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hello hello everyone this is volts for october 2 2026 the best of september i'm your host david roberts i am in a hotel room in aarhus denmark just about to go to bed but i wanted to get this out to you so pardon the sound quality once a month i pull one chunk out of every episode string it together and create a clips show to give you an overview of the month's episodes this was a big month for volts a couple of technical deep dives a couple of broad overviews and lots more some of my favorite episodes of the year i think this month paid subscribers get these early each one opens up to everyone when the next one comes out so the best of august is now open to everyone if you know somebody who's been meaning to check out the show that's the one to send to them all right seven conversations this month one piece of each as always i deeply appreciate all of you who pay for subscriptions this podcast is entirely listener supported and i couldn't do it without you so let's get into it first up we begin with leah cuspa ceo of good power which pushes back on clean energy disinformation i'm curious what else you have found just in your message testing i mean is it just all the intuitive stuff like cost and convenience or what matter you know that kind of thing i agree what have you found about messages themselves yeah definitely i think messages right we have to get away from and i think our biggest failure is sort of our own egos and wanting people to care about climate or wanting them to care about and really essentially what it boils down to we got almost 70 of americans that live paycheck to paycheck right now so we're thinking am i going to keep my job everything's more expensive what about my health care what about filling my car up with gas we do this great series it's on our good power youtube channel called what we pay and we're telling these stories there's a story on there from pennsylvania 10 this is scott perry's district he's a house republican and we just talked to this family they have an 859 utility bill they pull it up on their screen we did like a mini documentary they're like yeah we have other bills due tomorrow so we're gonna have to choose which ones to pay so essentially yeah economic security republicans and democrats all have to pay for their own gas they have to fill their gas up their car up with gas they all have to pay an energy bill so i would say election cycle after election cycle having economic security and feeling like one is getting ahead i would say really really helps how do we tie that to the energy transition oh well how about we stop the tyranny of far-off wars and just break our dependence on this stuff and just you know what charge your car in your garage for a couple bucks that sounds pretty great and if you look at australia and if you look at europe eb sales is going to be a lot of money and i think that's going to be a lot of money and i think that's going to be a lot of money and i think that's through the roof right now i mean the trends are everywhere globally so i'm hoping to see that in the u.s but i think the values argument around some of these technologies and how ideological they are and how polarizing they are across political lines is really really holding us back so i think what is working definitely economic security i think second when we look at audiences in rural conservative places where most of the utility scale renewables are being built energy security grid reliability like keeping the power on around extreme weather american competitiveness with the rest of the world and keeping us ahead and making sure that you know we can build these technologies here i would say you know the jobs message well i feel like we've some practitioners have kind of turned away from that we still see a lot of potential and influence when you show really cool people in clean energy jobs that love their jobs and they're showing beautiful vistas from the top of turbines or wind and in solar or people on battery energy storage sites there's a ton of stuff on our youtube channel about that so i would say it depends on the audience sometimes a climate message really works for like a young audience under 30 this is what i wanted to ask about one of the big fights right now is i think like everybody almost everybody has come around basically to thinking yes obviously like cheaper energy more reliable better for your personal immediate life is the best thing is the top thing is the best thing to lead with but now there's this argument about like some people want to say but like yes bolstering that with climate will boost you a few points and then other people will say no no no if you throw climate in in fact you polarize a bunch of people away even if you've got them on your side from that then they'll polarize them away with climate like i wonder specifically about climate what you've found can i just start by saying something maybe very polarizing but i think this is just the most ridiculous false debate that is so dangerously distracting from the bigger issues i'll just say that i mean they love it on social media though leah they love it they love it and they i've been reading all the blogs and news stories and sub stacks and everything about it i mean how we think about it is maybe a little different but i think we can have our cake and eat it too and to continue with the dessert analogy right we think about it like a pie so there's some people right now like eight percent of young people under 35 rated climate as their top voting issue in 2024 right that's a lot of people so we want to use a climate first message for them and you know it'd be great if people who are kind of could be predisposed to being really driven around a climate message to get more of them to increase the size of that slice of the pie but then there's other people who will never be driven by a climate message i will reference my dad who is a staunch conservative trump supporter but he now loves solar because his hvac guy has solar not because his daughter works at good power but because his hvac guy convinced him you know he could save money so i mean it really depends on the audience and this sort of crude segmentation between should we say climate shouldn't we when you look under the hood and really look at the nuances of how we communicate the audience segmentation how we market the answer is just not black and white like that it's you know what use it if it's advantageous in most cases it's not incredibly polarizing it's also what i said a logistical issue when you say climate how do the algorithms respond on tiktok there's evidence that your content is suppressed so it could be a logistical reason it's not even a polarizing thing i'm less worried about the polarization of saying climate i actually don't think it's that big of a deal for most people right now we're seeing it we're living it it's really a logistical thing with certain platforms deciding to suppress or serve your content to different audiences and how do we get by the goalie next up carl hoyland and joel edwards of zanskar who use machine learning models to hunt for conventional geothermal and so then let's talk about this third discovery this is called big blind in nevada and this is sort of i think the news that made everybody really sit up and pay attention because this was unlike the previous two we've discussed this was genuinely a discovery of there were no prior wells on this site to give you any data there were no surface manifestations of activity on the surface this was a genuine blind site so how did you find it in a nutshell how did you find it yeah this is really our bread and butter so joel i'll let you kind of talk through how greenfield perspective exploration works yeah it's that concept we talked about at the beginning david that you build models everybody can build models zanskar builds models but you have to pair your model predictions with tests in the field of those predictions and so this is one of those cases where we had made a set of predictions in across this part of the state and we were out testing those predictions and ran into this system at this location and this is a system that's west of tonopah nevada so pretty remote and like you said there was no prior data at the site and if you or me or anybody were to walk across the site there would be nothing at the surface that would clue you into that there's a massive system below that initial discovery was made at the end of 2023 and then we went through the permitting processes and we came back with a larger rig and drilled into that resource in what years and i was 2026 i think we drilled into in 2025 and we encountered commercial reservoir conditions at around two to three thousand feet the thing that's really exciting about this system in particular is how big it is this system by the footprint of the heat flow anomaly is much bigger than Pumpernickel and much bigger than Lightning Dock. Oh, interesting. I guess you've just kind of started exploiting it, right? I mean, is it commercially operational? Where's the state of play there? No, we're in the wellfield stage of the project. So we're permitting additional exploration wells right now to go back to the site. So we're still early stages. And yes. Still trying to figure out how big the site itself is, how big the resource itself is. Exactly. We have a sense of sort of the surface area, how big it is. That's why I can make that claim relative to some of the other projects. But we do not yet know at depth how big and hot the system is. It seems quite spicy to think that this thing was sitting out there. There's lots of exploration across the West for minerals and other things. And to just think that this had been missed for so long, you know, gets us really excited about the future. So you had your models and they gave you a sort of probabilistic sense. And then you go out and do some exploration in those probabilistic areas. And you just got lucky on this one. I guess not lucky. The model, the probabilities paid off in this spot. Yeah, I know. Maybe the models got lucky. Maybe we got lucky. There's luck in all this. And there's also bad luck when we miss. And to be clear, we've missed way more than we've hit. Like to make this sound like this thing has been working better, you know, than the legacy explorers. In the early days, our models were frankly much worse than. Than expert explorers. And we do benchmark against expert predictions in our modeling space. And it's really only. Our models really only in the last year or two have started to outperform. And, you know, every model that you build, sometimes your models get worse. So it's not like it's up and to the right. It's like there's a wobble. It's sort of like the climate, right? Like some years it's wobbling hotter and cooler, but you're generally up and to the right. And that's very true for our modeling space. So you think from now on over time, the more exploration you do, the more data you feed into the models, the better the models get. Over time, you think you're going to get better and better at finding these things? And that's actually quite clear already from the data we've collected. Like Joel said, they started out much worse than humans. They caught up and they're performing better in many locations and areas. And we've seen it improve in two ways. As you put more data into the models, the same architecture ends up yielding higher precision, you know, better performance. But in other cases, actual changes to the architecture, the way we've the model itself with the same data yields an improvement in prediction. So the teams are constantly driving improvements in both of those fronts. Interesting. So maybe not up and to the right for every increment, but over time, in the fullness of time, you're going up and to the right with your models. Yeah. And really those sort of side steps that Joel's talking about, or what might feel like even a step back, is often in a certain type of metric, like precision or accuracy. But it usually reflects that we weren't realizing that there was something less generalizable about the prior model. And so this step back is getting you to a more accurate representation of the uncertainty. So it's still a better model. You're just being more correct in your estimation of uncertainty for it. Right. Interesting. Interesting. You know, this manifests, it's funny, you would expect our sort of hit rate, like when we find a system to be like consistent and linear. But what I've found is that our hit rate is like, you know, like in sports, you get into like a streaky zone, like home run after home run, or whatever, you're hitting the threes, like back to back. That's the same thing in our models. Like we go through periods where bang, bang, bang, like survey after survey after survey, we're hitting, hitting, hitting. And then we go through like a cold slump for a period of time, and then we push out a new one. So it's been a very like nonlinear sort of spikiness to the discovery rate. And that's the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more, become a paid subscriber at volts.wtf. Thank you. Thank you.