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Podcast

Podcast

Want to Decarbonize Your Life? Here’s How.

Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap staffers about why — and how — consumer choices matter.

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Geothermal power.

Why Geothermal Is So Hot Right Now

Inside season 2, episode 6 of Shift Key.

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Power lines.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue.

The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate.

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Voting.
<p>Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images</p>

You don’t need us to say it: The 2024 election will have enormous stakes for America’s climate policy and the planet’s climate. But how well can we quantify those stakes? What would a Trump presidency — or a Harris presidency, for that matter — really mean for the country’s emissions trajectory?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with Sonia Aggarwal, the chief executive officer of Energy Innovation, a climate policy think tank that operates across North America, Europe, and Asia. She was previously special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation, and deployment under President Joe Biden, and she co-chaired the Biden administration’s Climate Innovation Working Group. She and Jesse — another top-notch modeler — dive into what the data can and can’t tell us about the election and how to think about energy system models in the first place. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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