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Most of the energy decisions that touch daily life in America get made in state legislatures, and the people making them are increasingly new to the job. In smaller states, a freshly elected lawmaker gets a pad of paper, no staff, and about 150 lobbyists at the door, then votes on billion-dollar energy budgets in a landscape where the technology changes faster than anyone can track. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Hawaii state Senator Chris Lee, co-founder of the Electric Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan network betting that education moves electrification faster than mandates: put lawmakers in front of working technology, connect them across state lines, and let affordability carry the argument where climate framing will not. As Lee puts it, "nine times out of ten, people just don't know what they don't know."

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

03:39 How electrification clicked: the 2008 iPhone moment

06:10 The education gap: why the initiative exists

11:35 Proxy staff and cross-state validation

15:44 What lands on the tours: eVTOL to the data-center win-win

20:51 Plain 'electrification': the bipartisan framing bet

26:28 Climate hushing and Hawaii's two-track proof

30:17 Policy that spreads: e-buses, heat pumps, RFPs

37:37 Utility business-model reform: Hawaii's PBR law

42:03 Affordability after the federal subsidies

45:22 Hawaii under pressure: LNG and the Lahaina grid

51:53 State power against federal hostility

55:19 The ten-year vision and the closing advice

Spreading the good news about electrification

Volts

Spreading the good news about electrification