A few months ago I wrote about stories I didn’t end up publishing in 2025. But I didn’t include the story of the philosophy professor and the batteries.

I will spare you all the details, but what should have been a fairly straightforward feature expanded to a half-year saga. By the time the second draft was released back to my control, the list of places where this particular story still made sense and was accepting freelance pitches dwindled to zero.

But I’m turning it into a story here, because its very much the exact thing I set out to write when I launched this newsletter in a very different era: a local story with wider implications about everyone's energy future. I'll be back with a roundup of the climate stories I'm obsessed with next week, but I hope you enjoy it.

Jeff Seidman teaches philosophy, but for years now, one of his biggest questions has not been determining meaning of life, but what to do about climate change. 

He’s spent more than a decade reading about potential solutions, especially digging into renewables and electricity. Sometimes it felt like he had gained lot of “useless knowledge”, given his day job as a college professor. But that changed when a developer proposed a battery energy storage system (BESS) in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, where Seidman lives and works at Vassar College. 

BESS projects are banks of large batteries able to charge and discharge electricity on a short-term basis, sometimes built in-combination with other energy developments, like solar fields, but almost always connected to the wider electricity system.