What's next for clean energy and climate mitigation

In this episode, I have a conversation (IRL!) with longtime energy analyst Ramez Naam about a wide range of nerdy but fascinating topics.

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David Roberts

As I previewed a few weeks back, on Wednesday, June 28, Canary Media held a live event in the downtown Seattle home space of beloved local independent radio station KEXP. It’s a gorgeous space, with a coffee shop and a small vinyl store, well worth a visit if you make it up this way.

In addition to a lively panel about the IRA and plenty of mixing and mingling with a fascinating, diverse crowd of energy nerds, the event featured a conversation between me and energy analyst/guru Ramez Naam.

We had a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from hydrogen to space-based solar power to geoengineering. Then we opened it up to Q&A and got a bunch of geeky questions about grid-enhancing technologies and performance-based ratemaking. It was so fun!

As promised, it was recorded for all you wonderful Volts subscribers. Enjoy.

David Roberts

I just wanted to say before we started, I should have thought in advance how to say this delicately. A lot of us have been to a lot of energy events, a lot of us old hands, and especially in the early years, we got very accustomed to seeing seas of gray hair at said events. And so it's just such a thrill that things have come as far as they have and this room is full of exciting young people doing cool stuff. Makes me feel old, but it's a small price to pay.

Ramez Naam

Are you saying that we're old now?

David Roberts

Yes, I'm afraid, yeah, if you do the math. Also, this is being recorded for my podcast. This will be an episode of Volts. So maybe everybody in the room say hi to Volts listeners at home. You could have been here, but you were too lazy. I'm joined today by Ramez Naam, who is a longtime energy guru I guess would be the word, forecaster, VC guy, now author of books on climate change and Sci-Fi books and other books, speaker, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody I have been looking to for wisdom since I started this back in the dark ages.

So I'm excited to talk just about sort of where things are now that we've been in this game for 20 years and how things have changed and sort of what's next? So the way Mez came to my attention, and I think a lot of people's attention in this world, was a 2011 blog post in which Mez said, here's the rate at which solar is getting cheaper. I'm going to make the bold prediction that it is going to continue doing that, which you'd think wouldn't be that revolutionary of a thing to do. But anybody who knows energy forecasts knows that as long as there has been solar, there have been people forecasting that it's going to stop getting cheaper, that it's going to level out, it's going to plateau.

If you look at the forecast, it's just plateau, plateau, plateau. And the reality is just down, down. And Mez just said, yeah, it's going to go down. And if you just project ahead on existing learning curves, you get what looked like ludicrously optimistic projections, which you then updated in 2015 and then updated again in 2020, and both times found that despite having been decried for ludicrous optimism, prices had in fact fallen farther than your forecast. And you did a similar post on batteries, more or less, with the same structure. So I guess the way since, I think we agree that solar, wind and batteries are going to be the core of the electrify everything century, I guess my first question is just do you think solar is going to keep doing that?

Ramez Naam

Yeah. Well, so first, David, it's awesome to be here. We've been together for twelve years now and we met basically on Twitter, arguing with this stuff back then. So, yeah, in 2011 I wrote a piece for Scientific American, a blog post, and at the time, the IEA International Energy Agency had a forecast for solar costs, said the cost of solar would drop by about half from 2010 to 2050. And my forecast was very naive. I'm not that smart. I was very lucky. I came from tech, where we have Moore's Law, and so I just applied the very same sort of very dumb learning model to solar.

And because I didn't know enough about energy to know how I was going to be wrong, it worked, more or less. So my forecast was the cost of solar would drop about a factor of ten to 2050, and it actually dropped twice as fast as I thought it would. And again, there were various things wrong in that model and I've updated them since and found where the errors are, I think. Will it keep getting cheap? The future is uncertain, but the odds are yes. So my personal forecast is the cost of solar will drop by another factor of four by the time solar is about a third of all electricity generation on Earth, something like that.

Now, could it be twice as fast? Maybe that's pushing it. Could it be half that rate? Yeah, but it's already the point, so I think it is clean electricity, especially solar, and now batteries have gone through, they're entering their third phase. The first phase was all of history from the 1970s to 2010, 2015, they were in their first phase. That was totally uncompetitive, totally policy dependent. Then with a second phase where new electricity from solar to wind became cheaper in some parts of the world than building new power from gas and coal, at least during the hours of the sun shone, or that the wind did, and that's their second phase cost competitive, and now they're into their third phase.

We've seen this like next era, started saying this in 2018, 2019, they hit this phase where the cost just on a pure kilowatt hour basis of, let's assume new solar, new wind would be cheaper than the operational cost of an already built coal or gas power plant. And that's happening. That happened in Indiana, it happened in Texas. Again, it doesn't deal with intermittency and what you do when the sun goes down and so on. But it's on a bulk electricity basis and there's every reason to believe this will continue. Now, solar is the fastest of these technologies.

Batteries are nearly the same pace. Wind is like half the pace. And wind has various problems, doesn't scale as fast. Hydrogen electrolyzers are going to look like batteries. I think. Batteries and EVs, EVs are still in their first phase. They're still more expensive than gasoline cars, but they are plunging in price and growing in scale at twice the pace of solar. So I do think there's lots of reasons, not in every single clean tech, but in those and the ones we make in factories, mass produce in high volumes, simple single part items, if you can, that those will have a very, very rapid learning rate for decades to come.

David Roberts

Good stuff. So, one of the big questions about the electrify everything model is wind and solar variable. Even with batteries, the batteries we have today, you can get two, four, maybe six, eight hours out of lithium-ion batteries, but you still have variability to deal with. And so, there's this idea that sort of you're going to get to, depending on who you ask, 60, 70, 80, 90%, and you're going to have to fill in the remainder with something else. And it seems to me whether that's 60% or 90% depends a lot on just how cheap sola