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Rob talks to Peter Brannen, author of the new book The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything.
Rob and Jesse revisit the basics of the ultra-clogged electricity interconnection queue.
Rob and Jesse quiz Mark Rothleder, chief operations officer at the California Independent System Operator.
Jesse gives Rob a lesson in marginal generation, inframarginal rent, and electricity supply curves.
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
Rob and Jesse take stock of all the trends threatening to push up power bills.
Jesse teaches Rob all about where solar and wind energy come from.
The two fastest-growing sources of electricity generation in the world represent a radical break with the energy technologies that came before them. That’s not just because their fuels are the wind and the sun.
This is our third episode of Shift Key Summer School, a series of “lecture conversations” about the basics of energy, electricity, and the power grid. This week, we dive into the history and mechanics of wind turbines and solar panels, the two lynchpin technologies of the energy transition. What do solar panels have in common with semiconductors? Why did it take so long for them to achieve scale? And what’s an inverter and why is it so important for the grid of the future?
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: And so then the other thing, of course, that helps is putting it at a place that’s sunnier, right? In addition to pointing it at the sun, you need to have the sun in the first place. If you go from a cloudy northern latitude to a sunny southern latitude, you’re going to get more production. That variation isn’t as large as you might think, though, from the best site in, say, Arizona and New Mexico to the worst 10th percentile sites in northern Maine or Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, where it’s very cloudy. That difference in solar resource potential is only about a factor of two. So I get about twice as much solar output from an ideally placed panel in Arizona as I do in Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. That’s a lot, but we can find much better resources much closer to Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, right?
And so this is why it doesn’t really make sense to build a giant solar farm in Arizona and then send all that power everywhere else in the country — because the transmission lines are so expensive and the efficiency gain is not that huge, it doesn’t make sense to send power that far away. It might make sense to put my solar panel on the east side of the Cascade Mountains and send them to Portland, Oregon, but not to go all the way to Arizona. Because the variation in solar potential is much more gradual across different locations and doesn’t span quite as much of a range as wind power, which we can talk about.
Robinson Meyer: I was going to say, this idea that solar only varies by, it sounds like, about 100% in its efficiency.
Jenkins: Or capacity factor.
Meyer: Yeah. I suspect, in fact, from previous conversations that this is going to be an important tool that comes back later — this idea that solar only really varies by 100% in its resource potential, that Arizona solar is only twice as good as Maine solar, is going to be really important after we talk about wind.
Mentioned:
How Solar Energy Became Cheap, by Gregory F. Nemet
More on what wind energy has to do with Star Trek
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Accelerate your clean energy career with Yale’s online certificate programs. Gain real-world skills, build strong networks, and keep working while you learn. Explore the year-long Financing and Deploying Clean Energy program or the 5-month Clean and Equitable Energy Development program. Learn more here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob does a post-vacation debrief with Jesse and Heatmap deputy editor Jillian Goodman on the One Big Beautiful Bill.
It’s official. On July 4, President Trump signed the Republican reconciliation bill into law, gutting many of the country’s most significant clean energy tax credits. The future of the American solar, wind, battery, and electric vehicle industries looks very different now than it did last year.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we survey the damage and look for bright spots. What did the law, in its final version, actually repeal, and what did it leave intact? How much could still change as the Trump administration implements the law? What does this mean for U.S. economic competitiveness? And how are we feeling about the climate fight today?
Jillian Goodman, Heatmap’s deputy editor, joins us to discuss all these questions and more. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I want to ask a version of the Upshift / Downshift question of both of you, which is, how are you feeling?
Jillian Goodman: Dizzy. I’m feeling dizzy.
Jesse Jenkins: I would like a break. Yes.
Meyer: You both had your faces up against the coalface of this policy change over the past two weeks. And I’m not someone who thinks how we feel about climate change is always the most salient question. At some point of working on it professionally, I think one just kind of is like, well, this is the thing I work on, and I get up in the morning and I try to make it better, and it doesn’t really matter whether I’m optimistic or pessimistic at the moment because you just keep pushing. That’s how it works.
Jenkins: I think it’s how you survive in this game this long, is adopting an attitude like that to some degree.
Meyer: The U.S. just went through a kind of clattering change to its energy and climate policy and got rid of a number of policies that, although flawed, were pushing the U.S. energy system in the right direction, and were a real vote of confidence and of good faith in the energy transition. Has watching the events of the past two weeks made you feel pessimistic about the energy transition to come? Or are you feeling like, you know, for a world where Trump won, for a world where the U.S. faced the constraints and the political environment that it did in 2023 and 2024 and 2025, we can work with this and there’s gonna be new stuff coming down the pipeline and we’re gonna keep deploying.
Goodman: I will say, kind of similar to you, Rob, doing this work is sort of my way of processing my climate anxiety, or at least putting some kind of wall of professionalism between that climate anxiety and my daily life. Like, this is my contribution, and I think about it as a professional, and I don’t really think about it as a human as often.
I will say, it’s shocking to me how much of a … you know, it is not a 100% policy reversal, but the extent to which the government of the United States was willing to throw out its existing climate policy that took however many years and decades to get to just really kind of floors me. And it’s the kind of thing that we can’t do again, at least not in this way. It’s not that U.S. companies will never again trust a climate-oriented tax credit. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. But this approach has been tried, and then it’s been undone. And so whatever approach is tried in the future will have to be something new, and it’ll have to be motivated by different arguments, and it will have to have different structures. And that project, I think, is also kind of daunting.
Jenkins: Yeah, so look, this is a terrible piece of policy for the United States, and for the world. And so on the one hand, I’m mad as hell about it, right? I mean, we haven’t even talked about the broader effects beyond climate of this bill. It’s going to kick nearly one in 20 Americans off of their health insurance. It’s going to explode the deficit so that we can mostly give tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations who don’t need it. It’s going to reduce food stamp spending for people who can’t afford to eat so that people who can afford first class flights can have another vacation. Like, this is just bad policy, and it is a bad way to do energy policy, to completely reverse course just because the other guy won the election, rather than to have a more thoughtful rationalization of the tax code for energy investment.
I think it’s particularly scary to think about the implications for our automotive sector, having basically replaced a pretty thoughtful and fairly successful domestic industrial strategy around EVs and batteries with basically nothing except for some subsidies that build a wall around the United States is really concerning.I don’t know that we’re gonna have a globally relevant auto industry in five years …
Mentioned:
The REPEAT Project report on what the OBBBA will mean for the future of American emissions
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s foreign entities of concern explainer
The new White House executive order about renewables tax credits
And here’s more of Heatmap’s coverage from the endgame of OBBBA.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
