If you are interested in getting past politics as usual and thinking about the structural issues underlying the state of democracy in the US, this new book by Ismar Volić is fascinating - full of insights and anecdotes about everything from the electoral college to the Oscars.

This is astonishing. 6 GW of battery power on the Calif grid last night. That’s the equivalent of 6 coal plants from next to nothing a few years ago. Many takeaways but one is that when something is small, modular, and easily sited you can deploy it fast.

In 2019, California knew it had a challenge: fossils were retiring & evening peak periods were power failure prone.

They saw a need for <4.7 GW of power to handle these periods by 2022. Grid wobbled…stayed up.

Now we’re blasting past 6.1 GW of storage.

pv-magazine.com/2019/08/19/is-…

What are the implications of cleantech manufacturing going for electric grid emissions?

Thanks to WattTime for help with data on marginal emissions that offers insights into that question…

For context: at the beginning of 2021, installed battery capacity in California was a rounding error. Now it's cranking out the equivalent power output as six nuclear reactors when grid operators and markets call. That happened fast (and a lot more to come!)

Very helpful thread on industrial policy / trade / decarbonization. Thanks for the summary.

Exciting how quickly battery storage on CA grid has grown.

Big moment: Batteries all built in just the last 3 years were providing 3 Diablo Canyons worth of power last night, and were the main source for the CA grid.

(DC is the West coast’s last large nuke, irreplaceable in decades, with replacement cost easily in the 10s of billions)

A veteran Republican consultant has a message for the GOP: 'Slam the brakes on the electric vehicle bashing. It will cost you on Election Day.'
politico.com/news/magazine/…

So many articles about EV sales right now are just repeating what was written somewhere else about a slowdown instead of looking at the data.

Here's a good datapoint:
EVs hit 42% of sales in China in March (retail). Up 30% year on year. April likely heading for 45% share.

.Harvard Book Store welcomes Ismar Volić for a discussion of his new book, Making Democracy Count, tomorrow (4/11) at 7 pm EDT. He will be joined in conversation by Wellesley College professor Andrew Schultz.

For more info on this (free!) event, visit: hubs.ly/Q02sgYPT0