The Energy Transition Show with Chris Nelder

What are the solutions to reducing carbon emissions from the “hard-to-decarbonize” sectors that make industrial civilization possible?

These episodes are part of our mini-series on the energy basics, and explain some of the essential concepts in electricity, including what electricity is, how we generate it, and how we manage power grids.

Why did the new film, Planet of the Humans, get so much about the energy transition wrong, and what are its filmmakers really trying to say?

Will progress on the energy transition continue as the world gets back to work, or will it falter thanks to economies under pressure and vast unemployment?

What does “sustainability” really mean in the context of energy transition? We review a new textbook that explores these complex questions.

Why are utility-scale wind and solar farms increasingly being paired with integrated battery storage systems, and is that really the best way to deploy storage?

What are the winning (and losing) tactics in crafting policy to support energy transition, and what do advocates need to do to win?

How much damage has the oil industry suffered from the coronavirus shutdown, how will it recover, and what are the implications for energy transition?

These first three episodes in our mini-series on the energy basics explain some of the essential concepts and terms in energy, including what energy is, why we convert it, and how we use it.

The Energy Transition Show joins up with The Interchange for our first ever crossover episode!

Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.

Two energy analysts ask an integrated assessment modeler to explain why the IPCC’s climate scenarios don’t seem to represent the progress of energy transition.

How is Australia dealing with the reality of climate change in this season of hugely destructive wildfires, and what is the outlook for its energy transition?

What does cybersecurity on the grid mean, and what does it have to do with energy transition and climate change?

Fully-regulated utilities can choose to operate their plants at a loss when regulators give them a way to pass those losses onto their customers.

How likely are the various scenarios for global warming, what do they mean, and where is the current trajectory for climate change likely to take us?

Transitioning to renewables, and moving heating and transportation to the power grid, will save everyone money while reducing emissions.

The transition to electric vehicles powered by renewables is all but guaranteed by the massive energetic advantage they have over conventional oil-burning vehicles.

Exxon was doing some of the best research on climate change 40 years ago. Why did they then commit to a global climate disinformation campaign?

Fossil fuel incumbents think energy transition will be gradual, while the disruptors think it will be rapid. What can we learn from these contrasting narratives?

Energy transition is complex, and understanding it requires expertise in multiple disciplines, so a group of Stanford researchers proposes to study it that way.

South Africa could be one of the world’s greatest success stories in energy transition if it can shed its apartheid-era legacy of coal dependency.

How can electricity markets be used as a tool to decarbonize power supply?

Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for another freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting developments over the past year in energy transition.

Unless energy transition is wildly successful, the world will have no choice but to depend on local resources when oil production begins its inevitable decline.

The energy transition provides some of the answers to wildfire risk, including how utilities deal with their own culpability.

In this wide-ranging chat, Chris Nelder and Jonathan Koomey talk about the many things we don’t know about how the energy transition will proceed.

For our 100th episode, we thought we’d do a little something special: Interview professors from four US universities who are using the Energy Transition Show as coursework, and make the full show available to everyone, including non-subscribers. We ask these teachers about the specific topics they’re teaching, how they’re using the show in their classes, what concepts students find difficult, what misconceptions students have about energy, and how students are reacting to having study materials in podcast form. We also talk with two of the professors about their new energy transition textbooks, which are being published this year.

Is the supply of certain key metals—like lithium, copper, nickel, and cobalt—and “rare earth” metals—like vanadium and indium—potentially a limiter on the progress of energy transition? Or is there enough of them to realize our ambitions? Are they being produced in a sustainable way? How will the geographic concentration of these metals affect geopolitics and trade as the energy transition progresses? How confident can we be about our assessments of their abundance? And how confident can we be about how much of them we’ll need in the future, given the rapid evolution of many of these technologies, and the many alternate ways of producing them? Our guest in this episode brings all of these questions into a whole new focus, and shows why these questions can’t be answered with some back-of-the-envelope calculation. Instead of asking whether there is enough of these metals in the Earth’s crust, he says, or about how they are mined, we should be asking much more sophisticated questions about the chemical industry, the opaque, illiquid markets in which these metals are traded, and the geopolitical implications of their trade.

Building high voltage transmission lines has never been easy, but now it’s arguably both harder than ever, and more necessary than ever, as we seek to unlock the vast potential of wind and solar in the US and ship it to major population centers. But it’s not a business for the faint of heart, as we’ll hear in this incredible story by award-winning investigative reporter and author Russell Gold of the Wall Street Journal. His new book, Superpower, chronicles the story of Michael Skelly, a developer who spent a decade and a great deal of money trying to build five major transmission lines in the US to support the burgeoning wind industry, only to be undermined, deceived, shot down, and ultimately driven to giving up, by people who opposed the lines for their own selfish interests. It’s an amazing story and a great cautionary tale for any prospective transmission line developer, as well as a wellspring of crucial insights that will benefit all who work in energy transition.

As we continue looking for ways to decarbonize our energy systems, we often have to decide whether it’s better to try reworking our market rules so that the markets will do a better job of procuring clean energy, as we discussed in Episode #90, or whether it makes sense to just mandate the procurement of clean energy resources. The former is a job for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), but the latter is the domain of the states. In fact, our guest in this episode, a senior attorney with NRDC and the Sustainable FERC Project, argues that because states are really the only ones with the authority to regulate energy in order to obtain a more environmentally beneficial outcome and combat climate change, their mandates are a necessary pathway to decarbonizing the grid. And that, to some extent, market price distortion is in the mind of the beholder.

Energy transition is happening quickly and disruptively in the transportation sector. But it is generally an open question whether the transition currently at hand is producing socially beneficial results. As we grapple with a sudden influx of new modes of mobility and business models, and contemplate the dawning of an entirely new mobility paradigm, are we just letting technology take us wherever it wants to go, or are we guiding technologies toward sustainable mobility? For that matter, what does sustainable mobility even mean? How can we weigh up all the pros and cons of new mobility modes—not just the social effects like safety and equity, but the environmental impacts, the total impact on the energy system, and the socioeconomic strategies we bring to our urban development and civic planning activities more generally? Can we hedge our bets against sudden and massive dislocations produced by autonomous vehicles? We explore all those questions and more in this episode with a researcher from Oxford University who has studied them deeply.

Can we run the world on renewables alone? Various researchers have tried to model how a given country might run a grid using mostly renewables, oftentimes finding that carbon-negative technologies, advanced nuclear power, and even coal power plants equipped with CCS will be a part of the solution set. But no one has produced a comprehensive model that shows how we can run the world on renewables alone, while accurately modeling the weather and grid conditions at a very discrete scale, at hourly resolution, using data on the renewable resources in each region, and determining how that would work while selecting the least-cost resources… until now. In this episode we speak with a researcher from Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, one of an international team of 14 scientists who have spent the past four and a half years performing research, data analysis, and technical and financial modeling to prove that a global transition to 100% renewable energy is economically competitive with the current fossil and nuclear-based system, and could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy system to zero even before 2050. This first-of-its-kind study outlines how the world could limit warming to 1.5°C with a cost-effective, global, 100% renewable energy system that does not use negative carbon technologies, and provides all the energy needed for electricity, heat, transport and desalination by 2050.

As more distributed energy resources arrive unbidden onto the power grid, they are increasingly requiring us not to just think about new utility business models, but to radically rethink what a utility might look like. What if millions of distributed resources become the dominant resources, and the grid assumes a subordinate role as a residual supplier of energy? What if the control of the system is also decentralized, through the actions of millions of devices? What if the roles of transmission system operators and the distribution system are diminished as their responsibilities are distributed across all those devices? And how will utilities, power market operators, regulators, legislators, and local officials deal with a radical shift in their roles and responsibilities? These are the questions that our guest in this episode—an 18-year veteran of wholesale power market design at the California ISO—thinks about, and he shares those deep thoughts with us in this wonky yet heady discussion.

This is Part 2 of our two-and-a-half hour interview with Tim Buckley, of the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, based in Australia. We featured Part 1 in Episode 91, in which we primarily discussed the future of coal fired power in India. In this second part, we expand on the India story and look more broadly at energy transition across Southeast Asia, and consider the outlook for coal, renewables, and nuclear power in China, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Malaysia, among others. As he did in Part 1, Tim shares with us in this episode a fascinating set of data on the future of energy in Southeast Asia that is oftentimes at sharp variance with the projections that we hear from energy watchdogs like the International Energy Agency. Tim tells a much more hopeful story about energy transition in the developing world. For example: If you think that China’s building more coal plants means that its coal consumption is going to go up, think again! Energy transition is moving ahead, and will move ahead, much more quickly in Southeast Asia than any of our major agencies project, and that is great news for the climate.

The coal power sector in the US is continuing to shrink due to poor economics, but this doesn’t mean we’re retiring coal fired power plants quickly enough to reduce carbon emissions at a rate that achieves our climate goals. So what’s the best way to get rid of coal plants before they reach the end of their expected lifespans, particularly while the Trump administration and the Republican party continue trying to find ways to keep coal plants open? Democratic state Representative Chris Hansen of Colorado has proposed a solution: Refinancing the debt that utilities still owe on their coal-fired plants with cheaper, public bonds, and then shutting down the plants. It’s an idea that would retire coal plants and reduce carbon emissions, save utility customers money, create better investment opportunities for the utilities, and replace that power with cheaper, clean, solar and wind power. Everybody wins! It’s a powerful idea whose time may have come in Colorado, where fossil fuels still make up 78% of the state’s electricity mix, and major utilities in the state, like Xcel Energy, have declared their intention to transition to 100% clean power in the coming decades. Will Hansen’s bill have the right approach to help achieve those goals? We dive into all the important details in this episode and find out!

It has long been assumed that India, China, and other developing countries of Southeast Asia would power their vigorous economic growth for decades to come with coal. We heard over and over that China is building a new coal-fired power plant every three days, and about plans for multi-gigawatt sized coal-fired power plants in India. As long as coal was the cheapest form of power, addressing our climate emergency seemed like a lost hope. But that nightmare is now evaporating thanks to the continuously declining costs for solar, wind, and battery storage. Although there are far too few policymakers (not to mention the major energy agencies, like EIA and IEA) who appear to be aware of it, the future of coal is fading by the day, as solar and wind take the lead as the lowest cost forms of power. And nowhere is this new reality more starkly evident than in India, where a remarkable pivot away from coal has been under way for about five years now, radically reshaping the outlook for India’s energy consumption, and stranding billions of dollars in investments in coal plants that will not be used as expected. At the same time, India is busily electrifying 18,000 villages, pushing forward on the electrification of transportation, and developing demand-side technologies that together are more likely to make India one of the world’s great success stories in energy transition than one of the world’s largest upcoming carbon emitters. Our guest in this episode has been closely watching these markets for three decades, and is one of the sharpest observers of what’s happening in India and Southeast Asia. This episode is Part One of our two-and-a-half hour conversation with him, which mostly covers India and coal. Part Two of this interview will be featured in Episode 93.

This one is for the grid geeks! With the Green New Deal now a hot topic in the US Congress, while wholesale power markets still struggle to figure out how to accommodate new kinds of resources even as coal plants and nuclear plants continue to retire, the question of how wholesale power markets should work, and how they should value new kinds of assets and services, is becoming increasingly urgent. What would a power market look like if it consisted mainly (or totally) of wind and solar, with their zero-marginal-cost power? And if we continue to use out-of-market payments to keep clean but uneconomic nuclear plants operating, what will be the effect on power markets? Will power markets ultimately crash under the weight of accumulated patches and workarounds, or can their design be adapted to new social priorities—like combating climate change—and new kinds of resources, like large-scale storage systems? Can we replace the market construct of locational marginal pricing with something more suited to the new reality of grid power? What kind of policies can keep us on track to support transition and facilitate the evolution of the fuel and technology mix toward a high renewables future? Will FERC Order 841 succeed in opening the doors to storage on the grid? Are real-time prices the future of rate design? And as we move toward a deeply decarbonized grid, what are the implications for our economic system? In this episode, we delve into all those questions and more with an expert who has worked on power markets for over 30 years.

What kinds of energy solutions can really improve the health of people in developing countries, and how can energy transition support them?

The global energy trade is enormously complex, and its geopolitical implications are vast, but they are only made more complex by energy transition. If the US exports gas to Europe and Asia, might you expect it to largely displace coal in their power plants? Think again! What will be the geopolitical ramifications on our relationship with Russia, as we send more of our gas to China and India? And as the US weans itself off of coal, and seeks to export more coal abroad, will it be stymied by energy transition in foreign countries, as well as political impediments at home? And what of US “energy independence?” Does it mean that the US is actually self-sufficient in energy, or even just in fossil fuels, in the sense that we may not need imports anymore? And what is the value of it anyway, especially if it also means increased dependence on export markets abroad? Tune in as we explore some of the fascinating questions about the implications of energy transition on energy trade in this interview, and be prepared to be surprised by some of our guest’s answers!

If utility-scale solar plants could be made to run more flexibly, they could avoid curtailment and play an even larger role in grid power supply.

Are investments in energy transition worth it, or do things like the rebound effect and dirty power grids nullify their value?

The best way to build a renewably-powered microgrid using foreign aid in Africa may be exactly the opposite of what you’d expect.

We talk with an author of Designing Climate Solutions about the best policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and how to design them.

How is Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) coming along, why did they decide to phase out nuclear at a time like this, and when will they get off coal?

Can a large corporation, especially one involved in heavy industry like mining, use more renewable energy and become more sustainable? Ingersoll Rand thinks so.

Dr. David Murphy of St. Lawrence University interviews Chris about principles of energy transition, live from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Forget buying HVAC and lighting systems for your commercial buildings. Building infrastructure-as-a-service offers an exciting new path to energy transition.

Community choice aggregations (CCAs) are rapidly taking over power procurement in California and elsewhere, with both advantages and concerns to consider.

Veteran energy researcher Jonathan Koomey rejoins us for our 3rd anniversary show covering a wide range of topics related to energy transition.