Latest news with #ClimateWire
Vox
2 days ago
- Climate
- Vox
One thing we can count on to keep ruining our summers
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. Smoke from wildfires in Canada is once again shrouding parts of the United States — cities like Chicago and Milwaukee — with unhealthy air, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Parts of the plume have reached as far as Europe. The bulk of the smoke is forecasted to drift eastward across North America and thin out. As of Thursday afternoon, Canada was battling more than 200 blazes, the majority in western provinces like British Columbia and Alberta, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. In Canada, the fires forced more than 27,000 people to evacuate, but the smoke is 'impacting aerial operations for both suppression and evacuation flights.' This is all too familiar. Canada faced a massive spate of wildfires in 2023 and in 2024 that similarly sent clouds of ash and dust across North America, reaching places like New York City. The burned area this year is a fraction of the size of the regions scorched in 2023, a record-breaking year for wildfires in Canada, but it's still early in the fire season. Canadian fire officials warn that the 'potential for emerging significant wildland fires is high to extreme' and lightning may lead to more ignitions in the next few days. These blazes remind us that the dangers of wildfires reach far beyond their flames, and the threat is growing. Wildfire smoke contains a melange of gases like carbon monoxide, particles of soot, and hazardous chemicals like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that can cause cancer. The tiniest particles in smoke can penetrate deep into the lungs, and even reach the bloodstream, leading to a variety of health problems. When it drifts over a community, it often causes a surge in emergency room visits as people who breathe the smoke suffer strokes, heart attacks, and asthma attacks. There's also evidence that long-term exposure to smoke can lead to a higher likelihood of death from heart, lung, kidney, and digestive diseases. And experts believe the true health burden from wildfires is likely much more extensive than we realize. The harms to health will increase as wildfires become more destructive. Though wildfires are a natural, regular, and vital phenomenon across many landscapes, more people are now living in fire-prone areas, increasing the risk to lives and homes. That increases the odds of starting a fire and means more people and property are in harm's way when one ignites. Decades of fire suppression have allowed fuels like trees and grasses to build up to dangerous levels. And as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels, emitting greenhouse gases and heating up the planet, the climate is changing in ways that enhance fire conditions. So smoke isn't the only pollutant to worry about, and as average temperatures continue to rise, these factors are undoing hard-fought progress in improving air quality across much of the world. However, there are ways to clear the air and avoid some of the worst harms. One tactic is to pay attention to the Air Quality Index in your area and avoid being outdoors when pollution reaches high levels. Wearing a high-quality KN95 or N95 mask can help reduce the damage from polluted air. Blocking air from getting indoors and filtering the air in living areas reduces smoke exposure as well.
Vox
6 days ago
- Business
- Vox
The wild hunt for clean energy minerals
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. The world is hungry for more stuff: televisions, phones, motors, container ships, solar panels, satellites. That means the stuff required to make stuff is in high demand, and none more so than what are known as 'critical minerals.' These are a handful of elements and minerals that are particularly important for making the modern devices that run the global economy. But 'critical' here doesn't mean rare so much as it means essential — and alarmingly vulnerable to supply chain shocks. In the US, the Geological Survey has flagged 50 minerals as critical to our economy and security. And including some among that larger group, the US Department of Energy is focused on 18 materials that are especially important for energy — copper for transmission lines, cobalt for cathodes in batteries, gallium for LEDs, neodymium for magnets in motors, and so on. For governments, these minerals are more than just industrial components — they're potential bottlenecks. If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply, companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down. That's because these minerals are especially vital for so many clean energy technologies. They're essential for the tools used to produce, store, transmit, and use electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. They're vital to building solar panels, batteries, and electric motors. As the worldwide race for cleaner energy speeds up, the demand for these products is surging. According to the International Energy Agency, mineral demands from clean energy deployment will see anywhere from a doubling to a quadrupling from current levels by 2040. But these minerals aren't spread evenly across the world, which could leave some countries bearing most of the environmental burdens from mining critical minerals while wealthier nations reap the economic benefits and other countries get left out of the supply chain entirely. 'A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,' said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at a panel last year. 'For developing countries, critical minerals are a critical opportunity — to create jobs, diversify economies, and dramatically boost revenues. But only if they are managed properly.' Right now, the US is a major consumer of critical minerals, but not much of a producer — a fact that's become an obsession for the Trump administration. The president has signed several executive orders aimed at increasing critical mineral production within the US by relaxing regulations and speeding up approvals for new critical mineral extraction projects. In Congress, lawmakers are mulling spending billions of dollars to build up a critical mineral stockpile similar to the strategic petroleum reserve. Even as the US government takes those steps, the international trade war that the Trump administration itself launched has begun to disrupt the global supply of critical minerals. China is one of the largest producers of critical minerals, particularly rare earth metals like dysprosium and terbium, but it has imposed limits on some of its critical mineral exports in response to President Donald Trump's tariffs, sending prices skyward. The dawning awareness that the critical minerals everyone needs may not be readily available has led countries to redouble their efforts to find more of these materials wherever they can — in the ocean, across deserts, and even in space. In the near term, that means the world will need more mines to expand supplies of critical minerals. And with the market for clean energy poised to expand even further, scientists are trying to find new alternative materials that can power our world without making it hotter. But it will take more time and investment before the plentiful can replace the precious. Why we're hooked on critical minerals Since the list of critical minerals is long and diverse, it's helpful to narrow it down. And one mineral stands out: lithium. The IEA estimates that half of the mineral demand growth for clean energy will come from electric vehicles and batteries, mainly from their needs for this soft, light metal. Depending on how aggressively the world works to decarbonize, lithium use is projected to increase by as much as 51 times its current levels by 2040, more than 10 million metric tons per year. That's because lithium is still the best material to store and release energy in batteries across a variety of applications, from the tiny cells in wireless earbuds to arrays of thousands of cells packed into giant batteries on the power grid. As more cars trade gasoline engines for electric motors, and as more intermittent wind and solar power connect to the grid, we need more ways to store energy. While lithium is not particularly rare, getting it out of the earth isn't easy. There are only a handful of places in the world that currently have the infrastructure to extract it at scale and at a low enough price to make doing so worthwhile, even with ever rising demand. The US produces less than 2 percent of the world's lithium, with almost all of it coming from just one mine in Nevada. The US has about 20 major sites where lithium could be extracted, according to the US Geological Survey, but building new mines can take more than a decade, and the timelines have only been getting longer. Because of their costs and the long-lasting environmental damage they can cause, mining projects have to undergo reviews before they can be approved. They often generate local opposition as well, stretching out project timelines with litigation. But the US is motivated to build this out and there are already new lithium projects underway in places like the Salton Sea in California and the Smackover formation across the southern US. These sites would extract lithium from brine. Could the US replace lithium and other critical minerals with cheaper, more abundant substances? Not easily. 'Substitution is not impossible, but depends on which material,' Sophia Kalantzakos, who studies environmental science and public policy at NYU Abu Dhabi, said in an email. Some materials are truly one of a kind, while others have alternatives that need a lot more research and development before they can step in. For example, there are companies investing in lithium alternatives in batteries, but they also have to build up a whole supply chain to get enough of the replacement material, which can take years. And it's not enough to mine critical minerals; they need to be refined and processed into usable forms. Here again, China leads, operating 80 percent of the world's refining capacity. The bottom line is that there's no immediate, easy answer to the critical mineral supply crunch right now. But there might be solutions that emerge in the years to come. How can we get around critical mineral constraints? These challenges have spurred a wave of research and development. Engineers are already finding ways to do more with less. Automakers like Ford, Tesla, and the Chinese company BYD are increasingly turning toward lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries as an alternative to conventional lithium-ion cells. Not only does the LFP chemistry use less lithium for a given energy storage capacity, it also uses less of other critical minerals like nickel and cobalt, lowering its cost. The batteries also tend to be more durable and stable, making them less prone to catastrophic failure. The US Department of Energy has invested in ways to make lithium-based batteries more efficient and easier to manufacture by redesigning the structure of battery components to store more energy. Researchers are also investigating battery designs that avoid lithium altogether. Chemistries like aluminum ion and sodium ion, as their names suggest, use different and far more abundant elements to carry charges inside the battery. But they still have to catch up to lithium in terms of durability, safety, performance, and production scale. 'I think this lithium-ion technology will still drive much of the energy transition,' said Rachid Amui, a resource economist who coauthored a United Nations Trade & Development report on critical minerals for batteries. It will likely be decades before alternatives can dethrone lithium. Eventually, as components wear out, recycling could help meet some critical mineral needs. But demand for technologies like batteries is poised to see a huge jump, which means the world will have no choice but to grow its fresh lithium supplies. There is some good news, though. Mining is getting more efficient and safer. 'There's so much autonomous technology now being developed in the mining industry that is making mining safer than we could have ever imagined 15, 20 years ago,' said Adam Simon, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Michigan. That's helping drive down costs and increase the efficiency of mineral extraction. The number of known sources of lithium is also rising. KoBold Metals, a mining firm backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is using AI to locate more critical mineral deposits all over the world. The Energy Department is also throwing its weight behind domestic innovation. The department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which invests in long-shot energy ideas, is funding 18 projects to increase domestic production of critical minerals. The program, dubbed MINER, is aiming to develop minerals that can capture carbon dioxide. 'Through programs like MINER and targeted investments in domestic innovation, we're working to reduce reliance on foreign sources and lay the groundwork for an American energy future that is reliable, cost-effective, and secure,' said Doug Wicks, a program director for ARPA-E, in a statement to Vox. There's also a global race to secure more mineral supplies from far-flung places, all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. On parts of the seafloor, there are vast fields of nodules made of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese. For mining companies, the argument is that mining the seafloor could be less damaging to the environment than drilling or brine extraction on land. But the ocean floor is anything but a desolate place; there's a lot of life down there taking many forms, including species that have yet to be discovered. One of the most lucrative areas for sea mining, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, happens to have a rich ecosystem of sponges, anemones, and sea cucumbers. Another factor to consider is that pulling up rocks from the bottom of the sea is inevitably expensive. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone can reach 18,000 feet deep. Hauling those minerals up, shipping them to shore, and refining them adds to their sticker price. 'I think it's interesting and needed because of the [research and development] that it stimulates,' Simon said. 'But economically, there's no company right now who could actually mine the lithium in those clays from the bottom of the ocean.' There are even companies that have proposed mining critical minerals from asteroids. One company, AstroForge, has already launched a test spacecraft into deep space. That's an even dicier business proposition since working in space is even more expensive than trying to mine the bottom of the ocean. But space mining technology is a moonshot — still gestational and decades away from even returning a sample. The companies behind these proposals say that humanity's hunger for these minerals is only growing and it's prudent to start taking steps now toward building up supplies of raw materials in space.
Vox
24-04-2025
- Climate
- Vox
Welcome to the world of triple-digit spring weather
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. A man walks along a road in Karachi, Pakistan, protecting himself amid the region's ongoing heat wave. In April alone, hundreds of millions of people across Pakistan and India have been experiencing scorching temperates. Asif Hassan/AFP via Getty Images We're only midway through spring, yet searing summer temperatures have already started baking some parts of the world. Heat waves are a distinct weather phenomenon where high temperatures linger for days at a time. As global average temperatures climb higher, the frequency and duration of periods of extreme heat are also growing, which is already hurting people around the world. But the human impacts of heat waves also vary depending on their timing. Climate change is leading to shorter winters, earlier springs, and earlier arrivals of extreme temperatures. Heat waves that occur early in the warm season, well before summer sets in, tend to cause greater harm to health. Related The Texas heat wave is even worse because of its timing 'These early events can cause more heat-related illnesses and fatalities than later heat waves in June or July, even if temperatures are similar,' Davide Faranda, a climate scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research studying extreme weather, wrote in an email. There are several factors behind this. One is acclimatization. When winter ends, people are less used to high temperatures at a physiological level. When ambient temperatures are higher than body temperatures, individuals absorb more heat, which can lead to heart and lung problems, first in vulnerable people — the very young, the very old, and those with underlying health concerns — then in everyone. In regions like South Asia, spring is when millions of farmers head outdoors to plant crops, where they can face dangerous temperatures while doing intense physical labor. Gradual exposure to heat over time can help people better withstand it, but without this familiarity, an early season heat wave can pack an unexpectedly strong punch. Heat has a cumulative and compounding effect on the body too when it doesn't let up. Humans acclimatize through infrastructure and behavior as well. Drinking water helps limit the dangers of high temperatures, but someone might not be in the habit of staying adequately hydrated in the spring. A person may not recognize that heavy sweating, light headedness, and severe fatigue are symptoms of heat illness. Many buildings may still be set to heat rather than cooling when the first heat wave of the year sets in. The low availability of air conditioning in the Pacific Northwest contributed to the death toll of a severe heat wave in 2021 that killed at least 868 people. That's not to say that mid- or late summer heat waves aren't dangerous, too. Heat has a cumulative and compounding effect on the body too when it doesn't let up. Spells of high temperatures that last weeks and persist long after the sun has set have proven deadly. To reduce the dangers of springtime heat, it's important to pay attention to weather forecasts and prepare accordingly. That means avoiding direct sunlight, proactively staying hydrated, and taking breaks during high temperatures. Ease into the warm weather. It's also essential to recognize the warning signs of heat-related complications and not to try to push past your limits. South Asia is a window into the future of extreme heat The region spanning Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, and Pakistan is home to more than a quarter of the world's population. It's also where scientists can see some of the strongest effects of human activity on temperature. 'South Asia is one of the regions where the climate change signal in heat waves is particularly strong,' Faranda said. Along with an international team of researchers, Faranda analyzed the factors behind the recent heat wave across India and Pakistan. The group found that events like the severe heat wave in April 2025 are 4 degrees Celsius warmer over the past three decades than they were in the period between 1950 and 1986. The team controlled for other factors that influence temperatures like urban air pollution and changes in land use. The recent scorching temperatures also took place at a time when the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a major driver of global weather variability, was in its neutral phase. In its warm phase, it tends to drive up global temperatures, so seeing this heat wave without this additional boost adds to the evidence that climate change is a major contributor. Humidity is another important driver of heat risk. It can get pretty muggy in South Asia. One of the ways scientists track this is with the wet-bulb globe temperature, a metric that accounts for heat, humidity, and sunlight exposure. For a healthy, young person, the upper survival limit for wet-bulb globe temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Cities in Iran, India, and Pakistan now regularly cross that threshold. Precipitation also appears to be shifting in the region, with more spells of severe rainfall followed by drought. And as the planet continues to heat up, these trends will continue. 'Future projections indicate that heat waves in South Asia are likely to start earlier in the year, last longer, and reach even higher peak temperatures,' Faranda said. While many factors are unique about South Asia, other regions of the world are on the same course. The same pattern of more frequent heat waves earlier in the season is also playing out in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, leading to similar problems. 'These impacts include increased mortality rate, and heat-related illnesses, disruption to local food supply and agriculture, and potential overload of power grids due to increased electricity demands,' Gianmarco Mengaldo, a professor at the National University of Singapore who co-authored the India-Pakistan heat wave analysis. The US is also facing an increase in the number of heat waves, with warming starting earlier in the year. The US is seeing an increase in the frequency, duration, and timing of extreme heat. Environmental Protection Agency It's leading to more complications from extreme heat as well as leading to longer, more intense pollen allergy seasons. Communities can take steps to mitigate the impacts of heat with design elements like green spaces and cool roofs that reflect sunlight rather than absorbing it. It's also critical to limit greenhouse gas emissions to slow the warming of the planet as a whole.
Vox
23-04-2025
- Science
- Vox
Let's not panic about AI's energy use just yet
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. AI is driving demand for data centers that in turn are creating demand for more energy. Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. 'Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,' said Timothy Sherwood, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'When you do any computation, what's happening inside the microprocessor is that there's some one that transitions to a zero, or a zero that transitions to one. Every time that happens, a little bit of energy is used.' This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. When you add that up — across the billions of transistors on chips and then the billions of these chips in computers and server farms — they form a significant and growing share of humanity's energy appetite. According to the International Energy Agency, computing and storing data accounts for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity demand at the moment. With the growth of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies that rely on industrial-scale data centers, that share is poised to grow. For instance, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours while a ChatGPT query consumes 2.9 watt-hours. In 2024, the amount of data center capacity under construction in the US jumped 70 percent compared to 2023. Some of the tech companies leaning into AI have seen their greenhouse gas emissions surge and are finding it harder to meet their own environmental goals. How much more electricity will this computation need in the years ahead, and will it put our climate change goals out of reach? AI is injecting chaos into energy demand forecasts But some of these companies aren't picky about where their power is coming from. 'What we need from you,' former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier this month, is 'energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.' Already, energy demand from data centers is extending a lifeline to old coal power plants and is creating a market for new natural gas plants. The IEA estimates that over the next five years, renewables will meet half of the additional electricity demand from data centers, followed by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. However, a lot of these energy demand forecasts are projections based on current trends, and well, a lot of things are changing very quickly. 'The first thing I'll say is that there's just a lot of uncertainty about how data center energy demand will grow,' said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the tech sector and energy. Here is some context to keep in mind: Remember that data centers are less than 2 percent of overall electricity demand now and even doubling, tripling, or quintupling would still keep their share in the single digits. A larger portion of global electricity demand growth is poised to come from developing countries industrializing and climbing up the income ladder. Energy use is also linked to the economy; in a recession, for example, power demand tends to fall. Climate change could play a role as well. One of the biggest drivers of electricity demand last year was simply that it was so hot out, leading more people to switch on air conditioners. So while AI is an important, growing energy user, it's not the only thing altering the future of energy demand. We're also in the Cambrian explosion era of crypto and AI companies, meaning there are a lot of different firms trying out a variety of approaches. All of this experimentation is spiking energy use in the near term, but not all of these approaches are going to make it. As these sectors mature and their players consolidate, that could drive down energy demand too. How to do more with less The good news is that computers are getting more efficient. AI and crypto harness graphical processing units, chips optimized for the kinds of calculations behind these technologies. GPUs have made massive performance leaps, particularly when it comes to the ability of AI to take in new information and generate conclusions. 'In the past 10 years, our platform has become 100,000 times more energy efficient for the exact same inference workload,' said Joshua Parker, who leads corporate sustainability efforts at Nvidia, one of the largest GPU producers in the world. 'In the past two years — one generation of our product — we've become 25 times more energy efficient.' Nvidia has now established a commanding lead in the AI race, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. However, as computer processors get more efficient, they cost less to run, which can lead people to use them more, offsetting some of the energy savings. 'It's easier to make the business case to deploy AI, which means that the footprint is growing, so it's a real paradox,' Parker said. 'Ultimately, that kind of exponential growth only continues if you actually reach zero incremental costs. There's still costs to the energy and there's still cost to the computation. As much as we're driving towards efficiency, there will be a balance in the end because it's not free.' Another factor to consider is that AI tools can have their own environmental benefits. Using AI to perform simulations can avoid some of the need for expensive, slow, energy-intensive real-world testing when designing aircraft, for example. Grid operators are using AI to optimize electricity distribution to integrate renewables, increase reliability, and reduce waste. AI has already helped design better batteries and better solar cells. Amid all this uncertainty about the future, there are still paths that could keep AI's expansion aligned with efforts to limit climate change. Tech companies need to continue pulling on the efficiency lever. These sectors also have big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chains for these devices, and in the infrastructure for data centers. Deploying vastly more clean energy is essential. We've already seen a number of countries grow their economies while cutting greenhouse gases. While AI is slowing some of that progress right now, it doesn't have to worsen climate change over the long term, and it could accelerate efforts to keep it in check. But it won't happen by chance, and will require deliberate action to get on track. 'It's easy to write the headline that says AI is going to break the grid, it's going to lead to more emissions,' Parker said. 'I'm personally very optimistic — I think this is credible optimism — that AI over time will be the best tool for sustainability the world has ever seen.'
Vox
23-04-2025
- Business
- Vox
Clean energy breakthroughs could save the world. How do we create more of them?
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change. The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad. That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn't be more different. In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren't just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights. So what will come next? That's the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow's energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what's to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future. If you're running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan? To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances. I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Can you define 'breakthrough' or explain how it's different from an incremental advance? A lot of really important innovation has been incremental. We've had amazing 'breakthroughs' in a way with batteries, with wind energy, but it has happened over time. An example of a kind of a breakthrough was fracking, because that was a revolution, but for a long time, everybody ignored the importance of all the various technologies horizontal drilling, shale fracture fluid, subsurface mapping] developing in the background, or didn't think it was going to happen. That one was a big step change when the price, performance, and shale gas field discoveries converged. Whereas with solar, it just kept getting cheaper consistently faster than we expected. One way you can define 'breakthrough' is you can look at what everyone's expecting and see when you do better than that. So breakthroughs are kind of surprises. So perhaps it's better to think of a breakthrough not necessarily as an invention, but rather a point at which a technology becomes viable? Right. Then can you put the recent clean tech advances we've seen into context? Have we seen anything like this before? I think that we've always had a lot of technological change. I don't think it's just around clean energy. If there is some kind of incentive, then energy developers will be very clever at finding solutions. As we realize that renewable energy has a lot of benefits to it, the more we focused on it, the more we were like, 'Whoa, this is 10 times better than anybody thought it was going to be.' With clean energy, a big part of the rationale is its environmental and climate benefits, rather than simply profit. There's sort of a moral motivation baked in. Does that motivation matter? For many technologies, there are always true believers. Most people who get really excited about an invention are not just trying to make a profit. I think they're almost always really into the technology itself. So with renewable energy, people have been excited for a very, very long time. That excitement tided people over for many years when those sources weren't all that profitable. Solar took a long time for it to become great. The reason people focused on it was because of their vision that this has such potential for energy and the environment. So I think that the moral dimension does play a role. With a trade war kicking off, a lot of the raw materials and finished products in clean energy are likely to get more expensive. Is there a chance of backsliding in clean energy progress? I don't think we're going to lose the technology advances. [Development] can slow down. We saw that for offshore wind, with the COVID-induced inflation and higher interest rates slowing the industry down. We're not losing any benefits of the technology though, and in fact it will probably induce new technological change. To me those kinds of things are temporary. Trade wars and stuff like that, they're bad. They will slow things down, but they won't stop innovation. There's also competition against clean energy. You talked about fracking and how that was an unexpected breakthrough. I remember in the 1990s people were talking about peak oil, and then that discussion went away because we just kept finding more oil and more exploitable resources. It seems like those same price and performance pressures on clean tech to improve also apply on the fossil side, and there's still a ton of money and innovation there. Are there any breakthroughs in fossil energy that could counteract progress in clean tech? That is a good point. Yeah, that peak oil thing used to drive me crazy. When it was a big thing, what I kept trying to explain to people that the industry will just innovate. The higher the price of oil gets, the more we're going to figure out how to get oil out of the ground. There could be more innovations in fossil fuels, but where we are in the US, climate change is a very real problem and it's hitting people today. It's not going away. I think that the majority of focus on innovation is going to be things that can help us deal with climate change while living high-quality lives. Being at a university, I see that the young bright students are not dying to get into fossil fuels. Most of them want to build a world that's going to be liveable for them, for their children. That gets back to what you were saying: Does it matter what the underlying reason is for innovating? And I guess when I think of it that way, it does matter. Young people want to make a better world. And so they are excited to go into clean energy, not into dirty energy. How do we start planning for another step change in clean energy? How do we prepare for stuff that we haven't invented yet? Investing in science and engineering is obviously a good idea if we want to have more kinds of scientific breakthroughs. But yeah, given that we don't know what the technology of tomorrow is going to look like, we really want to focus on flexibility and adaptability in the near term. Something that I think is important but not always very sexy or appealing is to streamline the grid interconnection process. Every time a new energy project wants to connect to the power grid they have to get into this interconnection queue. The grid operators have to do a study and see how it's going to affect the rest of the grid. That process is really slow and inefficient; it can take years and years for things to get on the grid. Speeding that up is something that's going to be useful broadly. You don't need to predict if it's going to be enhanced geothermal or if it's going to be new versions of solar that will win out to get that queue working better. Similarly, we need to build new transmission where and when it's needed. It would be independent of where we end up on the energy supply side. Some of these battery technologies are facilitating distributed resources like rooftop solar and microgrids. Thinking about just how to integrate them on the main power grid would be useful. What do you see as the government's role in facilitating this? Certainly investing in science and engineering. A lot of it is also setting goals for specific technologies. It's important because it coordinates the supply chain. That's something that state or federal governments could do if they really have a vision. It doesn't even cost very much money. A lot of it is reviewing and streamlining regulatory processes to make sure that regulation is doing what it should do. What about things like investing in companies or offering financing to startups? One thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of green bonds so that you can borrow money at a lower interest rate when what you're doing is good for the environment. I don't think that involves the government exactly picking companies; it just means you're making this money available if you follow certain guidelines. Permitting risk is a kind of a bureaucratic risk, and the government could reduce that by understanding if there's going to be a huge public pushback in building a certain area rather than every developer going out to do all their own individual work. One example is offshore wind in Europe. There, the state does a lot of work before the developers get there in understanding the specific sites. By the time they allocate the regions to build, they've done a lot of the work that takes a lot of the risk out of it, and then they put it up for bids to private companies. Mechanisms like that can be really useful. For energy project developers, how do you decide whether to use what you can get off the shelf now versus waiting a few years, maybe another decade, for something better? A friend of mine many years ago did some research on that, and basically she found that if things are improving at a pretty fast rate, it's almost always worth it to go ahead and invest in what you have now because you're going to get a lot of value out of it. Yes, it's possible that 10 years from now, it'll be something even better, but you're already getting a lot of value from what you're doing. I don't see many developers waiting around for a better technology. I think we have a lot of good options.
