As Congress struggles to pass a spending bill that includes some of the biggest climate legislation the U.S. has seen, there’s another big hurdle the country needs to clear to make big moves on climate change —the electric grid.

In this episode, reporter Elena Neale-Sacks talks to energy policy expert Steve Weissman, environmental scientist Grace Wu, and energy equity researcher Daniel Raimi, to better understand how the grid needs to change to better adapt to the effects of climate change and mitigate future effects.

Transcript

Noah Cole: [00:00:01] Hey, Amy.

Amy Benziger: [00:00:01] Hey, Noah.

Noah Cole: [00:00:02] Today we're talking about climate change.

Amy Benziger: [00:00:05] We have the most progressive president on the environment in decades, but we still can't seem to get anything done on the local or federal level.

Noah Cole: [00:00:12] It's easy to blame the lack of progress on right wing holdouts in Congress, and that is a big part of the equation. But it's not the focus of today's episode. After listening to the experts on today's podcast, one thing should be clear. There are a range of tradeoffs at every step of the way that well-intentioned actors are considering.

Amy Benziger: [00:00:30] So today, our reporter Elena Neale-Sacks is breaking those tradeoffs down for us. You'll hear from a UC Berkeley professor who's going to lay out the fundamentals of the electric grid.

Noah Cole: [00:00:38] An environmental scientist whose work analyzes the effects of energy infrastructure on land use and wildlife.

Amy Benziger: [00:00:43] And a researcher focused on the legacy of environmental racism.

Noah Cole: [00:00:47] Let's kick it over to Elena, and we'll be back at the end of the pod with some thoughts. I'm Noah Cole.

Amy Benziger: [00:00:51] I'm Amy Benziger, and this is Talk Policy To Me. Today, we're talking trade offs and the electric grid.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:01:06] We're starting off the episode talking to Steve Weissman, a lecturer at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, who worked at the California Public Utilities Commission for 30 years. I wanted to talk to Steve to better understand the grid's history, how it works, and how climate change has shifted the way we think about energy.

Steve Weissman: [00:01:27] It's really been over the last 140 years or so that we've evolved to the grid that we have now. Initially, when there was electricity needed for some type of of commercial process, then the company itself would would get a generator and create the power that they needed. When it became commercial, you still had had power being provided on pretty much of a neighborhood basis. There'd be one small generator and some poles and wires delivering the power to people within that neighborhood. Over the course of time, as you had more and more of these small generating companies doing business, they started to combine into one larger company. And as the technology improved, we learned how to have much larger power plants, which nobody would really want to have close to where they live or work. And so they they were put in a distant location. We determined that you could have high voltage lines that can carry the power in to where people live and work.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:02:26] OK, I'm going to pause here for a minute because these high voltage lines, or transmission lines, are a super important part of the conversation when it comes to adapting the grid to better withstand the effects of climate change, as well as making it more reliant on renewable energy and less reliant on fossil fuels.

Steve Weissman: [00:02:45] Not all parts of the country are equally blessed in terms of strong wind or a lot of solar energy available. And so there's a desire to be able to move this power longer distances to serve people in other locations. Solar and wind are intermittent. The wind blows when it's going to blow and the sun shines during the daytime. And yet people need power at many other times when those resources aren't available. The more you can spread out the resources across a broad region, the greater reliability you can have because the clouds will roll by or or you may be in a different time zone so people's needs for power at a particular hour may be different. And so this has made the notion of building out the transmission grid to move power long distances a lot more appealing.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:03:35] And this is where tradeoffs come into play. In one camp, people argue it would be way more cost effective to build more transmission lines to get electricity from point A to point B, to take advantage of the natural cycles of solar and wind power, especially because we still haven't found a great way to store energy and save it for later. But there's another camp that wants to bring the focus back to localized power sources.

Steve Weissman: [00:04:01] One vision is to make buildings energy neutral. You build a new building, make it very energy efficient, maybe put solar on the roof and maybe have some some battery storage. And hopefully the building basically takes care of itself. What normally happens is every time you create a new building, it creates a new burden for the greater grid. So the extent to which we can have new construction incorporating these, these opportunities for self generation and greater efficiency, and the more we can retrofit existing buildings to be able to do the same thing, the less we're going to have to rely on these long distance lines. But it also provides the opportunity that if there's a blackout in the broader grid, that that particular location can be isolated or islanded from the major main grid and continue to provide service to people.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:04:57] I wanted to know, what's a situation where the grid would experience this kind of shutdown.

Steve Weissman: [00:05:02] In a place like California, where you have the potential for these dramatic wildfires. We've all experienced these public safety power shutoffs or times when involuntarily the grid goes down as a result of of severe conditions. If people could have their own system to use, then they have their own form of reliability. We talk about combining the ability of various people in a particular area to to have rooftop solar, to be able to share storage, et cetera.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:05:36] All right, so that example has to do with adapting the grid to better deal with the effects of climate change we're already seeing.

Steve Weissman: [00:05:44] Adapting the grid to a changing climate requires a recognition that hotter temperatures and lower supplies of water in some areas, and flooding in other areas, all three of those things can have a dramatic impact on the ability of particular generating resources to function. In the West, we rely significantly on hydroelectric power. But this year, for instance, the Oroville Dam, one of the major dams, is at about 25 percent of average and average isn't even full capacity. So it's really reached a point where it may not be able to generate electricity at all and where it can produce electricity, there's going to be less there to provide to the grid than there would have been otherwise.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:06:30] There's another piece of the puzzle too: changing the grid to prevent the worst case climate scenarios. Also known as mitigation.

Steve Weissman: [00:06:38] Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is another critical component, of course, and there are tremendous opportunities related to the electric grid that come in two flavors. One is it's possible to take a lot of things that generally rely on fossil fuels, like transportation, and electrify them so that they won't be directly burning fossil fuels anymore. But then the other important flavor is you can take that grid and decarbonize it. Try to do everything you can to eliminate the use of fossil fuels for generating electricity. And so then what you've done is you've created a much greater reliance on the electric grid, but it's going to be a cleaner grid providing a product that's going to be more favorable for the environment.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:07:19] So, with a baseline understanding of the technology of the grid, I wanted to understand the decision-making behind where that technology goes and what happens when it's installed. So I called up Grace Wu, an assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. Grace's work has focused on the impacts of clean energy infrastructure on land use and conservation efforts. And she co-founded this tool called the Map R-E Initiative.

Grace Wu: [00:07:45] The Map R-E initiative is essentially a way to help policymakers, decision makers plan where to put these types of wind and solar and transmission lines, and these criteria really need to be based off of who lives there. So, you know, is it a community member? Is it industry like, you know, a coal mining plant that needs this electricity? We need to bring all these different voices to the table and consider all of their needs when siting huge landscapes of infrastructure.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:08:25] Just a quick note. Grace used this word "siting" a lot when we talked. It just refers to the placement, or site, of some type of energy infrastructure, like a transmission line, wind farm, that sort of thing. If you already knew that, cool. Now back to Grace.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:08:40] Could you kind of tell me just a bit more about your research on the impact of clean energy infrastructure kind of in general?

Grace Wu: [00:08:48] So the enormity, the scale and the pace of this transition and the transmission, the power plant infrastructure that's required to achieve this is entirely unprecedented and will have significant impacts on our land resources because all of this infrastructure needs to be sited somewhere and where that somewhere really dictates the ecosystem impacts, the community and social impacts, job implications. So the geographic and spatial component of this transition is extremely important and has, you know, social, environmental, economic ramifications.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:09:33] This research is clearly very interdisciplinary. So what are kind of all the different fields of study that come into play?

Grace Wu: [00:09:43] Academically, we work with models, but from a practical perspective, trying to use the results of the, of the research, we work really closely with energy planners. So the Public Utilities Commission, for example, at the state of California and the California Energy Commission, they they work together, these energy principles within the state, to implement these short term energy plans that ideally eventually achieve these mid-century ambitious targets. And so our, my goal in my work is to improve upon their planning process in a way that helps us integrate a lot of important spatial information, and namely, from my perspective, this ecosystem impacts into that process so that we can plan with those considerations.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:10:37] So you mentioned that part of what you do is collaborating on finding kind of what are some of the best and worst places to build infrastructure? So what are some of the best and worst places?

Grace Wu: [00:10:49] We really are trying to target what we call low impact areas. These are brownfield locations, ideally, or areas that have been previously degraded by prior land use like agriculture.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:11:07] Another quick, explanatory comment here. A brownfield location is an urban planning term for any previously developed land that is not currently in use, and Grace said there are two primary criteria for identifying a brownfield location. The first is some kind of land degradation, so think abandoned farmland that was flooded. The second is somewhere that's close to a power plant that already has transmission lines to make sure there's as little destruction to the land as possible.

Grace Wu: [00:11:35] Bad places, worst places are what we would call greenfield development sites. So these are areas that have had very little human impact, and we want to maintain the quote unquote intactness of these landscapes because it has ecological value. There's very little intact landscape actually left. And so any incremental damage that we do to those landscapes is a fairly large impact on the whole, ecologically speaking. So it's not in terms of the absolute, you know, acres damaged, but it's really we've kind of already brought it to the brink and now we're pushing it even more in terms of of available habitat.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:12:29] Yeah, I'm curious, is there a lot of differing ideas about how to go about this or is there a good amount of consensus in terms of like, "all right, this is what we need to do. This is where we need to do it. Let's go."?

Grace Wu: [00:12:43] Yeah. The conflict that you're mentioning, it's got multiple names now. So there's a green versus green, that's been coined and then the Green Civil War, because this is really kind of infighting between people who really want renewable energy development from a climate perspective, and environmentalists who are really thinking about land use change like I am who are more traditionally from a conservation background. But nonetheless, we're all in this green camp together.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:13:16] Can you kind of talk a bit about comparing the impact of the current grid versus some kind of predicted or possible impact of a cleaner grid?

Grace Wu: [00:13:29] Yeah. So it would be helpful to bring in some numbers to give you a sense of the scale of this impact. So what we're seeing in the Western states, some preliminary analysis has shown that we need to increase the transmission infrastructure by between 50 to maybe 80 percent. I should also add that the location of the power plant matters for the transmission impacts. As I said earlier, it's not just the distance, but if you cite a power plant in a very pristine or intact landscape, you're you're going to have to put up a new transmission line, presumably much longer, because that area is relatively underdeveloped.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:14:13] OK, OK. We know we need to increase the size of the electric grid. So I asked Grace, how does that happen?

Grace Wu: [00:14:21] Oftentimes, people refer to this problem as a chicken and egg issue because we don't know what should come first. Should we put the power plant there and then plan the transmission? But then transmission takes so long, like five to 10 years. We really need to put the transmission there before putting the power plant. But then who do you, what do you incentivize first? Because project developers are independent power producers, right? We can't dictate where they should really go. But then transmission planning, especially the interstate, is a multi jurisdiction, this very difficult, convoluted process of of multiple dozens upon dozens of landowners involved. So it's challenging just to get one line, you know, sited. And even though I said, you know, 50 to 80 percent, that's dozens upon dozens of large lines that will need to be sited by mid-century to achieve these goals. So yes, there's a lot of transmission. We still need a lot more, but we built all that transmission in the last, you know, 60, 70 years. We're going to have to do that in a much shorter amount, half that amount of time.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:15:31] So along with Grace and Steve, I talked to one more person for this episode. And if you're thinking, OK, Elena, you must be about to explain how all these puzzle pieces fit together, not quite. There are still more tradeoffs, and a big one is that both the tech and environmental footprints of the grid are going to have a human impact too, especially when it comes to equity.

Daniel Raimi: [00:15:54] My name is Daniel Raimi, I am a fellow at Resources for the Future. I also direct our Equity in the Energy Transition Initiative.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:16:03] Daniel's work focuses on making sure that in this race to net zero, we don't leave people and places behind.

Daniel Raimi: [00:16:10] So we all know that we need to reduce emissions quickly and deeply, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other air pollutants, to avert the worst impacts of climate change and to reduce the burdens on public health from energy use across the economy. We also know that it's not easy to do that and that doing so has the potential to create new challenges. For example, transitioning quickly to clean energy has the potential to raise energy costs for consumers. And so it's important that as we reduce emissions, we don't at the same time increase the energy burden for low income households and others that might struggle to pay their energy bills. In addition, there are many communities around the United States where fossil fuels provide an economic backbone in terms of jobs, in terms of tax revenues for schools and roads and bridges. And as we transition away from those fuels, it's important that those communities are able to succeed in the future and that communities that currently rely on, let's say, coal mining or coal fired power plants or oil production or oil refining or even natural gas production, looking forward can have more diversified economies and more diversified sources of public revenue so that they can develop new economic drivers as fossil fuels recede into the background.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:17:43] Something else Daniel brought up while we were talking is that each local context is different when it comes to the clean energy transition.

Daniel Raimi: [00:17:51] The issues that are experienced in, let's say, Appalachian coal communities are really different from those that you would see in the Permian Basin in West Texas or the Four Corners region in New Mexico, or, you know, the coal fields in Wyoming or Kern County in California, which is the leading oil producer in California. And so every local context is different, which means it's really hard to find a one size fits all solution. What the federal government has started to do in the Department of Energy and what our research has found is that the most successful approaches are likely going to rely on bottom up approaches, that is local experts, local economic development professionals, local businesses identifying what is going to succeed for their communities and then the federal government can help empower and enable those local solutions to grow. I think it's pretty clear that a one size fits all top down approach from Washington, D.C. First of all, it's not going to work. And second of all, it's not going to be welcomed in many of these communities where there's already a healthy skepticism of the federal government. In the past, we have not done a good job of siting infrastructure in a way that is equitable. The legacy of environmental injustice and environmental racism is all around us, particularly in cities. And so we need to make sure that the siting of this new infrastructure does not overly burden certain communities. The last thing I would say is that we can't forget about tribes. There are a substantial number of sovereign tribes in the United States where fossil fuels play a major role in the local economy. This is true, particularly in the Southwest, but it's also true in parts of Wyoming, North Dakota, other parts of the United States. And so tribes are also going to need to identify their own strategies for economic diversification. And those are probably going to look a little bit different from what you would see at the county or state level as well. And then again, the federal government, I think, can be supportive of tribes in those efforts.

Elena Neale-Sacks: [00:19:57] What are some of the specific primary concerns you have about the kind of current trajectory of the energy transition?

Daniel Raimi: [00:20:08] Oh, we have a lot of challenges right now. One big challenge is just the political environment is very difficult to to achieve the emissions reductions that we need, particularly in the United States. And another thing that worries me is that often when we do energy policy in the United States, our main form of energy policy is done through the tax code and it's done through subsidies. We subsidize every major energy source that there is in the United States. We subsidize oil, we subsidize gas, we subsidize coal, we subsidize wind, we subsidize solar. We subsidize electric vehicles. We subsidize carbon capture and sequestration. And you know, a more rational energy policy would not just subsidize everything, but it would also tax things that we don't like. Carbon, in particular, a carbon tax or a cap and trade system is the solution that, you know, most folks would say is ideal. Is it politically feasible? Not right now. Might it be politically feasible in the future? I think we can hope so, and we can try to push towards that. The end result of subsidizing everything is you get more of everything. And so when you look around the world at our global energy system, we have been adding to the energy system over time. We essentially use, you know, as much coal as we ever have in the world today. We use more oil than we ever have. We use more natural gas than we ever have, we use more wind, we use more solar, we use more nuclear. And so looking forward, we need to do more than just add to the energy system. We also need to start taking stuff out of the energy system, and our policies today are not really enough to get us there.

Noah Cole: [00:22:12] Those of you that made it to the end, thanks for staying with us.

Amy Benziger: [00:22:15] This is complicated.

Noah Cole: [00:22:17] Right, and complicated in so many ways, just as we suggested in the intro. Technologically, politically, environmentally, the list goes on, and the major looming question is how this is going to get solved on the U.S. national stage and even local stage. So Amy, time for a prediction. A year from now, what's going to happen?

Amy Benziger: [00:22:35] Well, this is less of a prediction and more of a dream. But man, do I hope Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema leave the Democratic Party. We've got a president who's making climate change a priority for the first time, so something's got to give in that a handful of folks have the power to stop that progress in its tracks.

Noah Cole: [00:22:50] This is a tough issue. So let's stay in that dreaming mindset. What I hope is that we're talking about this as more of a local issue next year. Steve spoke about the value of a locally controlled grid, while Daniel spoke about environmental racism on the local level. There's a long history of Black and brown movement leaders doing environmental justice work in their own communities. So I hope that a year from now, their voices are more uplifted in the conversations around climate and energy.

Amy Benziger: [00:23:29] Talk Policy To Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.

Noah Cole: [00:23:35] Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.

Amy Benziger: [00:23:40] Elena Neale-Sacks produced and edited this episode.

Noah Cole: [00:23:42] The music you heard today is Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Mesiti-Miller.

Amy Benziger: [00:23:46] I'm Amy Benziger.

Noah Cole: [00:23:47] And I'm Noah Cole.

Amy Benziger: [00:23:48] Catch ya next time.