In this episode of Energy Matters With Claire & Dan, hosts Claire Broido Johnson and Dan Kammen unpack the legacy of the Inflation Reduction Act — the largest clean energy investment in U.S. history — and contrast it with the current administration's push for fossil fuel–friendly policies. They explore the trillion-dollar impacts on electric vehicles, solar, storage, and community energy justice, while also digging into the flaws, political compromises, and the global ripple effects of America's shifting energy priorities.
From Norway's near-total EV adoption to Texas emerging as a renewable leader, the conversation highlights both progress and peril: how the IRA spurred innovation and investment, and how today's "Big Beautiful Bill" and threats to the EPA's endangerment finding could derail that momentum.
If you care about where our energy dollars go — and what it means for the climate, the economy, and our daily lives — this is a conversation you won't want to miss!
NOTE This file was generated by Descript
00:00:03 --> 00:00:05 Claire Broido Johnson: The Inflation Reduction Act, the big, beautiful
00:00:05 --> 00:00:07 bill and what it means for you.
00:00:08 --> 00:00:09 This is Energy Matters,
00:00:16 --> 00:00:21 Dan Kammen: and you're here with Dan and Claire and we are your hosts and
00:00:21 --> 00:00:25 hopefully confidants when we talk about everything Energy matters.
00:00:25 --> 00:00:29 Claire Broido Johnson: So Dan, what was the Inflation Reduction Act and why was it
00:00:29 --> 00:00:32 so unique despite potentially its flaws?
00:00:32 --> 00:00:35 Dan Kammen: And I guess the lead in for everyone listening in and
00:00:35 --> 00:00:40 commenting is this is really about the worldviews that we had under the
00:00:40 --> 00:00:44 previous Biden administration that we have now under the Trump administration.
00:00:44 --> 00:00:46 So there's so many ways you could.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 Pulled this apart, but I would say the simplest starting point for people who
00:00:50 --> 00:00:55 don't remember back what the US was like, oh, say three years ago when it
00:00:55 --> 00:00:59 was a very different place, is that the Inflation reduction Act was a
00:00:59 --> 00:01:06 compromise Bill put together in quite the surprise to the energy community.
00:01:06 --> 00:01:11 Few people kind of expected what would happen when essentially.
00:01:12 --> 00:01:16 Senator Schumer from New York and Senator Manchin from West Virginia
00:01:16 --> 00:01:21 took a great deal of input and crafted something that was ultimately passed.
00:01:21 --> 00:01:28 And in the Inflation Reduction Act, there was $369 billion of direct
00:01:28 --> 00:01:30 federal money that was allocated.
00:01:32 --> 00:01:39 Largely to support electric vehicles, solar, wind, launching offshore wind.
00:01:39 --> 00:01:43 Uh, something where the US was looking to catch up to China and Europe.
00:01:43 --> 00:01:43 Uh.
00:01:44 --> 00:01:49 Investing in communities, and in particular, something that doesn't
00:01:49 --> 00:01:55 always get the attention of that three $69 billion of direct federal subsidies
00:01:55 --> 00:01:58 or direct federal spending, 60 billion.
00:01:58 --> 00:02:03 The single largest chunk was actually for energy access, energy justice,
00:02:03 --> 00:02:07 energy diversity, and we will come back later in the episode to how
00:02:07 --> 00:02:09 dramatically different things are now.
00:02:09 --> 00:02:12 Now, when I say three $69 billion, were.
00:02:12 --> 00:02:13 Allocated.
00:02:13 --> 00:02:15 These were largely carrots.
00:02:15 --> 00:02:21 There were almost no sticks because of the very odd politics of a very, very
00:02:22 --> 00:02:26 liberal senator and a very conservative senator putting together the details.
00:02:26 --> 00:02:31 And when you look at the numbers, the amount of impact
00:02:31 --> 00:02:33 on the economy is dramatic.
00:02:33 --> 00:02:36 So the ira, the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the largest
00:02:36 --> 00:02:38 spending bills in US History.
00:02:39 --> 00:02:44 Accelerating the clean energy transition and the estimates of its total economic
00:02:44 --> 00:02:50 value go from something like 600 billion to $5 trillion, depending
00:02:50 --> 00:02:52 how you look at the various impacts.
00:02:52 --> 00:02:56 So it is a big thing in itself, and we will talk about how it
00:02:56 --> 00:02:58 is dramatically different from.
00:02:59 --> 00:03:01 HR one, the big beautiful build later.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:05 But let's start and stay with the Inflation reduction Act for a little bit.
00:03:05 --> 00:03:07 So, Claire, you're in the field.
00:03:07 --> 00:03:08 Yep.
00:03:08 --> 00:03:12 You are trying to make money and making green money in the process.
00:03:12 --> 00:03:16 How did the Inflation Reduction Act affect you directly?
00:03:16 --> 00:03:16 Claire Broido Johnson: So.
00:03:18 --> 00:03:20 I mean, as a capitalist and as a business person, the thing that was
00:03:20 --> 00:03:25 fascinating about the Inflation reduction Act is that with $1.2 trillion in
00:03:25 --> 00:03:31 total of spending, the estimate was that another three to $4 trillion
00:03:31 --> 00:03:35 would be spent on climate reduction technologies by the capital markets.
00:03:36 --> 00:03:37 And what that meant was.
00:03:38 --> 00:03:42 We can actually subsidize electric vehicles and put electric
00:03:42 --> 00:03:43 vehicles all over the country.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:49 We can spend more on solar to reduce what, uh, the grid congestion issues and
00:03:49 --> 00:03:51 transmission problems that are going on.
00:03:51 --> 00:03:55 It was, it was a wonderful time to be in the market and a
00:03:55 --> 00:03:56 wonderful time to be hopeful.
00:03:56 --> 00:04:00 About reducing cli, the impacts of climate change in the United States.
00:04:00 --> 00:04:03 Dan Kammen: And I think there's a lot of things that feed into that.
00:04:03 --> 00:04:07 So already the numbers of direct federal spending versus monies that
00:04:07 --> 00:04:12 had to be spent by companies or by municipalities to partner in makes
00:04:12 --> 00:04:14 these numbers all over the place.
00:04:14 --> 00:04:15 But it's a really interesting.
00:04:15 --> 00:04:20 Picture, there are lots and lots of flaws in the inflation reduction Act.
00:04:21 --> 00:04:24 Um, some of the more minor ones, from my perspective, I would say
00:04:24 --> 00:04:27 hydrogen was subsidized too much.
00:04:27 --> 00:04:27 Yep.
00:04:27 --> 00:04:33 And there wasn't enough that was spent on the cleanup side or addressing
00:04:33 --> 00:04:38 the needs of fossil communities, be they coal mining communities
00:04:38 --> 00:04:41 in West Virginia or in Montana.
00:04:41 --> 00:04:43 Ironically, those were things that were in some.
00:04:44 --> 00:04:49 Obama legislation that didn't make it through, because largely to get this
00:04:49 --> 00:04:54 bill, the number of votes it needed, it really needed to only excel accentuate the
00:04:54 --> 00:04:56 positive, not to highlight the negative.
00:04:57 --> 00:05:02 That said, I. What's happened across the world has been dramatic.
00:05:02 --> 00:05:10 So we now see places like Norway where last month, 34, not 3,
00:05:10 --> 00:05:15 not 34, but 34 non-electric vehicles were sold nationwide.
00:05:16 --> 00:05:22 What China is now, well over 50% of all new vehicles in the world's
00:05:22 --> 00:05:25 largest vehicle market, all electric.
00:05:26 --> 00:05:32 While California was, uh, sort of the leader in the number of electric vehicles
00:05:32 --> 00:05:37 in the Western world, now the United Kingdom England has surpassed that.
00:05:37 --> 00:05:43 So the Inflation Reduction Act with all of its downsides put the US in such an
00:05:43 --> 00:05:48 interesting leadership position that we actually had other green energy leaders
00:05:49 --> 00:05:51 like President Macron of France saying.
00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 This is a horrible action.
00:05:54 --> 00:05:59 It's stealing our best clean energy leaders from Europe to go to the
00:05:59 --> 00:06:03 us and my response to that was, isn't that actually what you want?
00:06:03 --> 00:06:07 You wanna race to see who's gonna make this go more?
00:06:08 --> 00:06:13 But it was such a change in how the US approached things that it really caught
00:06:13 --> 00:06:17 a lot of our allies in Europe, allies in Japan and elsewhere, off guard.
00:06:18 --> 00:06:19 Claire Broido Johnson: A breath of fresh air.
00:06:19 --> 00:06:19 Right?
00:06:19 --> 00:06:22 Sort of like the race of the moon really is how can we solve our climate
00:06:22 --> 00:06:24 change problems collectively, right?
00:06:24 --> 00:06:28 Not only, not only in in Europe, and not only in China,
00:06:28 --> 00:06:29 but also in the United States.
00:06:30 --> 00:06:32 Dan Kammen: And I think it did some things that.
00:06:32 --> 00:06:35 You know, built on what, what you just said, Claire, in
00:06:35 --> 00:06:36 ways that are interesting.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:41 So we had people like your, your former, uh, founding member and
00:06:41 --> 00:06:45 then the head of the loan guarantee program in the Biden administration.
00:06:45 --> 00:06:50 Jigger saw out there every day saying how great it would be to be replacing
00:06:50 --> 00:06:54 air conditioners, which are very energy intensive and polluting with heat pumps.
00:06:55 --> 00:06:55 Much more efficient technology.
00:06:57 --> 00:07:02 The debate around how are we investing in nuclear power, not just how we make
00:07:02 --> 00:07:07 solar available to rich homeowners, but how we make solar available to renters.
00:07:07 --> 00:07:13 All of these things had a place in the inflation reduction Act and.
00:07:14 --> 00:07:16 As we'll talk about in a bit.
00:07:16 --> 00:07:21 Some of them are places where the current administration is not just trying to deny
00:07:21 --> 00:07:26 them, but actively tearing out preexisting electric chargers for vehicles.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:30 So it has it been a night and day difference between what we saw
00:07:30 --> 00:07:32 last administration to this one?
00:07:32 --> 00:07:32 Claire Broido Johnson: Yeah.
00:07:32 --> 00:07:33 And this might be a place where we might.
00:07:34 --> 00:07:37 Argue a little bit, but the J 40, maybe you can tell us a little about the J 40.
00:07:38 --> 00:07:42 I mean, what, what I saw as a person in the private sector, but who has
00:07:42 --> 00:07:46 also worked in the, in the federal government is that there were all sorts
00:07:46 --> 00:07:49 of organizations that were trying to get this inflation reduction act money.
00:07:49 --> 00:07:53 So many different organizations that were hyperlocal, that were
00:07:53 --> 00:07:55 trying to fix a hyper-local problem.
00:07:55 --> 00:07:59 But so much of that money was going to the back office, to the administration
00:07:59 --> 00:08:03 of those programs, and not as much of it as could have gone actually went.
00:08:03 --> 00:08:08 To providing the solar for renters or the new HVAC systems
00:08:08 --> 00:08:11 for low income communities.
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 Dan Kammen: So this I think is something we'll maybe even come back to in another
00:08:14 --> 00:08:20 episode because when Claire says J 40, and we'll always try to explain our acronyms.
00:08:20 --> 00:08:22 That's the Justice 40 effort.
00:08:23 --> 00:08:28 And what Justice 40 is, from my perspective as a Californian, was a
00:08:28 --> 00:08:33 Californian policy that didn't have a name that got named at the federal level.
00:08:33 --> 00:08:39 So in California we've had a whole series of energy and climate laws that have
00:08:39 --> 00:08:44 passed, some of which seemed impossible, some not so difficult, and all are part of
00:08:44 --> 00:08:45 the landscape and we'll come back to that.
00:08:46 --> 00:08:51 But what California set up was a. Cap and trade system, meaning a
00:08:51 --> 00:08:55 polluter pays system for greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
00:08:55 --> 00:09:03 And the way that was written was that 35% as a floor, not a ceiling
00:09:03 --> 00:09:06 of the revenues from that effort.
00:09:07 --> 00:09:13 Would be then directed to be spent on low income communities, communities
00:09:13 --> 00:09:17 of color, fence line communities around polluting facilities.
00:09:17 --> 00:09:22 And so when then vice president and candidate for President Biden came to
00:09:22 --> 00:09:26 California, talked to the governor, talked to the California Energy Commission,
00:09:26 --> 00:09:31 he and his team went back and said, well, I kinda like this Justice 35.
00:09:32 --> 00:09:34 They didn't come up with a good name in California.
00:09:34 --> 00:09:38 I'm gonna call it Justice 40, and it's one of the executive orders,
00:09:38 --> 00:09:43 the the 20 or one that he signed on his first full day in office.
00:09:43 --> 00:09:48 It established an office of workforce engagement in the Department of Energy.
00:09:48 --> 00:09:51 It established the programs that you mentioned that.
00:09:51 --> 00:09:54 We're supposed to give money back to communities and some of which
00:09:54 --> 00:09:56 found it bureaucratically difficult.
00:09:56 --> 00:10:01 But it's really because if you go from Trump's administration, one
00:10:01 --> 00:10:03 where none of this was on the table.
00:10:03 --> 00:10:03 Yep.
00:10:03 --> 00:10:08 To the Biden administration where all of this got built back up at the
00:10:08 --> 00:10:12 federal level, it's no surprise that you had to not just spend money, you
00:10:12 --> 00:10:14 had to build offices to spend money.
00:10:14 --> 00:10:14 Right.
00:10:14 --> 00:10:15 And I'm gonna come back and.
00:10:16 --> 00:10:18 Ask you a question from the Obama administration.
00:10:18 --> 00:10:19 Sure.
00:10:19 --> 00:10:23 You were part of the team in the loan guarantee office, and you needed
00:10:23 --> 00:10:28 to build from scratch some of the structures to do what you wanted to do.
00:10:28 --> 00:10:32 So there's a precedent for the need to spend, not just in
00:10:32 --> 00:10:36 getting money out the door, but to rebuild the capacity to spend.
00:10:36 --> 00:10:38 Claire Broido Johnson: So when I was at the Department of Energy, I was
00:10:38 --> 00:10:42 in the senior executive service and ran a bunch of government funding.
00:10:42 --> 00:10:46 I wasn't a part of the loan guarantee program, but we were responsible
00:10:46 --> 00:10:50 for deploying about 11 billion of the stimulus package to go towards
00:10:50 --> 00:10:53 state energy programs, block grant programs, weatherization programs
00:10:53 --> 00:10:57 to serve low income households, and we had to distribute all of that.
00:10:58 --> 00:11:00 Basically 10 months without any waste, fraud, or abuse.
00:11:00 --> 00:11:04 So there definitely is a history of putting a lot of these, you know,
00:11:04 --> 00:11:08 putting a whole bunch of federal money together at a very quick pace.
00:11:08 --> 00:11:12 I think the Inflation reduction Act though, had had so much money and, and.
00:11:13 --> 00:11:16 So many people had to create new organizations.
00:11:16 --> 00:11:20 And I see this in a, on a local level and a larger level, you know, you're,
00:11:20 --> 00:11:23 a lot of that money goes towards executive directors, but then there's
00:11:23 --> 00:11:30 25 executive directors in some specific area and not enough people spending
00:11:30 --> 00:11:32 the money on actually doing the work.
00:11:32 --> 00:11:36 Dan Kammen: And it's funny you say that because as someone on the academic side.
00:11:37 --> 00:11:42 And who spends a lot of time working with governments in Europe, the German
00:11:42 --> 00:11:45 government that's very famous for having essentially launched what was at the
00:11:45 --> 00:11:51 time, the most successful subsidy program for solar power called Feed in Tariffs.
00:11:52 --> 00:11:56 And working with some African governments that were engaged in efforts around
00:11:56 --> 00:12:02 so-called the net zero world or reorienting their economies to be zero
00:12:02 --> 00:12:06 carbon, even if they're major fossil fuel states today, like Nigeria.
00:12:06 --> 00:12:12 And so when I look at this from the academic perspective, I say,
00:12:12 --> 00:12:15 oh, the inflation reduction Act was actually a. Also trying to
00:12:15 --> 00:12:18 catch up on the infrastructure.
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 We need to be a clean energy economy.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:20 Right?
00:12:20 --> 00:12:25 And trying to build the capacity that exists in countries overseas.
00:12:26 --> 00:12:27 China for sure.
00:12:27 --> 00:12:28 Germany for sure.
00:12:28 --> 00:12:29 England for sure.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:37 And one of the challenges is that that might look like waste, but if
00:12:37 --> 00:12:40 you don't have offices and people skilled in doing these things,
00:12:40 --> 00:12:41 Claire Broido Johnson: right,
00:12:41 --> 00:12:41 Dan Kammen: you actually.
00:12:42 --> 00:12:46 Maybe you can get money out the door once, but you need to do program evaluation.
00:12:46 --> 00:12:47 Things that sound boring.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:53 But ultimately, every program, good or bad gets put under the microscope of
00:12:53 --> 00:12:54 is the money being spent well or not?
00:12:55 --> 00:12:59 So I actually felt like even though the Inflation reduction Act came up
00:12:59 --> 00:13:01 as a big surprise in a lot of ways,
00:13:01 --> 00:13:01 Claire Broido Johnson: yep.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:06 Dan Kammen: It actually was a thoughtful combination.
00:13:07 --> 00:13:11 Of the things you need to do today, what we need, which is to start spending on
00:13:11 --> 00:13:19 clean energy and down the line to have a capacity to think creatively about.
00:13:20 --> 00:13:22 Mid-course corrections we're gonna need later on.
00:13:23 --> 00:13:23 Sure,
00:13:23 --> 00:13:24 Claire Broido Johnson: yep.
00:13:24 --> 00:13:25 I agree that with that.
00:13:25 --> 00:13:26 Absolutely.
00:13:26 --> 00:13:30 But unfortunately, a lot of that was stymied and now we have the
00:13:30 --> 00:13:32 one big, beautiful bill to discuss
00:13:33 --> 00:13:34 Dan Kammen: and indeed we do.
00:13:34 --> 00:13:39 And so I, you know, we say this podcast is gonna be about the facts and we
00:13:39 --> 00:13:40 will always lead with the facts.
00:13:40 --> 00:13:42 But as someone who.
00:13:42 --> 00:13:47 Resigned my federal commission when Mr. Trump was elected the first
00:13:47 --> 00:13:53 time and felt we were making some painful missteps in the economy.
00:13:53 --> 00:13:57 I'm gonna try to do my best to be a little bit impartial, but these
00:13:57 --> 00:14:01 are topics where these are fighting words for me, so it's gonna be.
00:14:01 --> 00:14:03 Claire Broido Johnson: Oh, believe me, I've spent my career in the,
00:14:03 --> 00:14:04 you know, in the solar industry.
00:14:04 --> 00:14:07 And, and I think, I think there's a lot to say about the big beautiful bill, right?
00:14:07 --> 00:14:11 But I think now that there are clear timelines for the investment
00:14:11 --> 00:14:15 tax credits and their, their, um, decrease in phase out.
00:14:15 --> 00:14:19 So, which is 2027, unless you begin, begin construction or
00:14:19 --> 00:14:22 safe harbor before July of 2026.
00:14:22 --> 00:14:24 So now you know there's less ambiguity.
00:14:25 --> 00:14:29 And the message is clear, like, now's the time to secure your
00:14:29 --> 00:14:31 rooftops queue for interconnection.
00:14:31 --> 00:14:32 Move quickly.
00:14:32 --> 00:14:32 Right?
00:14:32 --> 00:14:35 If you're interested in solar at all.
00:14:35 --> 00:14:39 Um, and, and frankly, you know, we aren't gonna need the ITC, the
00:14:39 --> 00:14:41 investment tax credit forever.
00:14:41 --> 00:14:43 We just needed a very clear phase out.
00:14:43 --> 00:14:45 Dan Kammen: And this is something I wanna, I gotta jump in
00:14:45 --> 00:14:47 because here's a place where.
00:14:48 --> 00:14:52 The lessons learned from California I thought were really interesting
00:14:52 --> 00:14:57 because California was the first state to have large scale subsidies
00:14:57 --> 00:14:59 in place for clean energy.
00:14:59 --> 00:15:03 Started with solar, then it went to electric vehicles, and.
00:15:04 --> 00:15:09 As we'll talk about a number of times the progress in making solar cheaper
00:15:09 --> 00:15:11 in making electric vehicles cheaper.
00:15:11 --> 00:15:14 Something we'll talk about later called the Learning Curve or Moore's
00:15:14 --> 00:15:16 Law for people in the computer world.
00:15:17 --> 00:15:21 Um, these are things where California was able to get to a point where
00:15:21 --> 00:15:24 it removed the subsidy for solar.
00:15:25 --> 00:15:25 Right.
00:15:25 --> 00:15:29 There is still a subsidy available if you do storage and solar, right?
00:15:29 --> 00:15:33 But the subsidy was really to get storage cheap the way solar
00:15:33 --> 00:15:35 had already become cheap, right?
00:15:35 --> 00:15:40 So these are interesting aspects of, for all of the ways in which academics like
00:15:40 --> 00:15:43 myself, love to criticize federal action.
00:15:43 --> 00:15:44 What happened?
00:15:45 --> 00:15:49 With the Inflation Reduction Act actually set us up in a way that as
00:15:49 --> 00:15:53 you're highlighting the end of these subsidies, European governments, they'll
00:15:53 --> 00:15:57 set up a policy and you hope it's gonna last For years and years here, we did
00:15:57 --> 00:16:00 all this heavy lifting under Biden and.
00:16:00 --> 00:16:04 Basically three, three years later, it's all being zeroed out.
00:16:04 --> 00:16:06 It's all being zeroed out.
00:16:06 --> 00:16:06 Claire Broido Johnson: Yep.
00:16:06 --> 00:16:07 Yep.
00:16:07 --> 00:16:09 I mean, I'm all for incentivizing batteries.
00:16:09 --> 00:16:14 So what you're referring to is the net energy metering rule, or NM 3.0
00:16:14 --> 00:16:17 in California, which I'm a big fan of.
00:16:17 --> 00:16:24 Um, and should be, you know, probably a, a good example of how we should be
00:16:24 --> 00:16:25 running a lot of the rest of the grid.
00:16:26 --> 00:16:28 But, you know, essentially, you know, the wheels are off.
00:16:29 --> 00:16:36 The, uh, 25 D, which is the investment tax credit for residential
00:16:36 --> 00:16:38 is gone as of the end of 2025.
00:16:39 --> 00:16:42 Commercial industrial is gonna be okay in the sense that if we can
00:16:42 --> 00:16:47 get stuff placed in service, um, by 2027 or begin construction by
00:16:47 --> 00:16:50 July of 2026, we're gonna be okay.
00:16:50 --> 00:16:52 Dan Kammen: Well, when you say, okay, again, I gotta cut
00:16:52 --> 00:16:55 in because my version of Okay.
00:16:55 --> 00:16:55 On the.
00:16:56 --> 00:17:00 Climate activist side in your version of the business world may be different
00:17:00 --> 00:17:06 because what I see is that if you are already a company or a municipality
00:17:06 --> 00:17:10 that had committed to going green, you were gonna do solar on public
00:17:10 --> 00:17:13 land, you were gonna do a public private partnership, then you're
00:17:13 --> 00:17:14 kind of already in the converted.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:15 Claire Broido Johnson: Correct.
00:17:15 --> 00:17:19 Dan Kammen: And so those people are gonna be rushing to get their projects done
00:17:19 --> 00:17:21 in the next year and a half, two years.
00:17:21 --> 00:17:21 Claire Broido Johnson: That's right.
00:17:21 --> 00:17:23 Dan Kammen: But the.
00:17:23 --> 00:17:30 The insidious or the deeper message out there is that if you weren't sure about
00:17:30 --> 00:17:34 going green, despite the good economics that we'll talk about later, what this
00:17:34 --> 00:17:41 said is don't do anything, hold off, and don't become part of the wave that.
00:17:42 --> 00:17:43 We're seeing around the world.
00:17:43 --> 00:17:48 Remember, 90% of all new energy projects worldwide, not just this
00:17:48 --> 00:17:51 year, but last year and the year before have all been clean energy.
00:17:52 --> 00:17:54 Claire Broido Johnson: 90% in the United States as well.
00:17:54 --> 00:17:54 Dan Kammen: That's right.
00:17:54 --> 00:17:54 Yeah.
00:17:54 --> 00:17:59 But now what I think we're gonna see is anyone who was on the fence.
00:17:59 --> 00:18:03 About becoming a player in this is now gonna say, oh,
00:18:03 --> 00:18:05 I'll just kind of hang back.
00:18:05 --> 00:18:09 And so what I worry about is not just the loss of projects that were in the
00:18:09 --> 00:18:15 so-called pipeline uhhuh, but I worry about the overall change of philosophy
00:18:15 --> 00:18:20 where, you know, we've, we've now seen deals where Mr. Trump and his
00:18:20 --> 00:18:24 team have gone to Europe and have extracted deals where there's gonna
00:18:24 --> 00:18:27 be a huge purchase of US exported gas.
00:18:28 --> 00:18:33 Investments that are now gonna be required in Japan to put not the 200
00:18:33 --> 00:18:38 billion they've been investing in the US economy, but 600 billion and
00:18:38 --> 00:18:40 a lot of that into fossil projects.
00:18:40 --> 00:18:45 So I see not just financial damage, but mindset damage
00:18:45 --> 00:18:46 coming up here, mindset damage.
00:18:46 --> 00:18:46 Claire Broido Johnson: Absolutely.
00:18:47 --> 00:18:47 Right.
00:18:47 --> 00:18:50 So at Sunrock what we do is we finance power purchase agreements
00:18:50 --> 00:18:52 for commercial industrial customers.
00:18:52 --> 00:18:55 And a lot of the off takers that we're considering it are saying, uh,
00:18:55 --> 00:18:59 I don't really understand what NPR is telling me right now, or Fox News.
00:18:59 --> 00:19:01 I'm just gonna hold back and wait and see.
00:19:01 --> 00:19:01 Right.
00:19:02 --> 00:19:07 Our partners, our EPC partners, our construction folks are saying,
00:19:07 --> 00:19:10 well, gosh, I have to get everything installed as quickly as I possibly
00:19:10 --> 00:19:13 can, and I'm gonna have to switch from residential to commercial, so
00:19:13 --> 00:19:14 I'm gonna have to figure that out.
00:19:14 --> 00:19:18 What I mean by being okay is at least we know what the rules are
00:19:18 --> 00:19:21 now, and the solar industry will accommodate towards them, so.
00:19:22 --> 00:19:27 2019 versus today, solar today without the federal tax credit
00:19:27 --> 00:19:33 is better than solar was in 20, somewhere between 2016 and 2019.
00:19:33 --> 00:19:34 With the solar tax credit.
00:19:35 --> 00:19:36 We don't need the tax credits anymore.
00:19:37 --> 00:19:38 They're gonna go down over time.
00:19:39 --> 00:19:42 Um, but certainly continuing with the federal tax credit would've
00:19:42 --> 00:19:46 been delightful because it would've subsidized solar longer and made
00:19:46 --> 00:19:47 everybody much more efficient.
00:19:47 --> 00:19:48 Dan Kammen: But see, I'm not even sure.
00:19:49 --> 00:19:54 We need to think of it that way, and I, I, I, I agree with you, but with the
00:19:54 --> 00:20:00 cost of solar coming down, what we're finding is that energy is a system, and
00:20:00 --> 00:20:01 we have this thing called nighttime.
00:20:02 --> 00:20:04 So during nighttime, there's no solar production.
00:20:04 --> 00:20:09 So what you really want to be doing as you evolve and grow out of your
00:20:09 --> 00:20:13 infancy into your teenage years is you don't just build solar and wind.
00:20:13 --> 00:20:14 You build those solar storage.
00:20:14 --> 00:20:15 Claire Broido Johnson: Storage.
00:20:15 --> 00:20:15 Exactly right.
00:20:15 --> 00:20:16 One of the, it's that world.
00:20:16 --> 00:20:20 One of the biggest winners of the big beautiful built is energy storage, which
00:20:20 --> 00:20:22 will benefit from the full ITC until 2032.
00:20:23 --> 00:20:25 Dan Kammen: And what's funny is that behind the scenes, a number
00:20:25 --> 00:20:27 of Republican members of the house.
00:20:28 --> 00:20:33 That can, that voted against the inflation reduction Act actually
00:20:33 --> 00:20:37 in their reelection this past year, campaigned on its benefits.
00:20:37 --> 00:20:42 And some of them really fought behind the scenes to get storage to be
00:20:42 --> 00:20:46 maintained because they see that as a business that can be in their district.
00:20:46 --> 00:20:49 So there are some interest where you're gonna manufacturer
00:20:49 --> 00:20:51 Claire Broido Johnson: storage in their district.
00:20:51 --> 00:20:51 Absolutely right.
00:20:51 --> 00:20:54 Though it's been fascinating because a lot of these Republican senators.
00:20:55 --> 00:20:59 Have had battery storage or solar manufacturing facilities put in
00:20:59 --> 00:21:03 their districts, but they voted for the one big beautiful bill.
00:21:03 --> 00:21:03 Yep.
00:21:03 --> 00:21:04 It's very interesting.
00:21:05 --> 00:21:09 One statistic I love, um, is that adding capacity from solar plus
00:21:09 --> 00:21:13 storage in Texas this year has reduced the chance of rolling blackouts
00:21:13 --> 00:21:20 from 12% to 0.3% according to Ercot, which is the state's grid operator.
00:21:20 --> 00:21:21 That's a huge percentage.
00:21:21 --> 00:21:24 Nobody ever really thinks about Texas as being a huge renewable
00:21:24 --> 00:21:28 resource, but 30% of Texas's energy comes from renewable resources.
00:21:28 --> 00:21:29 Texas
00:21:29 --> 00:21:31 Dan Kammen: now is number one, and you can say whether it's 'cause they
00:21:31 --> 00:21:35 have a climate that's amenable to it or they have a lot of land or because
00:21:36 --> 00:21:40 despite protests about what happened when Texas had its freeze out in the
00:21:40 --> 00:21:45 winter, they actually learned that the wind turbines, the solar stayed
00:21:45 --> 00:21:47 on, whereas the gas plants went off.
00:21:47 --> 00:21:50 And so Texas has absolutely become a massive.
00:21:50 --> 00:21:54 Clean energy leader, and it's interesting to see, you know,
00:21:54 --> 00:21:56 as you pull away the rhetoric.
00:21:56 --> 00:22:01 What I keep finding again and again is that now that clean energy
00:22:01 --> 00:22:03 is cheaper than fossil energy.
00:22:04 --> 00:22:04 Yep.
00:22:04 --> 00:22:06 And it's cheaper on many metrics.
00:22:06 --> 00:22:12 And my favorite kind of, you know, short version of that is in much of
00:22:12 --> 00:22:17 the world, it's now cheaper to build a new clean energy power plant than to
00:22:17 --> 00:22:20 just operate an existing fossil plant.
00:22:20 --> 00:22:20 Claire Broido Johnson: Isn't that great?
00:22:20 --> 00:22:22 Dan Kammen: That's an amazing number.
00:22:22 --> 00:22:24 Claire Broido Johnson: There's great statistics, which we'll put on our
00:22:24 --> 00:22:30 website, energy Matters world, um, about from the levelized cost of energy from
00:22:30 --> 00:22:32 Lazar, and that's sort of the, the.
00:22:32 --> 00:22:33 Industry standard.
00:22:33 --> 00:22:36 But you can see hands down, solar makes way more sense than natural
00:22:36 --> 00:22:40 gas and nuclear than really anything, both from a cost perspective
00:22:40 --> 00:22:42 and from a timing perspective.
00:22:42 --> 00:22:45 So one of the things that we're seeing in the industry is that US power
00:22:45 --> 00:22:47 consumption's, D rising dramatically.
00:22:47 --> 00:22:51 Driven by ai, driven by data centers and electric vehicles, federal
00:22:51 --> 00:22:55 energy regulatory commission, FERC forecast, five-year peak demand growth
00:22:55 --> 00:22:59 has increased by a factor of five compared to 2022, which is crazy.
00:22:59 --> 00:23:01 That's because of data center.
00:23:01 --> 00:23:04 Power consumption is going up year on year by 10%.
00:23:04 --> 00:23:07 Forecasted growth in peak demand over the next year.
00:23:07 --> 00:23:10 You know, next five years is going up astronomically.
00:23:10 --> 00:23:14 And we have an aging grid infrastructure, which has created massive bottlenecks
00:23:14 --> 00:23:17 in the, uh, utility scale generation.
00:23:17 --> 00:23:21 So if you're a solar developer or a wind developer, really any developer,
00:23:21 --> 00:23:25 the years spent in an interconnection queue could be five years or more
00:23:25 --> 00:23:26 depending on the utility that you're in.
00:23:27 --> 00:23:28 And so where are we gonna get all this energy?
00:23:28 --> 00:23:32 From, I mean, it makes perfect sense to do distributed energy solar plus
00:23:32 --> 00:23:37 storage, particularly because you generate your energy where you use it.
00:23:37 --> 00:23:39 But where are we gonna get this energy from?
00:23:39 --> 00:23:40 It's not gonna be from solar plus storage.
00:23:40 --> 00:23:45 Dan Kammen: So it's interesting because as a researcher on clean
00:23:45 --> 00:23:49 energy, and I would say as a proponent of clean energy, to my view.
00:23:49 --> 00:23:51 The added demand.
00:23:51 --> 00:23:53 This is a exciting bring it on moment.
00:23:53 --> 00:23:54 Um, yeah.
00:23:54 --> 00:23:58 It is true that if you have an electric vehicle at your home, when your
00:23:58 --> 00:24:04 electric vehicle is at maximum speed, like you floored it, and you floor
00:24:04 --> 00:24:09 your house, meaning you turn on every light, everything, every washer, dryer,
00:24:09 --> 00:24:14 your car is using three to four times as muscle energy as your house is.
00:24:14 --> 00:24:20 So that's a lot of energy, but clean energy is now so inexpensive, and
00:24:21 --> 00:24:24 if the rules, many of those set up in the inflation reduction act
00:24:24 --> 00:24:26 were to have been followed out.
00:24:26 --> 00:24:30 Installing clean energy has gotten easier and easier.
00:24:30 --> 00:24:30 And so
00:24:31 --> 00:24:32 Claire Broido Johnson: well and less expensive.
00:24:32 --> 00:24:33 Dan Kammen: Well, that's what I mean by easier.
00:24:33 --> 00:24:33 And easier.
00:24:33 --> 00:24:34 Yeah.
00:24:34 --> 00:24:34 There's a lot of ways to do it.
00:24:34 --> 00:24:39 And so the, the version of this story, the kind of the debate, when Angela
00:24:39 --> 00:24:44 Merkel was the chancellor of Germany, she liked to say that in Germany, if
00:24:44 --> 00:24:48 you follow our regulations, which is of course on the web to do what's called
00:24:48 --> 00:24:53 the feed in tariff, meaning you qualify and you install solar generally, but
00:24:53 --> 00:24:57 it was solar or wind on your home or your business or your industry.
00:24:57 --> 00:25:00 The form you fill out is literally like one piece of paper.
00:25:01 --> 00:25:06 Whereas when the US got started in the field and you know, at Sun Edison, it was
00:25:06 --> 00:25:08 far more than one piece of paper, right?
00:25:08 --> 00:25:13 And so streamlining all of these non hardware costs, we call 'em
00:25:13 --> 00:25:17 the balance of systems costs, was one of the things that has brought.
00:25:17 --> 00:25:22 The price is down for clean energy and so much so that we are now seeing
00:25:22 --> 00:25:28 in the parts of the US West, not just rooftop solar, but trailer parks and
00:25:28 --> 00:25:32 places that are parking garages are putting solar on top, and they're
00:25:32 --> 00:25:38 finding that the business case for solar, if the market is thoughtfully
00:25:38 --> 00:25:40 set up, meant it was easier and easier.
00:25:40 --> 00:25:41 And so California.
00:25:42 --> 00:25:48 Has now exported clean energy to its neighboring states for 110 days in a row.
00:25:48 --> 00:25:52 And California is the fourth largest economy on the planet.
00:25:52 --> 00:25:55 And so it's not like some small case.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:58 I don't wanna say anything derogatory about Costa Rica, which I love.
00:25:58 --> 00:26:02 They do clean energy all the time from hydro, but they're small, right?
00:26:02 --> 00:26:06 California's a big dog and they can now be exporting clean
00:26:06 --> 00:26:08 energy when the rules permit.
00:26:08 --> 00:26:10 Claire Broido Johnson: But so what you're saying though, Dan, is that.
00:26:10 --> 00:26:16 Despite the fact that the one big beautiful bill is trying to improve
00:26:16 --> 00:26:21 the economics for fossil fuels and make it worse for clean energy,
00:26:21 --> 00:26:22 clean energy is still gonna prevail.
00:26:23 --> 00:26:24 Dan Kammen: Well, I hope it is.
00:26:24 --> 00:26:28 Um, we'll talk about in the next couple episodes the real barriers.
00:26:28 --> 00:26:31 And I guess the last thing that needs to be on the table, 'cause
00:26:31 --> 00:26:35 we're gonna come back to these bills later in the series, is that.
00:26:36 --> 00:26:42 Well, the big beautiful bill, which I just call HR one house bill number one,
00:26:42 --> 00:26:47 because I can't stand that term, is that something else is happening at the same
00:26:47 --> 00:26:54 time, and it's the interaction of this HR one and this new thing, and that's called
00:26:54 --> 00:26:59 the effort by the current administration's leader of the Environmental
00:26:59 --> 00:27:04 Protection Agency to kill a 2009.
00:27:05 --> 00:27:10 Um, finding called the endangerment finding and almost all of climate
00:27:10 --> 00:27:14 legislation in the United States is based around this endangerment finding, and
00:27:14 --> 00:27:20 that says that herding the climate is bad for people, which sounds pretty simple.
00:27:20 --> 00:27:22 Herding the climate is bad for crops, it's.
00:27:22 --> 00:27:23 Bad for biodiversity.
00:27:23 --> 00:27:27 It's bad for poor people, it's bad for women, it's bad for the economy.
00:27:28 --> 00:27:33 Lee Zelin, the current head of the US EPA, is now leading the effort
00:27:33 --> 00:27:35 to repeal that endangerment finding.
00:27:35 --> 00:27:39 And if you get the negative aspects of HR one.
00:27:40 --> 00:27:45 And you get a finding that we don't care about the climate, which in my language
00:27:45 --> 00:27:48 is we don't care about our own children,
00:27:49 --> 00:27:49 Claire Broido Johnson: obviously.
00:27:49 --> 00:27:56 Dan Kammen: Then you have a package of a bill and a policy change at
00:27:56 --> 00:27:59 the Environmental Protection Agency.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:03 That together really will scare us, and we'll come back to this, but
00:28:03 --> 00:28:09 it's these two things together that make me even more worried about the.
00:28:10 --> 00:28:13 Anti-environmental and really anti economic direction that
00:28:13 --> 00:28:14 we seem to be going very
00:28:14 --> 00:28:15 Claire Broido Johnson: anti economic.
00:28:15 --> 00:28:19 Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that's scary to me, and as I
00:28:19 --> 00:28:23 think about my kids and hopefully grandkids at some point in time, is,
00:28:23 --> 00:28:25 you know, we don't have solutions.
00:28:25 --> 00:28:29 And so if we're gonna try to, um, focus on.
00:28:30 --> 00:28:36 You know, fossil fuels great, but clean energy and particularly solar plus
00:28:36 --> 00:28:38 storage is gonna have to be the solution.
00:28:38 --> 00:28:43 Um, and if we continue to make it harder to do that with our interconnection
00:28:43 --> 00:28:46 queues, with our permits, with, you know, all of the things that we're
00:28:46 --> 00:28:49 trying to do to make it harder, what's gonna end up happening is there's just
00:28:49 --> 00:28:51 gonna be more blackouts and brownouts.
00:28:51 --> 00:28:52 That's what's gonna happen.
00:28:52 --> 00:28:57 We already have seen in the solar industry, 250 jobs are gonna be
00:28:57 --> 00:28:59 lost just in the residential space.
00:28:59 --> 00:29:02 And utility rates are gonna go up by 20 plus percent all across the country.
00:29:03 --> 00:29:06 That is an, that is an absolute fact, right?
00:29:06 --> 00:29:09 And so we're gonna see with the big, beautiful bill, they're gonna do their
00:29:09 --> 00:29:11 darnedest to try to support fossil fuels.
00:29:11 --> 00:29:14 But the fact of the matter is there will be more brownouts and blackouts.
00:29:14 --> 00:29:18 And that is going to just by default cause people to buy batteries.
00:29:18 --> 00:29:18 Right.
00:29:18 --> 00:29:22 Dan Kammen: And we have put some readings on the website so that you can
00:29:22 --> 00:29:26 go to, to track some of these issues.
00:29:26 --> 00:29:31 If you go to Energy Matters world, one of the things that I think Claire
00:29:31 --> 00:29:33 and I might show some differences in opinion later on, but we'll come
00:29:33 --> 00:29:39 back to, are some of the subsidies that exist for investing in fossil
00:29:39 --> 00:29:41 fuels in the US and other countries.
00:29:41 --> 00:29:42 And the degree to which.
00:29:44 --> 00:29:49 No matter what your politics is with the current state of energy generation,
00:29:49 --> 00:29:54 the flexibility, the speed, the low cost of renewables, to my mind, HR
00:29:54 --> 00:30:00 one, the big blanking bill, is to my mind a version of economic suicide.
00:30:00 --> 00:30:06 It is moving against the direction that not only the science is taking us, but
00:30:06 --> 00:30:08 the economic opportunities are taking us.
00:30:08 --> 00:30:11 And that's why, again, no matter how you voted.
00:30:11 --> 00:30:17 To my mind, we are seeing a sad giveaway of leadership that the US
00:30:17 --> 00:30:19 was just starting to really lean into.
00:30:19 --> 00:30:20 Claire Broido Johnson: It's such a disappointment.
00:30:20 --> 00:30:20 Yeah.
00:30:20 --> 00:30:24 Max Boot of the Washington Post had a really good article in
00:30:24 --> 00:30:28 which he said, we are witnessing the suicide of a superpower, and
00:30:28 --> 00:30:29 I really think that that's true.
00:30:30 --> 00:30:32 Dan Kammen: It's a hard place to end this episode.
00:30:32 --> 00:30:36 We'll be more upbeat when we talk about startups and Silicon
00:30:36 --> 00:30:38 Valley culture and things.
00:30:38 --> 00:30:42 But hope you've enjoyed so far, and again, hope you give us feedback
00:30:42 --> 00:30:47 at Info at Energy Matters World or just go to the website, download the
00:30:47 --> 00:30:51 episodes, take a look at the direction that this podcast series is going.
00:30:51 --> 00:30:53 And this is Dan and, and
00:30:53 --> 00:30:53 Claire Broido Johnson: this is Claire.
00:30:53 --> 00:30:54 Thank you so much for listening.
00:31:06 --> 00:31:10 The Inflation Reduction Act, the big, beautiful bill and what it means for you.
00:31:11 --> 00:31:12 This is Energy Matters,
00:31:19 --> 00:31:24 and you're here with Dan and Claire and we are your hosts and
00:31:24 --> 00:31:28 hopefully confidants when we talk about everything Energy matters.
00:31:28 --> 00:31:33 So Dan, what was the Ref Inflation Reduction Act and why was it so
00:31:33 --> 00:31:36 unique despite potentially its flaws?
00:31:36 --> 00:31:40 And I guess the lead in for everyone listening in and commenting is this
00:31:40 --> 00:31:44 is really about the worldviews that we had under the previous Biden
00:31:44 --> 00:31:48 administration that we have now under the Trump administration.
00:31:48 --> 00:31:50 So there's so many ways you could.
00:31:50 --> 00:31:54 Pulled this apart, but I would say the simplest starting point for people who
00:31:54 --> 00:31:58 don't remember back what the US was like, oh, say three years ago when it
00:31:58 --> 00:32:02 was a very different place, is that the Inflation reduction Act was a
00:32:02 --> 00:32:09 compromise Bill put together in quite the surprise to the energy community.
00:32:09 --> 00:32:15 Few people kind of expected what would happen when essentially.
00:32:15 --> 00:32:19 Senator Schumer from New York and Senator Manchin from West Virginia
00:32:19 --> 00:32:24 took a great deal of input and crafted something that was ultimately passed.
00:32:24 --> 00:32:32 And in the Inflation Reduction Act, there was $369 billion of direct
00:32:32 --> 00:32:34 federal money that was allocated.
00:32:35 --> 00:32:42 Largely to support electric vehicles, solar, wind, launching offshore wind.
00:32:42 --> 00:32:46 Uh, something where the US was looking to catch up to China and Europe.
00:32:47 --> 00:32:47 Uh.
00:32:48 --> 00:32:52 Investing in communities, and in particular, something that doesn't
00:32:52 --> 00:32:59 always get the attention of that three $69 billion of direct federal subsidies
00:32:59 --> 00:33:02 or direct federal spending, 60 billion.
00:33:02 --> 00:33:06 The single largest chunk was actually for energy access, energy justice,
00:33:07 --> 00:33:11 energy diversity, and we will come back later in the episode to how
00:33:11 --> 00:33:12 dramatically different things are now.
00:33:12 --> 00:33:15 Now, when I say three $69 billion, were.
00:33:16 --> 00:33:16 Allocated.
00:33:17 --> 00:33:18 These were largely carrots.
00:33:18 --> 00:33:25 There were almost no sticks because of the very odd politics of a very, very
00:33:25 --> 00:33:30 liberal senator and a very conservative senator putting together the details.
00:33:30 --> 00:33:34 And when you look at the numbers, the amount of impact
00:33:34 --> 00:33:36 on the economy is dramatic.
00:33:36 --> 00:33:40 So the ira, the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the largest
00:33:40 --> 00:33:42 spending bills in US History.
00:33:42 --> 00:33:48 Accelerating the clean energy transition and the estimates of its total economic
00:33:48 --> 00:33:53 value go from something like 600 billion to $5 trillion, depending
00:33:53 --> 00:33:56 how you look at the various impacts.
00:33:56 --> 00:34:00 So it is a big thing in itself, and we will talk about how it
00:34:00 --> 00:34:01 is dramatically different from.
00:34:02 --> 00:34:05 HR one, the big beautiful build later.
00:34:05 --> 00:34:09 But let's start and stay with the Inflation reduction Act for a little bit.
00:34:09 --> 00:34:11 So, Claire, you're in the field.
00:34:11 --> 00:34:11 Yep.
00:34:11 --> 00:34:15 You are trying to make money and making green money in the process.
00:34:16 --> 00:34:19 How did the Inflation Reduction Act affect you directly?
00:34:20 --> 00:34:20 So.
00:34:21 --> 00:34:24 I mean, as a capitalist and as a business person, the thing that was
00:34:24 --> 00:34:29 fascinating about the Inflation reduction Act is that with $1.2 trillion in
00:34:29 --> 00:34:35 total of spending, the estimate was that another three to $4 trillion
00:34:35 --> 00:34:39 would be spent on climate reduction technologies by the capital markets.
00:34:39 --> 00:34:41 And what that meant was.
00:34:42 --> 00:34:45 We can actually subsidize electric vehicles and put electric
00:34:45 --> 00:34:46 vehicles all over the country.
00:34:47 --> 00:34:53 We can spend more on solar to reduce what, uh, the grid congestion issues and
00:34:53 --> 00:34:55 transmission problems that are going on.
00:34:55 --> 00:34:58 It was, it was a wonderful time to be in the market and a
00:34:58 --> 00:35:00 wonderful time to be hopeful.
00:35:00 --> 00:35:04 About reducing cli, the impacts of climate change in the United States.
00:35:04 --> 00:35:06 And I think there's a lot of things that feed into that.
00:35:06 --> 00:35:10 So already the numbers of direct federal spending versus monies that
00:35:10 --> 00:35:15 had to be spent by companies or by municipalities to partner in makes
00:35:15 --> 00:35:17 these numbers all over the place.
00:35:17 --> 00:35:19 But it's a really interesting.
00:35:19 --> 00:35:24 Picture, there are lots and lots of flaws in the inflation reduction Act.
00:35:24 --> 00:35:28 Um, some of the more minor ones, from my perspective, I would say
00:35:28 --> 00:35:31 hydrogen was subsidized too much.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:31 Yep.
00:35:31 --> 00:35:37 And there wasn't enough that was spent on the cleanup side or addressing
00:35:37 --> 00:35:42 the needs of fossil communities, be they coal mining communities
00:35:42 --> 00:35:44 in West Virginia or in Montana.
00:35:45 --> 00:35:47 Ironically, those were things that were in some.
00:35:47 --> 00:35:52 Obama legislation that didn't make it through, because largely to get this
00:35:52 --> 00:35:57 bill, the number of votes it needed, it really needed to only excel accentuate the
00:35:57 --> 00:36:00 positive, not to highlight the negative.
00:36:00 --> 00:36:05 That said, I. What's happened across the world has been dramatic.
00:36:05 --> 00:36:13 So we now see places like Norway where last month, 34, not 3,
00:36:13 --> 00:36:19 not 34, but 34 non-electric vehicles were sold nationwide.
00:36:20 --> 00:36:25 What China is now, well over 50% of all new vehicles in the world's
00:36:25 --> 00:36:28 largest vehicle market, all electric.
00:36:30 --> 00:36:35 While California was, uh, sort of the leader in the number of electric vehicles
00:36:35 --> 00:36:40 in the Western world, now the United Kingdom England has surpassed that.
00:36:40 --> 00:36:47 So the Inflation Reduction Act with all of its downsides put the US in such an
00:36:47 --> 00:36:52 interesting leadership position that we actually had other green energy leaders
00:36:52 --> 00:36:55 like President Macron of France saying.
00:36:56 --> 00:36:57 This is a horrible action.
00:36:57 --> 00:37:02 It's stealing our best clean energy leaders from Europe to go to the
00:37:02 --> 00:37:06 us and my response to that was, isn't that actually what you want?
00:37:06 --> 00:37:11 You wanna race to see who's gonna make this go more?
00:37:11 --> 00:37:16 But it was such a change in how the US approached things that it really caught
00:37:16 --> 00:37:21 a lot of our allies in Europe, allies in Japan and elsewhere, off guard.
00:37:21 --> 00:37:22 A breath of fresh air.
00:37:22 --> 00:37:23 Right?
00:37:23 --> 00:37:26 Sort of like the race of the moon really is how can we solve our climate
00:37:26 --> 00:37:28 change problems collectively, right?
00:37:28 --> 00:37:31 Not only, not only in in Europe, and not only in China,
00:37:31 --> 00:37:33 but also in the United States.
00:37:33 --> 00:37:35 And I think it did some things that.
00:37:36 --> 00:37:38 You know, built on what, what you just said, Claire, in
00:37:38 --> 00:37:39 ways that are interesting.
00:37:39 --> 00:37:44 So we had people like your, your former, uh, founding member and
00:37:44 --> 00:37:48 then the head of the loan guarantee program in the Biden administration.
00:37:48 --> 00:37:53 Jigger saw out there every day saying how great it would be to be replacing
00:37:54 --> 00:37:58 air conditioners, which are very energy intensive and polluting with heat pumps.
00:37:58 --> 00:37:59 Much more efficient technology.
00:38:00 --> 00:38:05 The debate around how are we investing in nuclear power, not just how we make
00:38:05 --> 00:38:11 solar available to rich homeowners, but how we make solar available to renters.
00:38:11 --> 00:38:17 All of these things had a place in the inflation reduction Act and.
00:38:18 --> 00:38:19 As we'll talk about in a bit.
00:38:19 --> 00:38:24 Some of them are places where the current administration is not just trying to deny
00:38:24 --> 00:38:30 them, but actively tearing out preexisting electric chargers for vehicles.
00:38:30 --> 00:38:34 So it has it been a night and day difference between what we saw
00:38:34 --> 00:38:35 last administration to this one?
00:38:35 --> 00:38:36 Yeah.
00:38:36 --> 00:38:37 And this might be a place where we might.
00:38:37 --> 00:38:41 Argue a little bit, but the J 40, maybe you can tell us a little about the J 40.
00:38:41 --> 00:38:46 I mean, what, what I saw as a person in the private sector, but who has
00:38:46 --> 00:38:50 also worked in the, in the federal government is that there were all sorts
00:38:50 --> 00:38:53 of organizations that were trying to get this inflation reduction act money.
00:38:53 --> 00:38:56 So many different organizations that were hyperlocal, that were
00:38:56 --> 00:38:58 trying to fix a hyper-local problem.
00:38:58 --> 00:39:02 But so much of that money was going to the back office, to the administration
00:39:02 --> 00:39:07 of those programs, and not as much of it as could have gone actually went.
00:39:07 --> 00:39:12 To providing the solar for renters or the new HVAC systems
00:39:12 --> 00:39:14 for low income communities.
00:39:15 --> 00:39:18 So this I think is something we'll maybe even come back to in another episode
00:39:18 --> 00:39:24 because when Claire says J 40, and we'll always try to explain our acronyms.
00:39:24 --> 00:39:26 That's the Justice 40 effort.
00:39:26 --> 00:39:32 And what Justice 40 is, from my perspective as a Californian, was a
00:39:32 --> 00:39:36 Californian policy that didn't have a name that got named at the federal level.
00:39:36 --> 00:39:42 So in California we've had a whole series of energy and climate laws that have
00:39:42 --> 00:39:47 passed, some of which seemed impossible, some not so difficult, and all are part of
00:39:47 --> 00:39:49 the landscape and we'll come back to that.
00:39:49 --> 00:39:54 But what California set up was a. Cap and trade system, meaning a
00:39:54 --> 00:39:58 polluter pays system for greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
00:39:59 --> 00:40:06 And the way that was written was that 35% as a floor, not a ceiling
00:40:07 --> 00:40:10 of the revenues from that effort.
00:40:11 --> 00:40:17 Would be then directed to be spent on low income communities, communities
00:40:17 --> 00:40:20 of color, fence line communities around polluting facilities.
00:40:20 --> 00:40:26 And so when then vice president and candidate for President Biden came to
00:40:26 --> 00:40:29 California, talked to the governor, talked to the California Energy Commission,
00:40:29 --> 00:40:34 he and his team went back and said, well, I kinda like this Justice 35.
00:40:35 --> 00:40:37 They didn't come up with a good name in California.
00:40:38 --> 00:40:42 I'm gonna call it Justice 40, and it's one of the executive orders,
00:40:42 --> 00:40:46 the the 20 or one that he signed on his first full day in office.
00:40:46 --> 00:40:51 It established an office of workforce engagement in the Department of Energy.
00:40:52 --> 00:40:54 It established the programs that you mentioned that.
00:40:55 --> 00:40:58 We're supposed to give money back to communities and some of which
00:40:58 --> 00:40:59 found it bureaucratically difficult.
00:41:00 --> 00:41:04 But it's really because if you go from Trump's administration, one
00:41:05 --> 00:41:06 where none of this was on the table.
00:41:07 --> 00:41:07 Yep.
00:41:07 --> 00:41:11 To the Biden administration where all of this got built back up at the
00:41:11 --> 00:41:15 federal level, it's no surprise that you had to not just spend money, you
00:41:15 --> 00:41:18 had to build offices to spend money.
00:41:18 --> 00:41:18 Right.
00:41:18 --> 00:41:19 And I'm gonna come back and.
00:41:19 --> 00:41:22 Ask you a question from the Obama administration.
00:41:22 --> 00:41:22 Sure.
00:41:22 --> 00:41:26 You were part of the team in the loan guarantee office, and you needed
00:41:26 --> 00:41:32 to build from scratch some of the structures to do what you wanted to do.
00:41:32 --> 00:41:36 So there's a precedent for the need to spend, not just in
00:41:36 --> 00:41:39 getting money out the door, but to rebuild the capacity to spend.
00:41:39 --> 00:41:43 So when I was at the Department of Energy, I was in the senior executive service
00:41:43 --> 00:41:46 and ran a bunch of government funding.
00:41:46 --> 00:41:49 I wasn't a part of the loan guarantee program, but we were responsible
00:41:49 --> 00:41:53 for deploying about 11 billion of the stimulus package to go towards
00:41:53 --> 00:41:57 state energy programs, block grant programs, weatherization programs
00:41:57 --> 00:42:01 to serve low income households, and we had to distribute all of that.
00:42:01 --> 00:42:04 Basically 10 months without any waste, fraud, or abuse.
00:42:04 --> 00:42:07 So there definitely is a history of putting a lot of these, you know,
00:42:07 --> 00:42:11 putting a whole bunch of federal money together at a very quick pace.
00:42:12 --> 00:42:16 I think the Inflation reduction Act though, had had so much money and, and.
00:42:16 --> 00:42:19 So many people had to create new organizations.
00:42:20 --> 00:42:24 And I see this in a, on a local level and a larger level, you know, you're,
00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 a lot of that money goes towards executive directors, but then there's
00:42:27 --> 00:42:34 25 executive directors in some specific area and not enough people spending
00:42:34 --> 00:42:35 the money on actually doing the work.
00:42:36 --> 00:42:40 And it's funny you say that because as someone on the academic side.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:45 And who spends a lot of time working with governments in Europe, the German
00:42:45 --> 00:42:49 government that's very famous for having essentially launched what was at the
00:42:49 --> 00:42:55 time, the most successful subsidy program for solar power called Feed in Tariffs.
00:42:55 --> 00:43:00 And working with some African governments that were engaged in efforts around
00:43:00 --> 00:43:06 so-called the net zero world or reorienting their economies to be zero
00:43:06 --> 00:43:09 carbon, even if they're major fossil fuel states today, like Nigeria.
00:43:10 --> 00:43:15 And so when I look at this from the academic perspective, I say,
00:43:15 --> 00:43:19 oh, the inflation reduction Act was actually a. Also trying to
00:43:19 --> 00:43:21 catch up on the infrastructure.
00:43:21 --> 00:43:23 We need to be a clean energy economy.
00:43:24 --> 00:43:24 Right?
00:43:24 --> 00:43:29 And trying to build the capacity that exists in countries overseas.
00:43:29 --> 00:43:30 China for sure.
00:43:30 --> 00:43:31 Germany for sure.
00:43:31 --> 00:43:33 England for sure.
00:43:33 --> 00:43:41 And one of the challenges is that that might look like waste, but if you don't
00:43:41 --> 00:43:45 have offices and people skilled in doing these things, right, you actually.
00:43:45 --> 00:43:49 Maybe you can get money out the door once, but you need to do program evaluation.
00:43:49 --> 00:43:51 Things that sound boring.
00:43:51 --> 00:43:56 But ultimately, every program, good or bad gets put under the microscope of
00:43:56 --> 00:43:58 is the money being spent well or not?
00:43:58 --> 00:44:02 So I actually felt like even though the Inflation reduction Act came up as
00:44:02 --> 00:44:05 a big surprise in a lot of ways, yep.
00:44:05 --> 00:44:10 It actually was a thoughtful combination.
00:44:10 --> 00:44:14 Of the things you need to do today, what we need, which is to start spending on
00:44:14 --> 00:44:22 clean energy and down the line to have a capacity to think creatively about.
00:44:23 --> 00:44:26 Mid-course corrections we're gonna need later on.
00:44:26 --> 00:44:27 Sure, yep.
00:44:27 --> 00:44:28 I agree that with that.
00:44:28 --> 00:44:29 Absolutely.
00:44:30 --> 00:44:33 But unfortunately, a lot of that was stymied and now we
00:44:33 --> 00:44:37 have the one big, beautiful bill to discuss and indeed we do.
00:44:37 --> 00:44:42 And so I, you know, we say this podcast is gonna be about the facts and we
00:44:42 --> 00:44:44 will always lead with the facts.
00:44:44 --> 00:44:45 But as someone who.
00:44:46 --> 00:44:50 Resigned my federal commission when Mr. Trump was elected the first
00:44:50 --> 00:44:56 time and felt we were making some painful missteps in the economy.
00:44:56 --> 00:45:01 I'm gonna try to do my best to be a little bit impartial, but these
00:45:01 --> 00:45:04 are topics where these are fighting words for me, so it's gonna be.
00:45:05 --> 00:45:07 Oh, believe me, I've spent my career in the, you know, in the solar industry.
00:45:07 --> 00:45:11 And, and I think, I think there's a lot to say about the big beautiful bill, right?
00:45:11 --> 00:45:15 But I think now that there are clear timelines for the investment
00:45:15 --> 00:45:19 tax credits and their, their, um, decrease in phase out.
00:45:19 --> 00:45:23 So, which is 2027, unless you begin, begin construction or
00:45:23 --> 00:45:25 safe harbor before July of 2026.
00:45:26 --> 00:45:28 So now you know there's less ambiguity.
00:45:28 --> 00:45:32 And the message is clear, like, now's the time to secure your
00:45:32 --> 00:45:34 rooftops queue for interconnection.
00:45:34 --> 00:45:35 Move quickly.
00:45:35 --> 00:45:36 Right?
00:45:36 --> 00:45:38 If you're interested in solar at all.
00:45:39 --> 00:45:43 Um, and, and frankly, you know, we aren't gonna need the ITC, the
00:45:43 --> 00:45:45 investment tax credit forever.
00:45:45 --> 00:45:47 We just needed a very clear phase out.
00:45:47 --> 00:45:51 And this is something I wanna, I gotta jump in because here's a place where.
00:45:52 --> 00:45:55 The lessons learned from California I thought were really interesting
00:45:55 --> 00:46:01 because California was the first state to have large scale subsidies
00:46:01 --> 00:46:03 in place for clean energy.
00:46:03 --> 00:46:07 Started with solar, then it went to electric vehicles, and.
00:46:07 --> 00:46:12 As we'll talk about a number of times the progress in making solar cheaper
00:46:12 --> 00:46:14 in making electric vehicles cheaper.
00:46:14 --> 00:46:18 Something we'll talk about later called the Learning Curve or Moore's
00:46:18 --> 00:46:20 Law for people in the computer world.
00:46:20 --> 00:46:24 Um, these are things where California was able to get to a point where
00:46:24 --> 00:46:28 it removed the subsidy for solar.
00:46:28 --> 00:46:28 Right.
00:46:28 --> 00:46:32 There is still a subsidy available if you do storage and solar, right?
00:46:32 --> 00:46:36 But the subsidy was really to get storage cheap the way solar
00:46:36 --> 00:46:38 had already become cheap, right?
00:46:38 --> 00:46:44 So these are interesting aspects of, for all of the ways in which academics like
00:46:44 --> 00:46:46 myself, love to criticize federal action.
00:46:47 --> 00:46:47 What happened?
00:46:48 --> 00:46:52 With the Inflation Reduction Act actually set us up in a way that as
00:46:52 --> 00:46:56 you're highlighting the end of these subsidies, European governments, they'll
00:46:56 --> 00:47:00 set up a policy and you hope it's gonna last For years and years here, we did
00:47:00 --> 00:47:03 all this heavy lifting under Biden and.
00:47:04 --> 00:47:08 Basically three, three years later, it's all being zeroed out.
00:47:08 --> 00:47:09 It's all being zeroed out.
00:47:09 --> 00:47:09 Yep.
00:47:10 --> 00:47:10 Yep.
00:47:10 --> 00:47:13 I mean, I'm all for incentivizing batteries.
00:47:13 --> 00:47:17 So what you're referring to is the net energy metering rule, or NM 3.0
00:47:18 --> 00:47:20 in California, which I'm a big fan of.
00:47:20 --> 00:47:27 Um, and should be, you know, probably a, a good example of how we should be
00:47:27 --> 00:47:29 running a lot of the rest of the grid.
00:47:29 --> 00:47:32 But, you know, essentially, you know, the wheels are off.
00:47:32 --> 00:47:39 The, uh, 25 D, which is the investment tax credit for residential
00:47:39 --> 00:47:42 is gone as of the end of 2025.
00:47:42 --> 00:47:46 Commercial industrial is gonna be okay in the sense that if we can
00:47:46 --> 00:47:51 get stuff placed in service, um, by 2027 or begin construction by
00:47:51 --> 00:47:53 July of 2026, we're gonna be okay.
00:47:54 --> 00:47:58 Well, when you say, okay, again, I gotta cut in because my version of Okay.
00:47:58 --> 00:47:59 On the.
00:48:00 --> 00:48:03 Climate activist side in your version of the business world may be different
00:48:03 --> 00:48:09 because what I see is that if you are already a company or a municipality
00:48:09 --> 00:48:13 that had committed to going green, you were gonna do solar on public
00:48:13 --> 00:48:16 land, you were gonna do a public private partnership, then you're
00:48:16 --> 00:48:18 kind of already in the converted.
00:48:18 --> 00:48:18 Correct.
00:48:18 --> 00:48:22 And so those people are gonna be rushing to get their projects done in
00:48:22 --> 00:48:24 the next year and a half, two years.
00:48:24 --> 00:48:25 That's right.
00:48:25 --> 00:48:26 But the.
00:48:27 --> 00:48:33 The insidious or the deeper message out there is that if you weren't sure about
00:48:33 --> 00:48:38 going green, despite the good economics that we'll talk about later, what this
00:48:38 --> 00:48:44 said is don't do anything, hold off, and don't become part of the wave that.
00:48:45 --> 00:48:46 We're seeing around the world.
00:48:47 --> 00:48:51 Remember, 90% of all new energy projects worldwide, not just this
00:48:51 --> 00:48:55 year, but last year and the year before have all been clean energy.
00:48:55 --> 00:48:57 90% in the United States as well.
00:48:57 --> 00:48:58 That's right.
00:48:58 --> 00:48:58 Yeah.
00:48:58 --> 00:49:02 But now what I think we're gonna see is anyone who was on the fence.
00:49:02 --> 00:49:07 About becoming a player in this is now gonna say, oh,
00:49:07 --> 00:49:08 I'll just kind of hang back.
00:49:08 --> 00:49:12 And so what I worry about is not just the loss of projects that were in the
00:49:12 --> 00:49:19 so-called pipeline uhhuh, but I worry about the overall change of philosophy
00:49:19 --> 00:49:23 where, you know, we've, we've now seen deals where Mr. Trump and his
00:49:23 --> 00:49:28 team have gone to Europe and have extracted deals where there's gonna
00:49:28 --> 00:49:31 be a huge purchase of US exported gas.
00:49:31 --> 00:49:37 Investments that are now gonna be required in Japan to put not the 200
00:49:37 --> 00:49:41 billion they've been investing in the US economy, but 600 billion and
00:49:41 --> 00:49:43 a lot of that into fossil projects.
00:49:43 --> 00:49:48 So I see not just financial damage, but mindset damage
00:49:48 --> 00:49:49 coming up here, mindset damage.
00:49:50 --> 00:49:50 Absolutely.
00:49:50 --> 00:49:51 Right.
00:49:51 --> 00:49:54 So at Sunrock what we do is we finance power purchase agreements
00:49:54 --> 00:49:56 for commercial industrial customers.
00:49:56 --> 00:49:59 And a lot of the off takers that we're considering it are saying, uh,
00:49:59 --> 00:50:02 I don't really understand what NPR is telling me right now, or Fox News.
00:50:02 --> 00:50:04 I'm just gonna hold back and wait and see.
00:50:04 --> 00:50:05 Right.
00:50:05 --> 00:50:10 Our partners, our EPC partners, our construction folks are saying,
00:50:10 --> 00:50:13 well, gosh, I have to get everything installed as quickly as I possibly
00:50:13 --> 00:50:16 can, and I'm gonna have to switch from residential to commercial, so
00:50:16 --> 00:50:17 I'm gonna have to figure that out.
00:50:18 --> 00:50:21 What I mean by being okay is at least we know what the rules are
00:50:21 --> 00:50:25 now, and the solar industry will accommodate towards them, so.
00:50:26 --> 00:50:31 2019 versus today, solar today without the federal tax credit
00:50:31 --> 00:50:36 is better than solar was in 20, somewhere between 2016 and 2019.
00:50:36 --> 00:50:38 With the solar tax credit.
00:50:38 --> 00:50:40 We don't need the tax credits anymore.
00:50:40 --> 00:50:42 They're gonna go down over time.
00:50:42 --> 00:50:45 Um, but certainly continuing with the federal tax credit would've
00:50:45 --> 00:50:49 been delightful because it would've subsidized solar longer and made
00:50:49 --> 00:50:50 everybody much more efficient.
00:50:51 --> 00:50:52 But see, I'm not even sure.
00:50:53 --> 00:50:58 We need to think of it that way, and I, I, I, I agree with you, but with the
00:50:58 --> 00:51:04 cost of solar coming down, what we're finding is that energy is a system, and
00:51:04 --> 00:51:05 we have this thing called nighttime.
00:51:05 --> 00:51:08 So during nighttime, there's no solar production.
00:51:08 --> 00:51:12 So what you really want to be doing as you evolve and grow out of your
00:51:12 --> 00:51:16 infancy into your teenage years is you don't just build solar and wind.
00:51:16 --> 00:51:18 You build those solar storage.
00:51:18 --> 00:51:18 Storage.
00:51:18 --> 00:51:19 Exactly right.
00:51:19 --> 00:51:19 One of the, it's that world.
00:51:19 --> 00:51:23 One of the biggest winners of the big beautiful built is energy storage, which
00:51:23 --> 00:51:26 will benefit from the full ITC until 2032.
00:51:26 --> 00:51:29 And what's funny is that behind the scenes, a number of
00:51:29 --> 00:51:31 Republican members of the house.
00:51:31 --> 00:51:37 That can, that voted against the inflation reduction Act actually
00:51:37 --> 00:51:40 in their reelection this past year, campaigned on its benefits.
00:51:40 --> 00:51:45 And some of them really fought behind the scenes to get storage to be
00:51:46 --> 00:51:50 maintained because they see that as a business that can be in their district.
00:51:50 --> 00:51:53 So there are some interest where you're gonna manufacturer
00:51:53 --> 00:51:54 storage in their district.
00:51:54 --> 00:51:55 Absolutely right.
00:51:55 --> 00:51:58 Though it's been fascinating because a lot of these Republican senators.
00:51:58 --> 00:52:03 Have had battery storage or solar manufacturing facilities put in
00:52:03 --> 00:52:06 their districts, but they voted for the one big beautiful bill.
00:52:07 --> 00:52:07 Yep.
00:52:07 --> 00:52:08 It's very interesting.
00:52:08 --> 00:52:12 One statistic I love, um, is that adding capacity from solar plus
00:52:12 --> 00:52:16 storage in Texas this year has reduced the chance of rolling blackouts
00:52:16 --> 00:52:23 from 12% to 0.3% according to Ercot, which is the state's grid operator.
00:52:24 --> 00:52:25 That's a huge percentage.
00:52:25 --> 00:52:28 Nobody ever really thinks about Texas as being a huge renewable
00:52:28 --> 00:52:32 resource, but 30% of Texas's energy comes from renewable resources.
00:52:32 --> 00:52:36 Texas now is number one, and you can say whether it's 'cause they have a climate
00:52:36 --> 00:52:41 that's amenable to it or they have a lot of land or because despite protests about
00:52:41 --> 00:52:45 what happened when Texas had its freeze out in the winter, they actually learned
00:52:45 --> 00:52:50 that the wind turbines, the solar stayed on, whereas the gas plants went off.
00:52:50 --> 00:52:53 And so Texas has absolutely become a massive.
00:52:53 --> 00:52:58 Clean energy leader, and it's interesting to see, you know,
00:52:58 --> 00:52:59 as you pull away the rhetoric.
00:52:59 --> 00:53:05 What I keep finding again and again is that now that clean energy
00:53:05 --> 00:53:06 is cheaper than fossil energy.
00:53:07 --> 00:53:07 Yep.
00:53:07 --> 00:53:09 And it's cheaper on many metrics.
00:53:09 --> 00:53:15 And my favorite kind of, you know, short version of that is in much of
00:53:15 --> 00:53:20 the world, it's now cheaper to build a new clean energy power plant than to
00:53:20 --> 00:53:23 just operate an existing fossil plant.
00:53:23 --> 00:53:24 Isn't that great?
00:53:24 --> 00:53:25 That's an amazing number.
00:53:25 --> 00:53:31 There's great statistics, which we'll put on our website, energy Matters world, um,
00:53:31 --> 00:53:35 about from the levelized cost of energy from Lazar, and that's sort of the, the.
00:53:35 --> 00:53:36 Industry standard.
00:53:37 --> 00:53:40 But you can see hands down, solar makes way more sense than natural
00:53:40 --> 00:53:44 gas and nuclear than really anything, both from a cost perspective
00:53:44 --> 00:53:46 and from a timing perspective.
00:53:46 --> 00:53:49 So one of the things that we're seeing in the industry is that US power
00:53:49 --> 00:53:51 consumption's, D rising dramatically.
00:53:51 --> 00:53:55 Driven by ai, driven by data centers and electric vehicles, federal
00:53:55 --> 00:53:58 energy regulatory commission, FERC forecast, five-year peak demand growth
00:53:58 --> 00:54:02 has increased by a factor of five compared to 2022, which is crazy.
00:54:02 --> 00:54:04 That's because of data center.
00:54:04 --> 00:54:07 Power consumption is going up year on year by 10%.
00:54:08 --> 00:54:10 Forecasted growth in peak demand over the next year.
00:54:11 --> 00:54:13 You know, next five years is going up astronomically.
00:54:14 --> 00:54:18 And we have an aging grid infrastructure, which has created massive bottlenecks
00:54:18 --> 00:54:20 in the, uh, utility scale generation.
00:54:20 --> 00:54:25 So if you're a solar developer or a wind developer, really any developer,
00:54:25 --> 00:54:28 the years spent in an interconnection queue could be five years or more
00:54:28 --> 00:54:30 depending on the utility that you're in.
00:54:30 --> 00:54:32 And so where are we gonna get all this energy?
00:54:32 --> 00:54:36 From, I mean, it makes perfect sense to do distributed energy solar plus
00:54:36 --> 00:54:40 storage, particularly because you generate your energy where you use it.
00:54:41 --> 00:54:42 But where are we gonna get this energy from?
00:54:42 --> 00:54:44 It's not gonna be from solar plus storage.
00:54:44 --> 00:54:49 So it's interesting because as a researcher on clean energy,
00:54:49 --> 00:54:52 and I would say as a proponent of clean energy, to my view.
00:54:53 --> 00:54:54 The added demand.
00:54:54 --> 00:54:57 This is a exciting bring it on moment.
00:54:57 --> 00:54:57 Um, yeah.
00:54:57 --> 00:55:02 It is true that if you have an electric vehicle at your home, when your
00:55:02 --> 00:55:08 electric vehicle is at maximum speed, like you floored it, and you floor
00:55:08 --> 00:55:12 your house, meaning you turn on every light, everything, every washer, dryer,
00:55:12 --> 00:55:17 your car is using three to four times as muscle energy as your house is.
00:55:18 --> 00:55:24 So that's a lot of energy, but clean energy is now so inexpensive, and
00:55:24 --> 00:55:28 if the rules, many of those set up in the inflation reduction act
00:55:28 --> 00:55:30 were to have been followed out.
00:55:30 --> 00:55:33 Installing clean energy has gotten easier and easier.
00:55:33 --> 00:55:35 And so well and less expensive.
00:55:36 --> 00:55:37 Well, that's what I mean by easier.
00:55:37 --> 00:55:37 And easier.
00:55:37 --> 00:55:37 Yeah.
00:55:37 --> 00:55:38 There's a lot of ways to do it.
00:55:38 --> 00:55:42 And so the, the version of this story, the kind of the debate, when Angela
00:55:42 --> 00:55:47 Merkel was the chancellor of Germany, she liked to say that in Germany, if
00:55:47 --> 00:55:52 you follow our regulations, which is of course on the web to do what's called
00:55:52 --> 00:55:57 the feed in tariff, meaning you qualify and you install solar generally, but
00:55:57 --> 00:56:00 it was solar or wind on your home or your business or your industry.
00:56:01 --> 00:56:04 The form you fill out is literally like one piece of paper.
00:56:04 --> 00:56:09 Whereas when the US got started in the field and you know, at Sun Edison, it was
00:56:09 --> 00:56:11 far more than one piece of paper, right?
00:56:11 --> 00:56:16 And so streamlining all of these non hardware costs, we call 'em
00:56:16 --> 00:56:20 the balance of systems costs, was one of the things that has brought.
00:56:20 --> 00:56:25 The price is down for clean energy and so much so that we are now seeing
00:56:26 --> 00:56:32 in the parts of the US West, not just rooftop solar, but trailer parks and
00:56:32 --> 00:56:36 places that are parking garages are putting solar on top, and they're
00:56:36 --> 00:56:41 finding that the business case for solar, if the market is thoughtfully
00:56:41 --> 00:56:44 set up, meant it was easier and easier.
00:56:44 --> 00:56:44 And so California.
00:56:45 --> 00:56:52 Has now exported clean energy to its neighboring states for 110 days in a row.
00:56:52 --> 00:56:56 And California is the fourth largest economy on the planet.
00:56:56 --> 00:56:58 And so it's not like some small case.
00:56:58 --> 00:57:01 I don't wanna say anything derogatory about Costa Rica, which I love.
00:57:02 --> 00:57:05 They do clean energy all the time from hydro, but they're small, right?
00:57:05 --> 00:57:09 California's a big dog and they can now be exporting clean
00:57:09 --> 00:57:11 energy when the rules permit.
00:57:12 --> 00:57:13 But so what you're saying though, Dan, is that.
00:57:14 --> 00:57:19 Despite the fact that the one big beautiful bill is trying to improve
00:57:19 --> 00:57:24 the economics for fossil fuels and make it worse for clean energy,
00:57:24 --> 00:57:26 clean energy is still gonna prevail.
00:57:26 --> 00:57:27 Well, I hope it is.
00:57:27 --> 00:57:31 Um, we'll talk about in the next couple episodes the real barriers.
00:57:31 --> 00:57:34 And I guess the last thing that needs to be on the table, 'cause
00:57:34 --> 00:57:39 we're gonna come back to these bills later in the series, is that.
00:57:40 --> 00:57:45 Well, the big beautiful bill, which I just call HR one house bill number one,
00:57:45 --> 00:57:51 because I can't stand that term, is that something else is happening at the same
00:57:51 --> 00:57:57 time, and it's the interaction of this HR one and this new thing, and that's called
00:57:58 --> 00:58:03 the effort by the current administration's leader of the Environmental
00:58:03 --> 00:58:08 Protection Agency to kill a 2009.
00:58:08 --> 00:58:14 Um, finding called the endangerment finding and almost all of climate
00:58:14 --> 00:58:18 legislation in the United States is based around this endangerment finding, and
00:58:18 --> 00:58:23 that says that herding the climate is bad for people, which sounds pretty simple.
00:58:23 --> 00:58:25 Herding the climate is bad for crops, it's.
00:58:25 --> 00:58:27 Bad for biodiversity.
00:58:27 --> 00:58:31 It's bad for poor people, it's bad for women, it's bad for the economy.
00:58:31 --> 00:58:36 Lee Zelin, the current head of the US EPA, is now leading the effort
00:58:36 --> 00:58:39 to repeal that endangerment finding.
00:58:39 --> 00:58:43 And if you get the negative aspects of HR one.
00:58:44 --> 00:58:48 And you get a finding that we don't care about the climate, which
00:58:48 --> 00:58:53 in my language is we don't care about our own children, obviously.
00:58:53 --> 00:59:00 Then you have a package of a bill and a policy change at the
00:59:00 --> 00:59:02 Environmental Protection Agency.
00:59:02 --> 00:59:07 That together really will scare us, and we'll come back to this, but
00:59:07 --> 00:59:12 it's these two things together that make me even more worried about the.
00:59:13 --> 00:59:17 Anti-environmental and really anti economic direction that we seem
00:59:17 --> 00:59:19 to be going very anti economic.
00:59:19 --> 00:59:22 Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that's scary to me, and as I
00:59:22 --> 00:59:26 think about my kids and hopefully grandkids at some point in time, is,
00:59:26 --> 00:59:29 you know, we don't have solutions.
00:59:29 --> 00:59:33 And so if we're gonna try to, um, focus on.
00:59:33 --> 00:59:39 You know, fossil fuels great, but clean energy and particularly solar plus
00:59:39 --> 00:59:41 storage is gonna have to be the solution.
00:59:42 --> 00:59:46 Um, and if we continue to make it harder to do that with our interconnection
00:59:46 --> 00:59:50 queues, with our permits, with, you know, all of the things that we're
00:59:50 --> 00:59:53 trying to do to make it harder, what's gonna end up happening is there's just
00:59:53 --> 00:59:54 gonna be more blackouts and brownouts.
00:59:55 --> 00:59:56 That's what's gonna happen.
00:59:56 --> 01:00:00 We already have seen in the solar industry, 250 jobs are gonna be
01:00:00 --> 01:00:02 lost just in the residential space.
01:00:02 --> 01:00:06 And utility rates are gonna go up by 20 plus percent all across the country.
01:00:06 --> 01:00:09 That is an, that is an absolute fact, right?
01:00:09 --> 01:00:12 And so we're gonna see with the big, beautiful bill, they're gonna do their
01:00:12 --> 01:00:14 darnedest to try to support fossil fuels.
01:00:14 --> 01:00:17 But the fact of the matter is there will be more brownouts and blackouts.
01:00:18 --> 01:00:21 And that is going to just by default cause people to buy batteries.
01:00:21 --> 01:00:22 Right.
01:00:22 --> 01:00:26 And we have put some readings on the website so that you can go
01:00:27 --> 01:00:29 to, to track some of these issues.
01:00:29 --> 01:00:34 If you go to Energy Matters world, one of the things that I think Claire
01:00:34 --> 01:00:37 and I might show some differences in opinion later on, but we'll come
01:00:37 --> 01:00:42 back to, are some of the subsidies that exist for investing in fossil
01:00:42 --> 01:00:44 fuels in the US and other countries.
01:00:44 --> 01:00:46 And the degree to which.
01:00:47 --> 01:00:52 No matter what your politics is with the current state of energy generation,
01:00:52 --> 01:00:57 the flexibility, the speed, the low cost of renewables, to my mind, HR
01:00:57 --> 01:01:04 one, the big blanking bill, is to my mind a version of economic suicide.
01:01:04 --> 01:01:10 It is moving against the direction that not only the science is taking us, but
01:01:10 --> 01:01:12 the economic opportunities are taking us.
01:01:12 --> 01:01:14 And that's why, again, no matter how you voted.
01:01:15 --> 01:01:20 To my mind, we are seeing a sad giveaway of leadership that the US
01:01:20 --> 01:01:22 was just starting to really lean into.
01:01:22 --> 01:01:23 It's such a disappointment.
01:01:23 --> 01:01:24 Yeah.
01:01:24 --> 01:01:27 Max Boot of the Washington Post had a really good article in
01:01:27 --> 01:01:32 which he said, we are witnessing the suicide of a superpower, and
01:01:32 --> 01:01:33 I really think that that's true.
01:01:33 --> 01:01:35 It's a hard place to end this episode.
01:01:35 --> 01:01:40 We'll be more upbeat when we talk about startups and Silicon
01:01:40 --> 01:01:41 Valley culture and things.
01:01:41 --> 01:01:45 But hope you've enjoyed so far, and again, hope you give us feedback
01:01:45 --> 01:01:50 at Info at Energy Matters World or just go to the website, download the
01:01:50 --> 01:01:55 episodes, take a look at the direction that this podcast series is going.
01:01:55 --> 01:01:57 And this is Dan and, and this is Claire.
01:01:57 --> 01:01:58 Thank you so much for listening.