In this episode, Claire and Dan dive into the long-standing East Coast vs. West Coast debate... This time, it's all about energy. From California's pioneering climate policies, solar and EV mandates, and wildfire-driven grid challenges, to the East Coast's regional planning, offshore wind ambitions, and coastal resilience, we explore how each side of the country is shaping the future of clean power. Along the way, we unpack successes, setbacks, and surprising lessons each coast can learn from the other. Hosts: Claire Broido Johnson and Dan Kammen
NOTE This file was generated by Descript
00:00:03 --> 00:00:06 East Coast Energy versus West Coast Energy, which is better.
00:00:06 --> 00:00:09 And why this is Energy matters.
00:00:15 --> 00:00:16 So I love this one.
00:00:16 --> 00:00:20 This feels to me like the battle of the Wrappers, the the Compton
00:00:20 --> 00:00:22 LA versus New York scene.
00:00:22 --> 00:00:26 Um, and of course I'm gonna do my best to rep the West Coast and Claire's
00:00:26 --> 00:00:30 gonna rep the East Coast, but both are interesting and they learned from each
00:00:30 --> 00:00:32 other, although maybe slowly, but.
00:00:33 --> 00:00:37 The differences to me are really interesting and stark and drawn
00:00:37 --> 00:00:42 from the degree to which, not just energy, but also environment and
00:00:42 --> 00:00:44 climate policy have shaped things.
00:00:44 --> 00:00:48 So certainly the California perspective on this is that we love our climate.
00:00:49 --> 00:00:53 We don't always treat it well, but we talk about it all the time and
00:00:53 --> 00:00:55 we think it's got better weather.
00:00:55 --> 00:00:57 It doesn't have the bugs and humidity, et cetera, et cetera,
00:00:58 --> 00:00:59 and all of those things.
00:00:59 --> 00:01:03 Plus, how beautiful the West Coast is has led into a series of
00:01:03 --> 00:01:05 really interesting innovations.
00:01:05 --> 00:01:10 And if I were to do the total thumbnail version, California.
00:01:10 --> 00:01:14 Started off with a bill that's got a really interesting history.
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 It's called the Pavley bill, named after Fran Pavley, the creator.
00:01:18 --> 00:01:23 Um, its technical name is assembly bill, the lower house assembly bill 32.
00:01:23 --> 00:01:28 And it said California had to level out its greenhouse gas
00:01:28 --> 00:01:29 emissions by a certain date.
00:01:29 --> 00:01:31 People said, can't do it too aggressive.
00:01:32 --> 00:01:34 California essentially was able to do it.
00:01:34 --> 00:01:41 That assembly Bill 32 then evolved into a target for the year 2020, called Senate
00:01:41 --> 00:01:46 Bill 32 when Fran Pavley moved from the lower house, the assembly to the Senate.
00:01:46 --> 00:01:50 And now California has a series of policies that.
00:01:51 --> 00:01:56 Would take many episodes, but in short, California had a mandate for a million
00:01:56 --> 00:01:58 solar rooftops by a certain year.
00:01:58 --> 00:01:58 Yep.
00:01:58 --> 00:02:00 People said it wasn't possible.
00:02:00 --> 00:02:01 California achieved it.
00:02:01 --> 00:02:06 Then it had a plan for a million and then a million and a half electric vehicles.
00:02:06 --> 00:02:07 People said that wasn't possible.
00:02:07 --> 00:02:09 California then achieved it.
00:02:09 --> 00:02:17 Um, and California has a. Cap and trade a market mechanism where there's a price
00:02:17 --> 00:02:23 on emissions, and that cap and trade market raises about 11 or $12 billion a
00:02:23 --> 00:02:30 year right now, and 35% of that money as a floor, not a ceiling, must be spent on
00:02:30 --> 00:02:33 low income marginalized fence line people.
00:02:33 --> 00:02:38 So environmental Justice ISD centrally into this complicated
00:02:38 --> 00:02:39 mixture that I've only just.
00:02:40 --> 00:02:41 Scratch the surface, ski the surface
00:02:41 --> 00:02:41 up.
00:02:41 --> 00:02:42 Yeah.
00:02:42 --> 00:02:46 So on the flip side, on the East Coast, MO East Coast states are
00:02:46 --> 00:02:51 part of independent grid operators that enable multi-state planning and
00:02:51 --> 00:02:53 forecasting and reliability management.
00:02:53 --> 00:02:57 Whether it's PJM, which stands for Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland, but
00:02:57 --> 00:03:02 actually constitutes I think 11 states now, or ISO New England, um, which
00:03:02 --> 00:03:06 is the New England State or the New York iso, by default, these smaller.
00:03:07 --> 00:03:13 States that are not as big as California are having to forecast and plan together.
00:03:13 --> 00:03:17 And in fact, as another example, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or
00:03:17 --> 00:03:22 rggi, is something that also exists to try to manage carbon emissions.
00:03:22 --> 00:03:23 Yeah.
00:03:23 --> 00:03:26 And I think that that is one of the features that whether you are an East
00:03:26 --> 00:03:30 Coast rapper or a West coast rapper, um, the fact that California is now
00:03:30 --> 00:03:32 the world's fourth largest economy.
00:03:32 --> 00:03:32 Right.
00:03:32 --> 00:03:33 It's just not, and really drives.
00:03:34 --> 00:03:36 What's going on in many of the neighboring states, even if they don't
00:03:36 --> 00:03:41 want to hear, it does mean that policies and things can be differently done.
00:03:41 --> 00:03:43 California has its own.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:46 Investment mechanisms in research and development.
00:03:46 --> 00:03:50 California has essentially its own foreign policy with regards to China.
00:03:50 --> 00:03:53 There are a number of big ticket differences, but if I were to back up
00:03:53 --> 00:03:57 and combine what we did in the last episode on energy efficiency with this
00:03:57 --> 00:04:03 one, one really interesting feature is that if you go back to the plans.
00:04:03 --> 00:04:08 For California's development as an economy, going back to the sixties,
00:04:08 --> 00:04:12 the plan was for the so-called hard path, meaning California would need
00:04:12 --> 00:04:14 to build a new big power plant.
00:04:14 --> 00:04:18 And at one point there was a plan for a nuclear plant, and
00:04:18 --> 00:04:19 we'll talk about nuclear later.
00:04:20 --> 00:04:24 Of some or some other big power plant every 20 miles
00:04:24 --> 00:04:26 along the 600 mile coastline.
00:04:26 --> 00:04:31 That path looked like a huge amount of building high cost
00:04:31 --> 00:04:34 for nuclear, potentially high risk, depending who you are.
00:04:34 --> 00:04:41 And that plan was replaced largely due to the work of Art Rosenfeld, one
00:04:41 --> 00:04:43 of Enrico Fermi's last PhD students.
00:04:43 --> 00:04:48 Towering figure, even though he was a very short man, lovely in the area of
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 efficiency, um, and many other colleagues.
00:04:51 --> 00:04:55 And that effort led to investment in energy efficiency in the
00:04:55 --> 00:05:00 country's first efforts to deploy significant amounts of wind and solar.
00:05:00 --> 00:05:04 And that effort is essentially the path that California's been on with lots of
00:05:04 --> 00:05:07 tricky bumps and bruises along the way.
00:05:07 --> 00:05:10 But that path has been one that's now really considered.
00:05:10 --> 00:05:14 The soft path where distributed resources at scale and
00:05:14 --> 00:05:16 particular renewables dominate.
00:05:16 --> 00:05:21 And so today, California has been able to export renewable energy
00:05:21 --> 00:05:23 for over a hundred days straight.
00:05:24 --> 00:05:26 Not 24 hours a day, but.
00:05:26 --> 00:05:30 During each day at some point they were selling or trading
00:05:30 --> 00:05:31 clean energy to its neighbors.
00:05:32 --> 00:05:32 Right?
00:05:32 --> 00:05:33 Right.
00:05:33 --> 00:05:35 So back to the East coast.
00:05:35 --> 00:05:41 The east coast side, um, you know, we are transmission constrained on the
00:05:41 --> 00:05:45 East coast and I would, I would suggest that our listeners take a look at
00:05:45 --> 00:05:49 the Connecticut Green Bank and Brian Garcia has been a dear friend for a
00:05:49 --> 00:05:51 long time and a wonderful human being.
00:05:51 --> 00:05:55 He's at a, has as a point where there's not enough transmission,
00:05:55 --> 00:06:00 there's not any idea that we're gonna be able to do offshore wind anymore.
00:06:00 --> 00:06:02 No chance of nuclear.
00:06:02 --> 00:06:02 Well, we'll come
00:06:02 --> 00:06:02 back to that.
00:06:02 --> 00:06:03 Yeah.
00:06:03 --> 00:06:04 Well, right.
00:06:04 --> 00:06:07 Um, no chance of nuclear.
00:06:07 --> 00:06:08 No chance of coal.
00:06:09 --> 00:06:10 And so what are you gonna do?
00:06:10 --> 00:06:10 Right?
00:06:10 --> 00:06:13 So I mean, there are definitely ways that a lot of these states
00:06:13 --> 00:06:17 are trying to create mandates and create both carrots and sticks.
00:06:17 --> 00:06:22 So, for example, Massachusetts and New York wanna be net zero by 25 50.
00:06:22 --> 00:06:26 Um, New Jersey wants a hundred, a hundred percent clean energy by 2050.
00:06:27 --> 00:06:31 And for a lot of these East Coast states, there's gotta be a focus on sea level
00:06:31 --> 00:06:36 rise and flooding and storm surges and investment in coastal resilience.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:39 Um, you know, priorities about grid modernization.
00:06:39 --> 00:06:44 I mean, some of our grid is over a hundred years old, back to offshore wind.
00:06:44 --> 00:06:47 I mean, I think that's been, you know, fraught with all sorts of issues.
00:06:47 --> 00:06:51 I was studying Cape Wind, which is an offshore wind project off
00:06:51 --> 00:06:56 of Nantucket in 2002 in my project finance class, and, you know, it
00:06:56 --> 00:06:58 still hasn't come totally to fruition.
00:06:58 --> 00:06:58 Yeah.
00:06:58 --> 00:07:00 So these are interesting cases.
00:07:00 --> 00:07:03 And just to kind of lay the scene for people who don't live
00:07:03 --> 00:07:04 and breathe this all the time.
00:07:05 --> 00:07:10 Denmark and the United Kingdom and China and South Korea have all done
00:07:10 --> 00:07:12 major investments in offshore wind.
00:07:12 --> 00:07:18 There's gigawatts of wind available and the total offshore wind
00:07:18 --> 00:07:19 installed in the US today is.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:21 Zero.
00:07:21 --> 00:07:21 Zero.
00:07:21 --> 00:07:26 And so there are plans, or there were plans before the current administration
00:07:26 --> 00:07:30 for the first significant wind farm to be off the Virginia Coast.
00:07:30 --> 00:07:36 We are so many decades behind the international players who are finding
00:07:37 --> 00:07:39 offshore wind that used to be expensive.
00:07:39 --> 00:07:41 Now not expensive.
00:07:41 --> 00:07:45 You can build bigger machines, bigger arrays, and you can do so in a way
00:07:45 --> 00:07:49 where the transmission cables to go into big cities is much easier to do.
00:07:50 --> 00:07:53 And yet, for all reasons you mentioned we are not there.
00:07:54 --> 00:07:55 Well, Maryland's another good example.
00:07:55 --> 00:07:59 The idea was to do 1500 megawatts off of Ocean City, Maryland,
00:08:00 --> 00:08:01 and that would've created.
00:08:01 --> 00:08:06 Somewhere on the order of 15 permanent jobs was something that
00:08:06 --> 00:08:07 everyone was very excited about.
00:08:07 --> 00:08:12 But these are huge projects and they suffer, you know, licensing
00:08:12 --> 00:08:17 problems, legislative setbacks, and the utilities have all terminated
00:08:17 --> 00:08:19 their, their power purchase agreements.
00:08:19 --> 00:08:21 Things have become more expensive.
00:08:21 --> 00:08:24 It's just, it's super complicated and, and it, but it really doesn't
00:08:24 --> 00:08:28 need to be, because as you've said, off of the coast of England, off the
00:08:28 --> 00:08:31 coast of lots of European countries, there's offshore wind everywhere.
00:08:31 --> 00:08:35 So let's pull this back to some of the, the nitty gritty of this
00:08:35 --> 00:08:37 East Coast, west coast feature.
00:08:37 --> 00:08:39 So I wanna highlight one particular bank.
00:08:39 --> 00:08:41 It was an early player.
00:08:41 --> 00:08:43 It was called the New Resources Bank in California.
00:08:44 --> 00:08:47 And their model hearkens back to what we've talked about previously
00:08:47 --> 00:08:49 in the series, energy efficiency.
00:08:49 --> 00:08:53 And what they said is that we will underwrite mortgages yep.
00:08:53 --> 00:08:55 And we will give you a better mortgage rate.
00:08:56 --> 00:09:01 If you take the high efficiency path, if the, if the home has the more efficient
00:09:01 --> 00:09:08 washer, dryer, refrigerator, et cetera, and now there's even more benefits if you.
00:09:09 --> 00:09:11 Go and do a home that has no gas.
00:09:11 --> 00:09:14 So it's an all electric house with the induction stove and everything else.
00:09:15 --> 00:09:17 I am a new Maryland homeowner.
00:09:17 --> 00:09:21 Um, and due to the thankful thoughtfulness of the person I bought
00:09:21 --> 00:09:25 the home from, it's all electric, so I don't need to worry about Wow.
00:09:25 --> 00:09:25 Gas
00:09:25 --> 00:09:26 bills.
00:09:26 --> 00:09:26 That's very unusual.
00:09:27 --> 00:09:30 Yeah, I was delighted to, yeah, to find one that has that, but
00:09:30 --> 00:09:32 what it also means is that.
00:09:32 --> 00:09:37 When I install solar, yeah, I can meet all my energy needs in a way that's very
00:09:37 --> 00:09:43 Californian and I can think about when is the market gonna change so that I can not
00:09:43 --> 00:09:48 just bank my power with utility, but I can actually sell power into the market.
00:09:48 --> 00:09:50 And California has.
00:09:51 --> 00:09:56 Talked a great game about building this dynamic kind of eBay like energy
00:09:56 --> 00:09:57 market, but only still hasn't happened.
00:09:57 --> 00:10:01 Only very, very, very small pilot steps in this direction.
00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 Well, and even one of, one of the things we talked about in one of our last
00:10:04 --> 00:10:10 episodes, NM 3.0, which is trying to support the expansion of storage, right?
00:10:10 --> 00:10:13 But if you're selling electricity back to the grid with your solar plus
00:10:13 --> 00:10:17 storage, you're only getting somewhere on the order three to 5 cents a kilowatt
00:10:17 --> 00:10:18 hour by selling it back to the grid.
00:10:19 --> 00:10:23 So this is a funny point because as the economist, the business financial
00:10:23 --> 00:10:25 person, you, Claire, definitely
00:10:25 --> 00:10:26 not an economist.
00:10:27 --> 00:10:32 That doesn't sound like a good deal, but from my perspective on the climate
00:10:32 --> 00:10:37 energy side, I actually think yes, I would like to see a higher rate of return to
00:10:37 --> 00:10:44 rate payers, but because this is such a. Gravitational shift in how utilities and
00:10:44 --> 00:10:46 their and their consumers would interact.
00:10:46 --> 00:10:52 I'm actually would be very happy with even small, minimal returns to the customer
00:10:52 --> 00:10:56 if we could set up a policy regime where those would ramp up over time.
00:10:56 --> 00:11:02 And build towards a, you know, a true interactive market where everyone is, as
00:11:02 --> 00:11:05 I said in a previous episode, a prosumer.
00:11:05 --> 00:11:09 Everyone is a producer and a consumer, and it's a function of when you need
00:11:09 --> 00:11:11 power, what the timing is, et cetera.
00:11:11 --> 00:11:18 But that world, that doesn't make a lot of sense to current.
00:11:18 --> 00:11:23 Regulators is actually one that technology could easily let us move into.
00:11:23 --> 00:11:28 We're just not ready for that emotionally or mentally or bureaucratically today.
00:11:28 --> 00:11:31 Well, that also means utilities make less money.
00:11:32 --> 00:11:35 So I'm gonna, now I'm gonna pull the California card again 'cause
00:11:35 --> 00:11:36 that's our, that's our episode title.
00:11:37 --> 00:11:41 And so in California, transmission has become a big deal.
00:11:41 --> 00:11:43 No, for different reasons than the East Coast Yeah.
00:11:43 --> 00:11:47 Is because we, uh, now have a fifth season of the year thanks to human
00:11:47 --> 00:11:51 activity called fire season, winter, summer, spring, fall, and fire season.
00:11:51 --> 00:11:56 And so the utilities have huge liability around those transmission projects.
00:11:56 --> 00:12:00 So one of the opportunities that is.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:04 Initially a west coast thing, I think it's gonna spread to the East for reasons
00:12:04 --> 00:12:10 you've described, is more and more communities could be, if not a hundred
00:12:10 --> 00:12:15 percent energy, self-sufficient, largely so, so installing and, and encouraging
00:12:15 --> 00:12:21 rooftop solar and putting big batteries in the basement of municipal buildings
00:12:21 --> 00:12:23 and a variety of things so that.
00:12:24 --> 00:12:27 Communities aren't energy islands, but they need less
00:12:27 --> 00:12:29 transmission back and forth.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:29 Right.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:31 Can lower costs overall.
00:12:31 --> 00:12:35 And this is a combination of the transition from dirty energy to clean
00:12:35 --> 00:12:40 energy and really maximizing the use of energy efficiency in all levels.
00:12:40 --> 00:12:41 Well, why is that just a California thing?
00:12:42 --> 00:12:44 Well, I don't think it is, but it certainly started in California.
00:12:44 --> 00:12:44 Oh, for sure.
00:12:44 --> 00:12:46 And I think it's something that you started
00:12:46 --> 00:12:47 everything in California Good for you.
00:12:48 --> 00:12:52 Well, you know, last time I heard the uh, white settlers in California all
00:12:52 --> 00:12:57 came from the east, but we'll get back to that, but certainly on the energy front.
00:12:57 --> 00:13:01 And so one topic and we've only briefly mentioned transportation, so yes.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:06 An example of the kind of good dynamic on this is that California,
00:13:07 --> 00:13:11 three years ago was the first US state to say we are going to.
00:13:11 --> 00:13:14 End of the sale of new gas powered vehicles.
00:13:14 --> 00:13:14 Yep.
00:13:15 --> 00:13:17 And that year is 2035.
00:13:19 --> 00:13:22 It does not say anything about the used vehicle market, nor does it
00:13:22 --> 00:13:24 say anything about farm vehicles.
00:13:24 --> 00:13:28 So there are nice important carve outs for places where those weren't available
00:13:28 --> 00:13:33 yet, but California said 2035, no more gas powered vehicles can be sold in
00:13:33 --> 00:13:38 state than I was super pleased to see the Netherlands and UK and Massachusetts.
00:13:38 --> 00:13:38 Yes.
00:13:38 --> 00:13:41 All, not only adopt that, but they went to 2030.
00:13:41 --> 00:13:41 Yep.
00:13:42 --> 00:13:46 And so they've beat California and so the, you know, in this rapper, dual
00:13:46 --> 00:13:48 between Snoop Dogg and Biggie Big.
00:13:48 --> 00:13:51 We're losing and California needs to up its game because
00:13:51 --> 00:13:56 certainly electric vehicles with clean energy save everyone money.
00:13:56 --> 00:14:00 And so there's an example of where we need to now relearn from the East Coast.
00:14:00 --> 00:14:01 Thank you for that.
00:14:01 --> 00:14:02 I appreciate that one.
00:14:02 --> 00:14:02 It
00:14:02 --> 00:14:04 was painful to say that I had to do it.
00:14:04 --> 00:14:04 Say, I
00:14:04 --> 00:14:04 understand.
00:14:05 --> 00:14:06 I wanna, uh, make another.
00:14:07 --> 00:14:11 Suggestion in terms of things to talk about is including inclusive prosperity,
00:14:11 --> 00:14:14 capital based in Connecticut, connected with the Connecticut Green Bank.
00:14:14 --> 00:14:18 They're trying to power a brighter tomorrow by delivering
00:14:18 --> 00:14:22 clean energy for all through innovative financing solutions.
00:14:22 --> 00:14:24 And so there are green banks out there that are focused on
00:14:25 --> 00:14:26 trying to support low income.
00:14:27 --> 00:14:31 Medium income everybody and providing financing solutions.
00:14:31 --> 00:14:33 So there there's been lots of really interesting things that have popped
00:14:33 --> 00:14:37 up on the East coast and the west coast to try to support energy
00:14:37 --> 00:14:40 justice and energy efficiency.
00:14:40 --> 00:14:42 So say a little bit more about this because we not
00:14:42 --> 00:14:44 only have some private banks.
00:14:44 --> 00:14:47 I mentioned resource bank, you mentioned that one, but the state of Connecticut
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 wanted to do its own state level bank.
00:14:50 --> 00:14:51 So talk about how those things.
00:14:51 --> 00:14:52 System.
00:14:52 --> 00:14:53 What does happen?
00:14:53 --> 00:14:54 State system.
00:14:54 --> 00:14:58 Well, you have a state O state bank can, California has a state bank, green bank,
00:14:58 --> 00:15:01 but these private ones have actually been the leaders in this
00:15:01 --> 00:15:01 area.
00:15:01 --> 00:15:02 Right, exactly.
00:15:02 --> 00:15:04 Though I think everything's been turned on its head right now.
00:15:04 --> 00:15:09 Now that the Trump administration has, has removed funding for everyone.
00:15:09 --> 00:15:12 Yeah, and we talked about that in the big beautiful Bill episode, but it
00:15:12 --> 00:15:17 is an issue where lots of developers that thought the landscape was fairly
00:15:17 --> 00:15:19 clear in favoring clean energy.
00:15:19 --> 00:15:20 Energy efficiency are now.
00:15:21 --> 00:15:23 Unsure, unsure what's gonna happen, or the
00:15:23 --> 00:15:25 grant funding's been pulled from them, right.
00:15:25 --> 00:15:27 Things that were promised to them have now been pulled.
00:15:27 --> 00:15:27 Right.
00:15:27 --> 00:15:30 So I'll do another give back to the East coast.
00:15:30 --> 00:15:35 This is gonna pain me to say, but among the ideas that were certainly
00:15:35 --> 00:15:38 launched in California but did not come to fruition under Governor
00:15:38 --> 00:15:42 Schwartzenegger, there was a big effort to build a so-called hydrogen highway.
00:15:43 --> 00:15:48 And the idea was we were gonna connect various big cities, San Francisco and
00:15:48 --> 00:15:53 Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the ski areas of Lake Tahoe with corridors where
00:15:53 --> 00:15:55 you could drive your fuel cell vehicle.
00:15:55 --> 00:15:58 And we were going to make hydrogen.
00:15:59 --> 00:16:05 And the language is gonna get slightly complicated here because hydrogen today.
00:16:06 --> 00:16:09 Is not hard to find in the US for industrial uses, but it's what we
00:16:09 --> 00:16:15 call gray hydrogen, meaning it's natural gas molecule, a carbon
00:16:15 --> 00:16:20 bonded to four hydrogen CH four, and we're gonna split that and get the
00:16:20 --> 00:16:22 hydrogen and then do something right.
00:16:22 --> 00:16:25 We don't know what with the carbon, so that's gray hydrogen.
00:16:25 --> 00:16:25 Okay.
00:16:25 --> 00:16:26 But what California said is.
00:16:27 --> 00:16:30 We aren't gonna permit that hydrogen in the long run.
00:16:30 --> 00:16:35 We are going to only utilize green hydrogen where the hydrogen
00:16:35 --> 00:16:37 is made using renewable energy.
00:16:37 --> 00:16:37 Yep.
00:16:38 --> 00:16:42 And that will be a commodity that will go into your fuel cell vehicles now.
00:16:43 --> 00:16:47 Experts will, we will talk differently, but how many of us have actually seen a
00:16:47 --> 00:16:51 fuel cell vehicle driving down a road?
00:16:51 --> 00:16:52 I've never seen one.
00:16:52 --> 00:16:53 Well, we have 'em in California.
00:16:53 --> 00:16:55 Um, but they're not common.
00:16:55 --> 00:16:58 And the number of hydrogen fueling stations where I used
00:16:58 --> 00:17:02 to live in Oakland, California in the Bay area is actually two.
00:17:02 --> 00:17:07 There's one for the municipal bus fleet and there's one that we operated
00:17:07 --> 00:17:09 at the University of California.
00:17:09 --> 00:17:11 As a research hub.
00:17:11 --> 00:17:11 Oh, interesting.
00:17:11 --> 00:17:11 There's a
00:17:11 --> 00:17:16 couple more as you go up towards Davis and Sacramento, but very few.
00:17:16 --> 00:17:20 Whereas how many of us have seen or hopefully lease or
00:17:20 --> 00:17:21 own an electric vehicle?
00:17:22 --> 00:17:24 Many, many more though I, I don't know the statistic.
00:17:24 --> 00:17:26 California versus the East coast.
00:17:26 --> 00:17:29 I mean, anytime I go to California, every third car or second
00:17:29 --> 00:17:31 car is an electric vehicle.
00:17:31 --> 00:17:32 Not on the, on the East Coast.
00:17:32 --> 00:17:32 Right?
00:17:32 --> 00:17:37 Well, so in California now, the bestselling car in the state is
00:17:37 --> 00:17:40 an electric vehicle and a third.
00:17:40 --> 00:17:43 Of all vehicle sales are now electric.
00:17:43 --> 00:17:45 I'm leaving out the truck market, which is different.
00:17:45 --> 00:17:45 Different, yeah.
00:17:45 --> 00:17:50 Although there is some penetration now into that one with the new
00:17:50 --> 00:17:53 truck companies, things like Rivian and the Ford Lightning,
00:17:53 --> 00:17:54 there's a whole bunch of others.
00:17:54 --> 00:18:04 But the California policy landscape of encouraging electric vehicles Yeah.
00:18:04 --> 00:18:10 Is something that has come up as a. Alternative because 10, 15 years ago
00:18:10 --> 00:18:15 there was a strong bet on this hydrogen highway, this kind of green corridor.
00:18:15 --> 00:18:17 Um, and that.
00:18:18 --> 00:18:23 Just simply didn't, uh, didn't pan out relative to the cost declines and the
00:18:23 --> 00:18:27 policies that were so much easier to put together to support electric vehicles.
00:18:27 --> 00:18:27 Right?
00:18:27 --> 00:18:33 And so as of 2024, something like 50% of all EVs.
00:18:33 --> 00:18:35 In the US are still in California.
00:18:35 --> 00:18:36 That's really interesting.
00:18:36 --> 00:18:37 It's a huge number.
00:18:37 --> 00:18:40 And now with a big, beautiful bill terminating the federal tax
00:18:40 --> 00:18:44 credit for new and used E electric vehicles, they, you know, that will
00:18:44 --> 00:18:46 be terminated by September 30th, 2025.
00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 So depending on when you're listening to this, go buy your
00:18:49 --> 00:18:50 EV right now or it's too late.
00:18:51 --> 00:18:55 And as a new resident of the East coast, it really pained me.
00:18:55 --> 00:19:00 I actually saw a construction or a maintenance truck taking out an EV
00:19:00 --> 00:19:03 charger in Washington DC and that.
00:19:04 --> 00:19:06 We know that's something that the current administration
00:19:06 --> 00:19:07 favors for some strange reason.
00:19:07 --> 00:19:11 Maybe it has to do with the, uh, Trump Musk breakup.
00:19:11 --> 00:19:15 Um, but it was painful as a Californian to see an EV station
00:19:15 --> 00:19:17 being removed on the East Coast.
00:19:18 --> 00:19:19 Well, yes, that does happen though.
00:19:19 --> 00:19:21 I have lots to say about electric vehicles that isn't just.
00:19:22 --> 00:19:24 Necessarily East Coast Fest versus West Coast.
00:19:24 --> 00:19:28 I will give you one thing on California, which is that is trying to solve one of
00:19:28 --> 00:19:32 the many problems associated with electric vehicles, which is Charger help started
00:19:32 --> 00:19:34 by Camille Terry on the west coast.
00:19:34 --> 00:19:38 Fantastic entrepreneur, female entrepreneur, kicking butt with her, with
00:19:38 --> 00:19:40 her startup, you know, electric vehicles.
00:19:41 --> 00:19:46 It's a lot of that really has to do with, um, the, the maintenance of them.
00:19:46 --> 00:19:48 And at any given time.
00:19:48 --> 00:19:50 25% of chargers are not functioning.
00:19:51 --> 00:19:56 Camille Terry is finding ways to reduce the opportunity for an electric
00:19:56 --> 00:19:59 vehicle charger to not be working.
00:19:59 --> 00:20:02 So she's providing operations and maintenance services to EVs.
00:20:02 --> 00:20:07 So this is a really important point because it touches on not only an
00:20:07 --> 00:20:10 east coast, west coast difference, but also a critical role of the
00:20:10 --> 00:20:12 environmental and racial injustice.
00:20:13 --> 00:20:13 Yeah.
00:20:13 --> 00:20:15 And so if you're a homeowner.
00:20:16 --> 00:20:19 And there's a sale on electric vehicles or a rebate.
00:20:19 --> 00:20:22 There used to be $7 federal rebate.
00:20:22 --> 00:20:27 When you buy an ev, that's great if you own a home and a garage where you
00:20:27 --> 00:20:29 can pull your EV in and charge it.
00:20:30 --> 00:20:35 But with the lack of public charging available in many cities, particularly on
00:20:35 --> 00:20:41 the east coast, the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of an EV for a
00:20:41 --> 00:20:43 low income person are simply not there.
00:20:43 --> 00:20:43 So.
00:20:43 --> 00:20:48 In California and just, I guess I should have said before, in many
00:20:48 --> 00:20:54 cases, with the cost parody between an electric vehicle and gas vehicles
00:20:54 --> 00:20:59 quickly approaching or even being eclipsed, the fact that an EV is.
00:20:59 --> 00:21:04 In many cases, one third, the cost to drive per mile is a gas powered vehicle.
00:21:04 --> 00:21:09 When you take in a cost of price of fuel and the much lower maintenance, how do you
00:21:09 --> 00:21:10 make that available to low income people?
00:21:10 --> 00:21:15 So one thing that we're seeing is charging stations being put in.
00:21:15 --> 00:21:21 In low income housing areas, and also making sure that the charging
00:21:21 --> 00:21:27 stations that are at places of work are not dominated by the affluent.
00:21:27 --> 00:21:31 So finding ways to say these are charging stations available for employees.
00:21:31 --> 00:21:35 A number of companies have gotten credit, right for putting in stations
00:21:35 --> 00:21:39 that the VPs and executives don't hog because they bought fancy, fancy,
00:21:39 --> 00:21:43 a hundred thousand dollars EVs, but making these available to people.
00:21:43 --> 00:21:46 Those programs need a huge boost up.
00:21:46 --> 00:21:48 And right now we're moving in the exact opposite direction.
00:21:48 --> 00:21:50 Though you did make a good point.
00:21:50 --> 00:21:55 I mean, we bought a Prius Prime and that costs $19.
00:21:55 --> 00:21:58 So it's an electric vehicle and it, you know, this gets to the point of
00:21:58 --> 00:22:00 electric vehicles and how people drive.
00:22:00 --> 00:22:02 People drive a lot in California.
00:22:02 --> 00:22:03 They drive really far distances.
00:22:03 --> 00:22:06 Depending on where you live on the east coast, you don't, right.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:08 So the Prius Prime will go 25 miles.
00:22:09 --> 00:22:11 On the electric and then switches over to gas.
00:22:12 --> 00:22:16 But because I'm just schlepping kids to soccer or to cost going to Costco or
00:22:16 --> 00:22:21 picking up kids from school, I'm only going 25 miles a day, and so on nine
00:22:21 --> 00:22:24 gallons of gas I can easily go 900 miles.
00:22:24 --> 00:22:28 So of course, my main trips are two places to go surfing and to eat sushi.
00:22:28 --> 00:22:30 But aside from that, that kind of feature.
00:22:31 --> 00:22:36 If we extend the west versus east, if we go keep going west, we get east.
00:22:36 --> 00:22:41 And so I was just in Hanoi and was shown Vietnamese and Chinese.
00:22:42 --> 00:22:48 Urban EVs that had price tags under $9.
00:22:48 --> 00:22:48 How cool.
00:22:48 --> 00:22:48 And
00:22:48 --> 00:22:52 these are vehicles that are four seaters, those little kind of fiat type vehicles.
00:22:52 --> 00:22:54 You see smart cars.
00:22:54 --> 00:22:58 But price tag under $9, 150 mile range.
00:22:59 --> 00:22:59 Amazing.
00:22:59 --> 00:23:03 And can be recharged fully in 20 minutes.
00:23:04 --> 00:23:04 What,
00:23:04 --> 00:23:07 and so there's a battery company that's not
00:23:07 --> 00:23:08 level one or level two or level three.
00:23:08 --> 00:23:09 What is it?
00:23:09 --> 00:23:09 It's
00:23:09 --> 00:23:13 technically level three, but it's a company, it's Chinese company, CATL.
00:23:13 --> 00:23:13 Right?
00:23:13 --> 00:23:16 That makes a battery that can be recharged.
00:23:17 --> 00:23:20 200 mile, even more than I said in very short amounts of time.
00:23:21 --> 00:23:25 Um, I saw one advertisement that said you can get 280 miles of
00:23:25 --> 00:23:28 additional range in 10 minutes.
00:23:28 --> 00:23:29 Wow.
00:23:29 --> 00:23:29 So
00:23:29 --> 00:23:33 these are huge numbers, but I want to focus on this low income
00:23:33 --> 00:23:35 issue of these urban vehicles.
00:23:35 --> 00:23:38 And so when you said moving things around, I know you're not gonna
00:23:38 --> 00:23:43 fill up the smart car with kids and groceries, but it is the case that.
00:23:43 --> 00:23:49 As we think more and more about electric vehicles and California and UK and Norway
00:23:49 --> 00:23:55 are thinking very hard about how to push this envelope out much faster and further.
00:23:56 --> 00:24:01 Tailoring vehicles like we tailor apps on our iPhone is one of the
00:24:01 --> 00:24:04 features of moving away from gas powered vehicles to electric vehicles.
00:24:04 --> 00:24:09 You can really tailor the mobility to the need, right?
00:24:09 --> 00:24:13 College students are zipping around on these electric scooters,
00:24:13 --> 00:24:14 these very small vehicles.
00:24:14 --> 00:24:19 These are all opportunities that didn't seem to be part of the landscape when we
00:24:19 --> 00:24:21 were in our gas powered world right now.
00:24:21 --> 00:24:22 These are a new way to go.
00:24:22 --> 00:24:27 Yeah, and pulling us back to the east versus west, I think it's important
00:24:27 --> 00:24:29 to think through the infrastructure and when infrastructure was built.
00:24:29 --> 00:24:34 So one of my dearest friends typically goes or goes very often to visit family.
00:24:34 --> 00:24:36 She lives in Boston and she goes down to Philadelphia.
00:24:36 --> 00:24:40 She has the exact same charger place that she goes to about halfway through.
00:24:40 --> 00:24:41 It takes her 30 minutes.
00:24:41 --> 00:24:45 To charge up her, the, her electric vehicle to get to the remaining
00:24:45 --> 00:24:48 way back to Philadelphia and you all at California, you, you just
00:24:48 --> 00:24:52 have much more infrastructure for something like an electric vehicle.
00:24:52 --> 00:24:56 Well, in fact, I think one of the cool things is that as you drive around in
00:24:56 --> 00:24:58 different vehicles, whether we're doing.
00:24:59 --> 00:25:05 Teslas or we're doing the VWs, or we're doing rivian or things, they actually
00:25:05 --> 00:25:09 tell you as you're driving, you're passing an EV charger, and by the way, this
00:25:09 --> 00:25:11 one is a lower price than the next one.
00:25:11 --> 00:25:12 Right?
00:25:12 --> 00:25:13 Or this one will charge
00:25:13 --> 00:25:14 faster, or something like that.
00:25:14 --> 00:25:14 Exactly.
00:25:14 --> 00:25:18 All that data can appear on your screen and can really inform things, and
00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 that is the vision of this California.
00:25:22 --> 00:25:27 Not hydrogen, but green highway where smart vehicles, smart roads make your
00:25:27 --> 00:25:33 choices easier as you move around and allow you to minimize cost and maximize
00:25:33 --> 00:25:35 how green the energy in your vehicle
00:25:35 --> 00:25:35 is.
00:25:35 --> 00:25:40 Yeah, going back to back to the East coast and something that's not smart,
00:25:40 --> 00:25:43 and that is very, very old, as I'd like to talk about some of our coal
00:25:43 --> 00:25:46 fire power plants and specifically the Brandon Shores power plant in
00:25:46 --> 00:25:50 Maryland, it was slated to be shut.
00:25:50 --> 00:25:57 Down, it's 1 megawatts and basically PJM, Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland, the
00:25:57 --> 00:26:02 independent service operator that manages the grid said that that just wasn't
00:26:02 --> 00:26:04 possible because we, it's way too needed.
00:26:05 --> 00:26:08 The Sierra Club and the Sierra Club Foundation proposed a battery
00:26:08 --> 00:26:11 storage solution to fill in for the retiring of the power plants.
00:26:12 --> 00:26:13 But basically, PJM said that.
00:26:14 --> 00:26:18 That doesn't address all the reliability problems with the plan shut down and
00:26:18 --> 00:26:19 probably wouldn't be built in time.
00:26:20 --> 00:26:22 That seems like highway robbery to me.
00:26:22 --> 00:26:28 We even have the state support with my state senator, uh, bill Ferguson, and, you
00:26:28 --> 00:26:34 know, shutting down and retiring Brandon Shores and Wagner units with batteries
00:26:34 --> 00:26:38 could be a very easy, reliable option.
00:26:38 --> 00:26:39 It is more expensive.
00:26:39 --> 00:26:42 And so I'm, I'm interested in what you would do as a Californian with that.
00:26:42 --> 00:26:42 So.
00:26:43 --> 00:26:48 Uh, this is definitely close to home because back in 2013 I was asked to
00:26:48 --> 00:26:53 craft a bill, um, assembly bill 25 13.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:58 That set a mandate for 2020 for the amount of storage that had
00:26:58 --> 00:27:00 to come from new storage sources.
00:27:00 --> 00:27:02 So this couldn't be existing things.
00:27:02 --> 00:27:05 California had some pumped hydro.
00:27:05 --> 00:27:07 We had some other storage on the grid where you pump water
00:27:07 --> 00:27:08 uphill and bring it down.
00:27:08 --> 00:27:09 This had to be new things.
00:27:09 --> 00:27:12 Lithium ion batteries, lithium phosphate batteries.
00:27:13 --> 00:27:16 Gravity storage where you move rocks uphill, all kinds of things.
00:27:16 --> 00:27:16 Mm-hmm.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:17 So
00:27:17 --> 00:27:21 we wrote this mandate and we were given pretty specific instructions.
00:27:21 --> 00:27:25 We said write a mandate that'll open the market, but won't be one that
00:27:25 --> 00:27:28 causes much inconvenience to utilities.
00:27:28 --> 00:27:29 So we had to kind of thread the needle.
00:27:29 --> 00:27:29 Right.
00:27:29 --> 00:27:34 Um, we set a target for 1200 megawatts.
00:27:34 --> 00:27:37 Note the unit megawatts not megawatt hours.
00:27:37 --> 00:27:37 Right.
00:27:37 --> 00:27:41 And what that means is that we were setting a storage target,
00:27:41 --> 00:27:45 not in terms of hours of storage, but in terms of the peak amount.
00:27:45 --> 00:27:49 We thought as a joke that it was because people didn't know the difference yet
00:27:49 --> 00:27:51 between megawatts and megawatt hours.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:51 And maybe
00:27:51 --> 00:27:53 we give the example for our listeners.
00:27:53 --> 00:27:54 You think of a bathtub.
00:27:54 --> 00:27:59 The bathtub, the amount of en of water you can put in the bathtub is the megawatts.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:02 The amount of water that can come into from the sink to the
00:28:02 --> 00:28:04 bathtub is the megawatt hours.
00:28:04 --> 00:28:04 Yeah.
00:28:04 --> 00:28:07 And so we set this target for 2020.
00:28:07 --> 00:28:09 People definitely said, this is kind of a crazy bill.
00:28:09 --> 00:28:10 It can't be done.
00:28:10 --> 00:28:16 California met it and just three years ago a new single facility
00:28:16 --> 00:28:17 was opened in California.
00:28:17 --> 00:28:22 The Moss Landing Energy Park where that one facility is larger than
00:28:22 --> 00:28:24 the whole mandate we set for 2020.
00:28:24 --> 00:28:25 That's the good side.
00:28:25 --> 00:28:27 The bad side is the two fires.
00:28:27 --> 00:28:29 At that plant have kept it offline.
00:28:29 --> 00:28:35 So the good and the bad in the kind of, uh, California innovation ecosystem.
00:28:35 --> 00:28:36 Right?
00:28:36 --> 00:28:37 Right.
00:28:37 --> 00:28:42 And that Moss landing, uh, fire, which happened in January of 25 actually is
00:28:42 --> 00:28:47 continues to cause problems because at Sunrock, just, it's just as an aside,
00:28:47 --> 00:28:51 we have been working towards getting permits for doing a solar plus storage
00:28:51 --> 00:28:53 installation in Monterey County.
00:28:53 --> 00:28:58 The concern is, is this storage plant gonna go on fire as well, right?
00:28:58 --> 00:29:03 And so we obviously have new safety plans and all of that, but Moss Landing has had
00:29:03 --> 00:29:05 a major severe impact on the industry.
00:29:05 --> 00:29:06 It has.
00:29:06 --> 00:29:10 And so you see that with innovation with kind of this leading edge as we like to
00:29:10 --> 00:29:14 think in California there are some, you know, you take two steps forward, you
00:29:14 --> 00:29:16 have to correct some issues along the way.
00:29:16 --> 00:29:19 So I hope at least in this episode, we've illustrated some of the
00:29:19 --> 00:29:21 differences on Eastern West Coast.
00:29:21 --> 00:29:23 We're gonna come back to this again and again.
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 Again, this is energy matters.
00:29:25 --> 00:29:30 You can go to our website Energy Matters World, or you can email
00:29:30 --> 00:29:33 us at info@energymatters.world.
00:29:34 --> 00:29:35 I'm Dan.
00:29:35 --> 00:29:35 And I'm
00:29:35 --> 00:29:35 Claire.
00:29:36 --> 00:29:36 Thank you for listening.