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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and now our climate story of the week, which we do every Tuesday here on the Brian Lehrer Show. In order to beat back emissions by 2050, which is their goal, the Biden administration is betting big on electrification. There are some signs that the US is heading in the right direction already. Electric car sales broke records last year making up almost 6% of all new car sold.

The administration's goal is to make EVs about two-thirds of sales just within the next decade. Also, electric heat pumps outsold gas furnaces last year for the first time ever. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, a tax break is providing billions of dollars to make that transition go even faster but electricity, if you think about it, while great in things like EVs and heat pumps, because it doesn't emit greenhouse gases, isn't itself clean.

A quarter of US carbon dioxide emissions come from electricity generation only second to transportation, and about 20% of electricity is made with renewable energy according to the EPA, only about 20%. To mitigate the worst effects of climate change will need to go electric, yes, but also decarbonize the sources of that electricity at the same time.

Joining us now as our climate segment of the week here on Earth Week itself is what we think is one of the most important, how-tos one of the most important solutions, conversations we can have in a climate segment of the week to talk about the current state of clean electricity and what scientists and the Biden administration are looking at for potential solutions in that direction.

We have Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project DrawDown. Now Project DrawDown is a nonprofit that seeks to help the world reach what they call “drawdown”, the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases actually stop climbing when we stop talking about the rate of increase and start talking about actual decline. Dr. Smith, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us.

Amanda Smith: Oh, thank you for having me. That was a great introduction to a lot of interconnected issues. Glad to talk about this.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Could you start with a little more on how electricity predominantly is made now in broad strokes, how does something like natural gas, let's say get made into electricity?

Amanda Smith: Yes, that's a great question. Here in the US the big sources of energy, the original form that we use to generate electricity tends to be natural gas, coal. Then a lot of these technologies we're talking about when we talk about decarbonizing solar, nuclear power, hydropower, wind, and geothermal. Natural gas, if it's going to be made into power, what happens is it's burned. Pretty much anytime we're recovering energy from natural gas, we're burning it but when we do that at a power plant we do that in a pretty efficient way.

We burn it, we recover the heat, and what happens is we heat up water so that it becomes really hot, high-pressure steam, and that water spins a turbine and as the turbines physically spinning, it's turning a generator which is allowing us to transform that rotation into electricity. That electricity leaves from the power plant goes into the transmission system and ultimately goes out to the distribution system and serves our buildings, our homes, our commercial buildings, and our industry.

Brian Lehrer: When we talk about the power grid, we can sometimes talk about it as this huge unseen infrastructure, but it's actually more of a series of interconnected, smaller grids, right? Can you explain how it all hangs together?

Amanda Smith: Yes, absolutely. It is really a nested web of interconnected systems. If you think about the structure of it, like here in the US we have three big interconnections, but within that, we have different what's called balancing areas. What happens with the balancing areas, you have a geographical boundary and you have an entity who's working with the governments, working with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

They are actually responsible for keeping supply and demand balanced in a certain geographical area. The levers they have to do that are to ask generators to turn on, ask them to turn off, and sometimes even to communicate with the demand side with the people who are using that energy. Also to ask them to change their energy use pattern so that the whole thing stays in balance so that the electricity is reliably there when we call upon it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few questions for our guest, Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project DrawDown on our climate story of the week as we talk about electrifying everything. How much can we, how quickly, and how to produce that much electricity as cleanly as possible because electricity itself, as we said in the intro, isn't necessarily produced in clean ways.

How can we have as much renewable sources of electricity generation, even as we're trying to go more to electricity and less to say gasoline for cars and buildings or gas for stoves and ovens and gasoline for cars. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Is there any consensus on how best to decarbonize electricity? Various news outlets have reported at one time or another that solar and winds seem too unreliable. You need windy days, you need sunny days. You can't exactly predict how much you're going to get when nuclear is expensive and risky in other ways. Hydroelectricity ruins environments in their own ways. How do you see it?

Amanda Smith: Yes, I think all of the issues that you're pointing out are valid. Every form of energy that we can use to generate electricity is going to have some benefits and some drawbacks. We've gotten better at understanding what are the benefits and how do we overcome some of the drawbacks. We've also gotten better at dealing with variability.

That issue of we can only use solar when the sun is available. We can only use when the wind is available. We have learned to integrate those sources better into our grids, and we've learned we do have some options in terms of storage and in terms of demand response on the demand side. The consensus, if I can be bold as to say there's a consensus, would be that there's probably not going to be one single source of energy that comes in and is the magic bullet. It's going to be a combination of different sources.

It's going to vary a lot geographically within the US because we're such a big country and there's so many different places that have different strengths in terms of their resources but we will definitely see solar and wind playing an increasing role over what they have in the past. That's what we're seeing for new generation.

In terms of capacity, new generations about half-solar in terms of what we expect to be put on the grid this year. We do expect that their role will grow and we expect to have a mix of power sources and we expect that to lean more towards these or calling decarbonized power sources. These are things that when you're generating electricity, they're not producing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution as they're producing electricity.

Brian Lehrer: How much is it up to public policy to accomplish that and how much is the market or public interest going to do it?

Amanda Smith: Well, I'm not a policy analyst expert, so I can comfortably say it's really got to be both. It's hard to see a path to success that's entirely policy-driven. That's entirely carrots and sticks in a policy form but we also have to see that the markets aren't going to necessarily change everything on their own.

We're seeing that fossil fuel generation is becoming less economically viable. A lot of that is of course, driven by policy but I think in order for this to happen as fast as we need it to happen, to meet our national goals and to meet our worldwide goals of reaching that point of drawdown when we're not making climate change worse, we need to see this happen very quickly. That means we need everyone on board.

Brian Lehrer: Different areas of the country I see are electrifying at different rates. I have some stats in front of me from the Washington Post and I'll give some of them in a minute but you're based on the West Coast. I wonder if you happen to know how clean is New York state and how clean is New Jersey Energy, the heart of our listening area compared to other states? Does this vary by region right now? The cleanliness by which different places within the United States generate electricity.

Amanda Smith: Yes, it certainly does vary a lot. I looked at New York and looked at that compared with our overall energy use patterns for the US. In the New York electric grid, it's on average, cleaner than what's being generated in the country as a whole. New York has some advantages. I'm in Washington State, we also have this advantage, which is there's significant hydropower resource. There's more power being generated from hydropower within New York State than there is in the US as a whole. New York and New Jersey both have some nuclear generation online.

I think it's a little bit more than the national average of what's generated by nuclear, although New York has had some nuclear retirements, but it looks like they're still on track to meet their electrification goals. Yes, New York is a little faster as a state. I would also point out New York has a really low per capita energy consumption per person. I think that's pretty neat. Those two factors working together bode well for New York as a state.

Brian Lehrer: Is that because almost half the people in New York State live in New York City, and urban living is just more efficient than private home living?

Amanda Smith: Yes. I think that's a really large piece of it.

Brian Lehrer: Back to the issue of the power grid. There are scientists who say that the grids are antiquated in the US, and they would need to be updated or replaced in order to accommodate new streams of renewable energy. Do you think that will be a significant challenge, and will updates be enough to reach emissions goals and all the additional electricity that we're looking at using for climate purposes, as opposed to other sources of power? Will the grid need an overhaul?

Amanda Smith: Yes. The grid is being overhauled as we speak. I would say so. It's a big challenge, and it's happening. We are changing the structure of the grid and the way that we think about managing it and running it. The grid does have to work differently when a lot of the resources that are providing the city are variable. We do need to be making those changes, but I would just point out that it's going to be a challenge to deal with air pollution and the negative consequences of continuing to do things the way that we have been doing them, which is relying really heavily on natural gas and coal for our electricity generation.

We were going to be facing challenges anyway. I would say this is actually a better challenge that we're choosing, before figuring out how to integrate these decarbonized sources into the grid. That opens up new opportunities for us, and as we're talking about, how do we electrify buildings? How do we run buildings in a way that's better, and that's healthier for the people in them?

Then I have some good news in terms of the amount of electricity that we're going to need, which is that there are different paths to electrifying. If we electrify in a way that we look at making our buildings as energy efficient as possible, and we are electrifying with the most efficient devices that are available at the time that we make that switch to an electric device, when we do that, we can really drastically change both the amount of additional electricity that we're calling for, and we can help smooth out the peaks in the electricity that we're calling for. Not asking for really sharp changes in electricity also makes the grid's job easier.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Your expertise is in building science and distributed energy systems. Here in New York City as you know, buildings are a main source of emissions. The New York Times reported last year the city's 1 million buildings generate nearly 70% of the city's carbon emissions because much of the energy for their heating, cooling, and lighting comes from burning fossil fuels. Aside from reforming electricity itself, what are some solutions to decarbonizing buildings that you think are most viable?

Amanda Smith: Yes. What we see within buildings is that the most common direct uses of fuel so I'm bringing in typically natural gas and burning it to provide some service in the building that's usually associated with heating. Either heating-- My space is more comfortable, or water heating or cooking. If we look at all those end-uses, we're really focusing on heating right now, and I think that's the right place to look because it's such a common demand anytime that you have buildings exposed to cold weather, and we know that it's this really big portion of our greenhouse gas emissions.

We have this option now to provide heat using electricity through something that's really really efficient called a heat pump. I think that's one of the most promising thing is is that we're seeing heat pumps increasingly deployed, we're seeing a lot of support for people in figuring out how to make their homes and apartment buildings into heat pump systems. We're seeing that they perform much better than they did even five years ago.

When you look at air source heat pumps, meaning capturing heat from the outside air, dropping it off on the inside air. We're actually able to do that a lot better than we were in the past. I think we're moving in a really good direction there. Those are our big opportunities, heating, water heating, which you can also do with a heat pump, and electrification of cooking appliances.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we are in our climate story of the week here on the Brian Lehrer Show, talking about the challenges of electrifying everything, as society is trying to do as much as possible, and how to produce the electricity itself for that as cleanly as possible with Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project DrawDown. Project DrawDown is a non-profit that seeks to help the world reach drawdown, which they describe as the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases actually stop climbing. Tim in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tim. Thanks for calling in.

Tim: Hi. Good morning, Brian. One of the greatest ironies of the last 100 years is that impassioned pleas in effective activism on the part of environmentalists stopped nuclear power from advancing. It had the unintended consequences of now that trillions of tons of carbon fuels are altering our planet's environment in negative ways. It was unintended, but it wasn't completely unforeseeable. I see a parallel now in the impassioned pleas to stop burning all fossil fuels immediately.

That's equally irrational and will have even worse unintended consequences. We have to phase them out, but it has to be done rationally. It's a cautionary tale, a warning about impassioned pleas, and I'm looking at you, Greta. [chuckles] It has to be done rationally.

For instance, the hysteria against pipelines is completely irrational. They're the safest way to transport liquid hydrocarbons and gaseous hydrocarbons. We're going to be using those so the next 200 years. The best pipeline is a new pipeline that's responsibly located and responsibly maintained and inspected. The anti-pipeline hysteria is not advancing safety or environmental concerns. Because we could be pumping synthetically produced liquid hydrocarbons made at nuclear power plants through that same pipeline.

Brian Lehrer: Tim, I got to ask you the question that half the listeners are probably thinking. Do you work for the fossil fuel industry?

Tim: What about them?

Brian Lehrer: Do you work for the fossil fuel industry?

Tim: Hell no. Fossil fuels are bad for the environment. Coal must be kept in the ground if we're going to continue to live on this planet. Absolutely not but just the passion. Yes, I appreciate I love the passion. I love it. We have to be rational and think about unintended consequences.

Brian Lehrer: Let me invite you to take one step further. You were very clear about the unintended consequences of denuclearizing. That's a real conversation. What do you see though, as an unintended consequence of de-fossilizing?

Tim: Well, energy gets more expensive if we de-fossilize all energy sources now. For instance, if we were to ban gasoline cars, who would suffer? People driving 15-year-old cars and trucks. It's all fine for the people who can afford a Tesla, but for a large portion of the population, there isn't an alternative right now.

Brian Lehrer: Tim, I appreciate your call. Do call us again. Amanda Smith, what about his points?

Amanda Smith: Yes. I would point out that that's why a lot of the people who are talking about electrification so getting electric vehicles, getting fossil fuel use out of our homes. What we're pushing for is when you replace, it's really really important that that get replaced with an electric device. If you're replacing out of need, if your furnace fails in the winter, you're not in a good position to do that. We are trying to get people to think ahead, and plan for, say, a heat pump installation, if that's going to be a good option for them.

Sell that you're not investing in something that, like he pointed out can last for decades. My next car purchase I expect will be an EV. I live in a rural area, and have a personal car, but right now I drive a pretty efficient eight-year-old gasoline-burning car. I guess if it's a comment on political messaging from other people okay, but I think what I see most electrification advocates pushing for is that it's really, really important as we're replacing systems that those systems go electric.

It's important when we're pushing for electrification that we try to do that in a way that's equitable, in a way that's cost-effective. I know that's been really hard in New York. Rolling out Local Law 97 has been tough and there have been a lot of considerations around what are these costs going to be, and how are they going to affect different groups, and how are we going to support them?

It sounds to me, and I'm an outsider, like New York City's thinking about the right things as that rolls out, but there's still challenges to that. I totally agree that it's important that we do this in a way that's affordable for everyone and that gives more people access to clean energy services. We're not limiting anyone's options or taking anything away from anyone. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Local Law 97 that you mentioned is the one with the goal to reduce the emissions produced by New York City's largest buildings by 40% by 2030, which is a pretty fast timeline, and 80% by 2050. This is WNYC FM, HD and AM, New York, WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton, WNJP, 88.5, Sussex, WNJY 89.3, Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio and livestreaming at wnyc.org.

A few more minutes in our climate story of the week for this week, which we do every Tuesday on The Brian Lehrer show. Today talking about how to most cleanly and quickly electrify as much as possible with Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project DrawDown. Here's a tweet that's just come in. This is a great tweet. See what you think.

listener writes, "Currently on an Amtrak from New Jersey to North Carolina, decided against plane, partially for environmental reasons, approaching DC where the train switches from electricity to diesel." Then this tweeter on the train asks the question, "What more can be done to decarbonize trains and convert more lines to electric across the country? Thanks for this segment." Do you know about trains and electrification versus diesel?

Amanda Smith: I love their point and I love that they chose that form of transit, really considering that I can't speak to the specific--

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] "Riding the Amtrak, listening to The Brian Lehrer show on headphones somewhere between New Jersey and Washington DC." That's cool. Hello, whoever you are. [laughs] Anyway, go ahead.

Amanda Smith: Yes, that's pretty cool. I can just really speak to the transportation sector broadly overall, which is that we do need to notice that that's integrated into our built environment, that a lot of our transportation energy we're just spending going between different buildings, and so having clean options for people is really valuable. Having more train options available for people is important.

Like the listener is pointing out, converting those trains so that they use electricity is really important too. I'm sure part of it is going to become more cost-effective as we are using less diesel overall and as we have more clean, affordable energy available as we decarbonize the electricity sector. Yes, I can't speak to the particular challenges associated with that conversion. It's just not an area where I have that deep expertise.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Bob in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bob.

Bob: Hey. I'm all for a fast transition as soon as possible. I've been following the environmental movement since the '70s. I want to piggyback off of what Tim was saying, and it has to do with the nuclear. I remember a friend of mine was pretty highly placed in the nuclear power industry early on, and he had a lot of complaints about the resistance, but he had no answers for the storing of spent rods or possible recycling of spent rods. That was the big sticking point. I'm wondering with batteries, with cars, solar batteries in houses, is there any kind of a plan set up for recycling or disposing of the spent units? Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Great question. Relevant question. Are you there yet on this one, Dr. Smith?

Amanda Smith: Yes, I love this question. I think it's really important as we roll out a lot of devices that are going to have batteries in them, that we think about what's going to happen to those materials. That's easier if we've planned for them in the design of the battery. What's happened in the past is that battery manufacturers might not have had an economic reason to design in a way that we can disassemble and recover those components and use them to make new things.

We are seeing different states try to implement policy around that. I think California has some policy active in that. My state, Washington is working with an extended producer responsibility law, which pulls the people who are selling batteries of certain types in the state of Washington into making sure that there is a recycling system.

That there are options available for people when it comes time for those to be disposed of. I'd really love to see more work in that area. I agree that it's really important and that the spent fuel issue is also something that was a big sticking point for the nuclear industry. Yes, I'd love for us to think about that upfront and I'd love to see what happens as that Washington law comes into effect, I think in the next year or two.

Brian Lehrer: You know what, I'm going to squeeze one more in because that was such an efficient answer, and this is a personal question that maybe a lot of people listening right now have. Richard and Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Richard.

Richard: Good morning, Brian. I've been wanting to have solar put on my roof for years, and every time I fill out a questionnaire online, for example, and then I get 8 million responses from all of these different companies, it's worse than Viagra ads online. How does one go about getting hooked up with solar?

Brian Lehrer: So heavy. Go ahead, Amanda.

Amanda Smith: I understand. I was living in Utah when they rolled out a community solar program, and yes, it can seem sometimes quite aggressive. I get that. Unfortunately, I can't point you to a particular method or a particular installer in your area. If you can go through something like a community solar program that helps because people are banding buyers together and they're working with a limited set of solar installers.

That might be a good option for you. It also might be worth checking with the institution you're purchasing power from. They may have like green power blocks. I know this doesn't get you solar on your roof, if that's really important to you to have that. Maybe that you can buy into renewables as part of an existing program so that you know that you're supporting that. In terms of getting it installed on your personal roof, I'm afraid I don't know how to help you without getting some more details.

Brian Lehrer: Richard, we'll do more segments on that. We've actually done how to go solar in an urban environment segments here, and we'll do more like that. We don't have time to really go into it right now but we'll definitely follow up on this. Of course, there are other places you could find out, but this is one of the things that we do in these climate segments of the week.

Some are on policy, some are on science, like this segment with Dr. Smith, and some are on personal behavior and personal choices and expanding your personal choices. We will definitely get back to that for Richard, and lots of others of you. Let me ask you about one other form of energy that we've hardly ever talked about on this show, but contributes, I think, to the electrification of as much as possible.

Geothermal energy gets a lot less attention than wind and solar. That's because as Reuters recently reported, "Geothermal energy which taps into heat within the earth currently makes up less than 1% of the US energy mix, not from Reuters," but the Biden administration is investing in it now. The energy department told Reuters that geothermal has the potential to generate more than 8% of all US electricity by 2050. For people who've never heard of geothermal energy, how is it harnessed and what are going to be some of the biggest challenges to get [unintelligible 00:30:26] to scale?

Amanda Smith: Yes, let me give you a couple of ways that it can be harnessed. Just first of all, geothermal energy means under the surface of the earth, there's hot rock and probably some hot fluid. That heat energy can be really valuable to us. We can drill down, circulate that hot fluid and use that heat to drive a turbine and drive a generator to make electric power. From the electric power perspective, we don't necessarily care what the heat source is if we have a lot of hot high-pressure steam that's able to turn a turbine, we're able to make that into electricity.

Another option is just to use a hot fluid just to provide heating. One really cool example is the city of Boise Idaho runs a geothermal district heating loop. They're actually circulating that hot fluid in their downtown area. Those buildings can actually use that, run it through heat exchangers with their building and use that to provide heating for free from the earth or their buildings. We're seeing some more interest in this. We haven't talked about it a lot cause it's been a really small portion of our energy use and our power generation overall.

You are, of course, limited by geography. There needs to be that geothermal resource there. We do have teams worked on mapping those out. They tend to be a little heavier in geothermal resource on the western side of the country. Then as we're scaling that up to produce more power, some of the new opportunities are around. Well, first of all, just increase interest in the technology because we want to build out different types of clean energy technologies, but also, in drilling further and reaching hotter and thus more energy dense resource.

Brian Lehrer: There we will have to leave it for this week's climate story of the week. A climate solutions conversation about how to generate as much electricity as possible, as cleanly as possible, and as cheaply as possible with Amanda Smith, senior scientist at Project DrawDown. One more time. Project DrawDown is a nonprofit that seeks to help the world reach "drawdown" the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases we hope actually stop climbing. Thanks so much for coming on. This was great. We really appreciate it. Happy Earth Week.

Amanda Smith: Oh, thank you so much. You too.

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