's

ridiculous. Four million, something like that. Systems installed from like three years of it being legalized. So clearly, like, people like it. Yeah. So I'm just curious, like, what the sort of distributed social effects will be of that. I know both of us will be translated. And my other backup, which I thought was good, but which you and I are probably not the people to discuss, but is China is an over, a state of overproduction of batteries and solar panels, which means they're selling solar panels to their neighbors at just ludicrously low prices, which means countries like Pakistan and Vietnam are just being flooded with.

cheap solar. Like, Pakistan went, like, I think it was like two years or three years, 40% of its total load now. It has imported solar panels equivalent to 40% of its total load. Give that another two, three years. So I'm very curious. So we're going to see what happens when a massive, spontaneous upwelling of distributed solar. solar energy meets rickety developing world grids. How does that resolve itself? Like, what happens when Pakistan has enough solar panels that, like, it's more than 100% of its total load?

You're going to get all these problems that grids get with lots of solar, right? Like balance and frequency management and inertia and all this stuff. But all of this is unplanned. Like the leaders of Pakistan did not arrange this. They didn't have anything to do with it. Same. It's happening in Africa. It's happening in Vietnam.

So I'm just curious. Like, what is the spontaneous, unplanned profusion of solar at the ground level do to a country's electricity system physically and also just politically? Like, that's just a very big change happening very rapidly. We have no idea yet what's going to come out of it. Great question. Not one we have time to answer. Let's watch it. We'll leave you listeners to ponder what's going to happen in Vietnam.

There we go. David, this was fun. Thanks for doing it again. So fun. Awesome. We'll do it again next year. David Roberts writes the Voltz newsletter and hosts the Voltz podcast. This show is a production of Latitude Media.

You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topic. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Max Savage-Levenson and Sean Marquan. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.