Why Is Texas Beating California on Wind and Solar?
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There's a common perception that democracy ends with a battle, soldiers in the streets, a coup d'etat, the fall of a government. But we know that democracy can be lost one little step at a time. We've reported on it and lived through it. And when we look at America today, right now, we see a place where the slide to autocracy has already begun. It's not some distant future, it's the present.

I'm Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. I'm Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. We're the hosts of a new podcast from The Atlantic, Autocracy in America. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If Democrats care more about the climate than Republicans, then why is Texas, not California, the leader in renewable energy?

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis, and this is an episode about a topic I've reported on for years, why it's so hard to build clean energy infrastructure in Democratic-run states. From talking with policymakers, issue groups, advocates, and experts, I've become convinced that our clean energy transition is seriously at risk if we don't make it much easier to build renewable energy technology.

On both wind and solar, Texas is now beating California. Why is that? For a while, Texas had led on wind, but sunny California had led on solar. That's no longer. ERCOT, which is the grid operator for basically all of Texas, announced at the end of last year that it had installed enough solar to power nearly 3.7 million homes during times of peak electricity. That's about 18,000 megawatts of solar, roughly 1,000 more than California.

After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act two years ago, renewable energy production became much cheaper. Now, not only had we solved many of the technological barriers to a clean energy economy, we'd helped address the financing ones too. But even in the face of all that science and money, there were questions. How much of anything would actually get built?

The reason for these questions is that building something, particularly something as big as utility-scale solar or wind, is about more than just knowing how to do it and having the money for it. You also need the government's permission by going through what's called the permitting process. And this process, it's broken. At least in my opinion.

In blue states like California, policymakers say they want to build renewable energy, but they make it really hard to do so out of a fear that the development may have unwanted impact on homeowners or the environment. But in red states like Texas, the attitude is often anything goes. The bias is towards building things, even if the policymakers aren't particularly in love with wind or solar or whatever it is that's being built.

Right now, there's a bill before Congress to help streamline the permitting process. And environmental groups like the Sierra Club have come out against it, claiming that it steamrolls communities and fast-tracks polluting projects. It's an open question whether Democrats will continue to be pro-climate when it comes to spending money or investing in technology, but not when it actually comes to building the necessary infrastructure.

My guest today is Jesse Jenkins. He's a professor and engineer at Princeton University, where he leads the REPEAT project that helps guide policymakers with up-to-date predictions and reports about renewable energy.

Jesse, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you for a bunch of reasons, but today we're here to talk about why it is that Texas has been better than California at building renewable energy. I think that this is something that's kind of been slow rolling in the background for a while, but what explains this clean energy boom in Texas? What's going on there?

Yeah, we should also add that they've been the longtime leader in wind power development as well. So they have the most installed wind capacity in the country as well in Texas. So number one in solar and wind now.

I mean, I think there's a few things going on here. It's important, I think, first to just acknowledge the natural resource endowment. Texas does have more land area, lower population density, and more high-quality wind and solar sites than you would find in California. I mean, obviously, California, known for its sunshine, has excellent solar resource potential in a lot of the state, but it's harder to build large-scale, utility-scale solar farms in higher population density areas.

And there just isn't anywhere near the kind of wind power potential in California as there is in West Texas, where you start to get into the, you know, great open plains and, you know, really high wind speeds that you find up and down the middle of the country. So part of it is that, you know, the resource endowment is just a bit better in Texas, and that'll kind of give them a leg up over California and many other states.

But I think the other major difference is the kind of attitude towards energy development in the state of Texas and, you know, for landowners and others in the state. You know, it's just it is the energy capital of America and it has a, you know, all of the above, all sources of energy are, you know, good sort of mentality to it that has left the state, I think, and, you know, both at a cultural level and also at an institutional level,

with a mentality and a footing that is designed to build stuff and to extract energy and to make money, which isn't exactly the primary footing that California is on. It's much more focused on protecting the quality of the environment and the quality of life of residents and other sorts of concerns, which tends to lead to less development and more red tape and process and, in many cases, legitimate constraints on development.

The other factor I would say is the grid operator in Texas. Texas is its own separated grid from the rest of the country. That makes it unique in the continental United States. It has chosen not to interconnect with the broader eastern and western grids that span most of the rest of the country, and it does so to avoid federal regulation.

So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it regulates interstate electricity and gas markets, has jurisdiction via the Interstate Commerce Clause in the Constitution. And so by not participating in interstate trade and electricity, Texas sort of carves itself out of that jurisdiction. But how does that help it speed up?

Yeah, I don't think it's as important, you know, that it's its own separated grid. It's not under federal regulation. But I do think it's important that it means that ERCOT can pursue sort of its own unique style of electricity market. So it's much more like free market approach. Yeah, it is. And that, I guess, has an indirect impact. I mean, there's a couple of things there. One is it makes it a lot easier for wind and solar to come into the market whenever they're profitable. Right.

without having to go through some of the extensive state-level regulation that we see in the Southeast or the Western states where utilities are still vertically integrated, meaning they're really subject to regulation from top to bottom, generation, transmission, distribution, and retail are all kind of under one regulated monopoly. And so they're able to kind of adapt to market trends faster in this sort of market free-for-all context in Texas.

And then the second thing is that because they don't have these organized capacity markets,

It's easier to interconnect to the transmission system in Texas than it is everywhere else. And can you explain what transmission is first? Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking about a wind farm out in West Texas or a solar farm, you know, in South Texas, you've got to connect that to the bulk transmission system, the high voltage wires that you might see running along the highway or, you know, across town that brings the power from those large generators to cities and other areas where people are consuming electricity.

And so you can't get to your customer unless you can connect to the grid. And the regional grid operators, in this case ERCOT, are in charge of that process. It can be hard to know whether we're talking about

a bottleneck that is the most important problem. It's a bottleneck that is, you know, just the easiest thing to solve or is, you know, the politically attractive thing to poke at right then. So when we're thinking about why it is that California has begun to lag behind Texas, like what are the top issues that you think that state is facing?

Yeah, you really nailed that. It's very hard to tell because it's a bit like, you know, you remove one obstacle that is the current longest pole in the tent, or you hope it is at least, and then the next constraint right behind it starts to bind. You know, there's just a lot of processes to go through now, you know, environmental review if you're on federal land or have anything to do with the federal government, you have to do the National Environmental Policy Act's, you know, review process. So there's just all these different processes. And it's actually fairly hard for me at this stage to know

you know, which of those is the most binding? And if you could cut it in half, would that double the pace of development or would some other challenge just rear its ugly head immediately after that and it would only get, you know, 5% faster? Yeah. I think in order to know that, and this is a research project I've proposed a couple of times but haven't been able to do, I do think you'd have to like sit down with industries and it's different in every type of technology, every industry.

and then think really carefully about where you might be able to streamline and combine processes or remove dependencies that slow things down so you can move more in parallel and just speed the whole process up. And I think that in general, the red states have put up less process than blue states.

So I feel like a lot of this conversation is even happening because of the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. I think I first came across your work when there were a bunch of questions around whether the clean investment following the Inflation Reduction Act was effective.

actually going to result in a bunch of things getting built on the timeline we needed in order to meet our net zero goals. I remember seeing your lab at Princeton, your findings that, you know, over 80 percent of the potential emissions reductions delivered by the IRA would be lost if

if we weren't able to expand transmission lines at a much faster rate than we were building them. And transmission, obviously, that's something that's beyond just individual states. They cross state borders all the time. But you have recently done also a report on where we stand because those findings were just kind of right after the IRA came out. And you guys kind of did a level set like, hey, okay, the IRA has been law for a couple of years now. What is the state of clean investment today?

in the country. And you're really worried. You find that wind and storage are falling really short of the projections that your team made. So what's causing that? Are there differences between Republican and Democratic states in your findings? Were you able to disaggregate that? Or what is actually causing us to fall behind our clean energy investment goals after

all this money's been pumped in. - Yeah, so what we highlighted when the Inflation Reduction Act passed is that what it basically does is put clean energy on sale, right? It's like Black Friday shopping, you get 10 to 50% off, basically all of the clean energy technologies you might wanna build.

And that is really- It's like Black Friday every day. Yeah, exactly. And that's really important because otherwise we're not really valuing the fact that clean energy is clean and dirty energy is dirty and it has cost to society, right? It has air pollution and it exacerbates climate change and has other environmental impacts.

And so if we're not going to price the dirty stuff, you know, to account for that environmental and social impact, we have to make the clean energy stuff more valuable. And, you know, obviously it's a lot easier political sell to say we're lowering the cost of all energy by subsidizing clean energy than we're raising the cost of all energy by, you know, taxing or penalizing dirty fossil fuels. And so that's the direction that Congress, you know, headed, right? That's why it's not called the inflationary.

Increase Act. Yeah, exactly. And so that's a necessary condition. It's just not sufficient, right? So, you know, if it didn't make economic sense to build all these clean energy projects, then we wouldn't care much about whether the permitting system is, you know, designed to build stuff or, you know, whether we can interconnect projects fast enough because no one would be trying to build them.

So what we did was we solved one really important big problem, which is that now it is basically just good business sense to go build wind and solar, to build batteries, to retrofit your home with a heat pump or to switch to an EV. All of that just makes good financial sense now. You don't have to be like a greenie environmentalist to do it. You just do it because of the pocketbook.

issues. So it's like you're we've removed the financial constraint. Maybe now we're like moving on to the permanent. Yeah. And now the question is, OK, all these people want to go build stuff and we're electrifying our homes and increasing electricity demand on the other side. How do we do that? You know, we're a country that built most of its major energy infrastructure out in the 1940s through or 1930s through the 1970s or so. And, you know, that was the period that we were building a lot of the modern infrastructure in the country.

And we have not really grown at anywhere near that pace since then. There was another period of slightly slower growth in electricity infrastructure from the late 1970s to about 2005. And since then, demand for electricity has basically been flat across the country for nearly 20 years.

And now we're in this mode where now we have to build a whole bunch of stuff and keep up with now what is likely to be steadily growing electricity demand from EVs and heating electrification and also data centers and AI and manufacturing plants that we're building. And we just don't really have a national institutional framework for building at scale anymore. We did in the post-war boom era. It had a lot of legitimate downsides and problems, right? I mean, it was...

We built the highway system in a way that disenfranchised poor and black and brown communities and drove right through the middle of many of their neighborhoods. We have significant environmental impacts. We had unintended impacts of pesticides on whole food chains, all that classic stuff that gave birth to a lot of the systems we have in place now to contain development.

to prevent it from these sorts of impacts. But what that's done is it's transformed us from a footing where we were building America to a footing where our job is to go slow and find lots of reasons to say no to things.

And that's not a system that's very well-conduced, you know, not conducive to building electricity, infrastructure, transmission lines, wind, solar, you know, nuclear power, batteries, whatever it is, at a pace that we haven't seen in a couple generations. And so I think the big question we face now is like, how do we square that circle? How do we get back into a mindset where we recognize that it's in the national interest to

to build again, you know, we are building a new America again, but we don't want to do that in the same way that we did before, because we don't want the same kind of environmental impacts and we don't want the same injustices across, you know, racial and economic lines.

And I don't have the answer for how to do that, but that's the conversation I think we need to be having now, which again, we didn't need to have before the IRA passed because it didn't make economic sense, but now it does. And this is the next frontier in climate policy and in decarbonization and in tapping the economic opportunity that the IRA presents to the country.

So your, I mean, how do we know that this new permitting framework that comes about in response to all of the sort of failures you laid out in the post-war era, how do we know that that's constraining development of clean energy or transmission lines? Yeah, that's a really great question. And it's not my primary area of research. I've read, you know, a few other people's studies, and it seems like there's a bit of conflicting opinions.

consensus amongst the literature. I mean, it's just a difficult thing to isolate, you know, the kind of causal effects of this versus some other thing that's also present. And so I think there's a kind of a difference of opinion about is this a, you know, a relatively small issue or a very, you know, major one. I mean, I think it's clear that we do have a system that has many, many different veto points.

And in order to build something, you have to pass through and survive all of them, right? Any single one says no and you're done, whether that's an environmental review or that's a court, you know, or that's an appeal to a previous review or that's a local citing board or, you know, local opposition, whatever it is.

And so I think one of the challenges is, you know, are there ways in which we can provide the same opportunities to raise concerns and to have them legitimately heard and addressed, but to consolidate those veto points into one big decision or a couple of big decisions? Because if we can do that, we can make the process move faster and we can reduce the development risk

for project developers because they then know what the rules are, right? They know, okay, I have to do this thing. It's going to take me 18 months. I may get an, you know, I'm going to get an up or down decision at the end. I may not, they may say no,

But now I know that I can move on to the next project as opposed to having projects drag out for years and years and years, which is what we tend to see in particularly linear infrastructure like transmission lines and pipelines, but increasingly in large wind farms and, you know, even solar farms and other things as well, where, you know, you're

you don't have any idea how long it's going to take to get through all of those processes. And in the case of some transmission lines, like the SunZia line, that's just starting construction now from New Mexico to California, which my ShiftKey co-host Rob Meyer wrote an excellent piece on for HeatMap recently, that project has been around in various stages of development for nearly 20 years.

Another project would help connect tens of gigawatts of renewable energy to the grid. It has to cross through this one small strip of a national wildlife refuge that runs up and down the Mississippi River for something like 200 miles, so you can't go around it.

It has met all of the reviews required under NEPA. It has survived multiple court challenges at both the state level and the federal level. And just recently, there was another injunction granted arguing from a local opposition environmental group that the project failed to meet some national wildlife refuge-related process that it had to go through. So this is the kind of thing that we see. It's just you don't know...

how long it's going to take, how many different challenges you need to survive. And that raises the risk and slows down the development of projects in ways that I don't think are necessary if the goal is just to provide an appropriate venue for everyone to raise legitimate concerns and to ensure and have the government ensure that those concerns are addressed. Yeah. So, I mean, I've reported on this a bunch. And I think for listeners who aren't like super

obsessed with local, state, and national environmental permitting, you may not be super familiar, but I agree with you. There's like a lot of debate within sort of like the academic literature about like, can we identify the causal impact of a specific environmental regulation or a permitting process in determining whether or not it's actually slowing down clean energy development? And I find a lot of that conversation, I mean, obviously it's important for like, you know, academics to be able to do that over long timescales. But I think...

think it's like when I look at all of the data points that exist, I like follow very much the story you're talking about here, where you see just this behemoth of regulations kind of sprout starting in the 1970s to now. And I think some of the best evidence we have is so Zachary Lisko, he's at Yale and Leah Brooks, she's at George Washington University. They look at what's happened to the cost of building highways since the 1970s.

And what they're able to do is basically like throw out a lot of the traditional explanations. They go, OK, the cost of building highways has just skyrocketed. Right. Highways. We know how to build highways in America. We do not suffer from a lack of highways. But the cost of building them has like tripled in in for since the 1970s. And what they find is, OK, it's not the traditional stuff like people expect it to be labor or maybe it's specific materials that have gone up in price and they get rid of all these. And what they're left

with is this variable that they call, quote unquote, citizen voice. And I think that that's exactly what you're kind of talking about here. And what that is, is that there are all of these ways in which individuals, groups at the local, state and federal level have figured out a way to delay the process by which we can build things in America, whether it's a highway or it's a transmission line or it's a house or anything that they've optimized, you know, like they've innovated and they figured out how can we block these things and

A lot of the research that pushes back on the idea that this is causing a lot of delays in energy and environment points to the fact that the government often wins, right? Like when there's a lawsuit that comes up against a wind farm and says, you know, hey, I'm suing you under an environmental regulation. You didn't consider the fact that there might be a harm to, you know, an endangered species or some other thing that we care about here. Sometimes they're much more frivolous. Like there was one lawsuit I saw in Alabama where they said they didn't consider the impact of

the glinting of the sun off the blades of a wind turbine. And so when those lawsuits come up, very often when they work their way through the process, like the Sunzi example you brought up, the government will win because it's either frivolous or the courts will decide, you know, you guys did do your due diligence. You did spend four years considering alternative impacts. You worked really, really hard on this.

But if you delay projects for that long, you both will kill a bunch of projects because their financing will get messed up or, you know, it will just price the cost of all of that will take so long that you won't be able to meet your goals. And then also a lot of times governments, if it's

If it's a project that requires a government permit, which almost all the projects we're talking about do, you know, the governments are political, right? Like they may just decide, OK, let's pare this back significantly. So you get a much smaller project. You get much less wind energy or much less solar. Or you end up moving the transmission line again and you're costing the taxpayers like billions and billions of more dollars. And so to me, it's like I always find like opposition to the idea that this is causing an impact to be kind of like in bad faith at some level, because there's not an alternative explanation for what's going on here.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's all very well said. And the other thing I'll just say is what's very hard to observe is all the projects that don't happen because you have to jump through all of these hurdles. The fact that, you know, I mean, I spent a little bit of time last week with Mike Skelly and Grid United, which is a company that is working to build very long distance transmission lines. And Mike personally has been at this for a couple of decades.

And the thing that you realize is you've got to be a little bit either crazy or just like completely undaunted to want to go build transmission lines in America right now. Right. And he's doing it. God bless him. And their company is making great progress. You know, SunZia, they stuck with it. They, you know, it looks like it's going to go through after 20,

15, 20 years and multiple owners, et cetera. But what we don't see is how many people just don't build at all because they don't want to even try in that environment because they know it'll take way too long, that the risk is so high that they won't make a reasonable return, that they should just spend their time doing something else, right? Something easier to make a profit doing.

And I think that that's another piece of the story that is just much harder to observe. What we can observe is that the pace of transmission expansion in the United States, if you sort of measure it in terms of like the ability to move a gigawatt of power over a mile, which is sort of one way to measure capacity, that was growing at about 2% per year in the last period when electricity demand was growing from the 1980s through the mid 2000s.

That declined to only about 1% per year during the period when electricity demand was flat from 2005 on. And in just the most recent five years, it's declined even further to something like 0.3% per year, less than half a percent.

So it's slowing and it's moving in the wrong direction at exactly at the time when we both have to keep up with demand growth again, right? We're entering a new era of demand growth for electricity. And so we have to keep up with all that demand, build enough clean electricity to meet that demand without having emissions go up.

But that's just running to stay in place. If we also want to drive down emissions, we have to be steadily retiring coal plants and displacing natural gas generation. And that means building even more renewables. And all that requires grid connection and transmission lines to link regions and to connect the places in the country where it's the windiest and the best place to build renewable energy to the places where people live.

So we need to be probably doubling the pace that we've seen, you know, getting back to at least that 2% per year growth rate. And instead, we've been moving in the wrong direction in the last few years. Yeah, I mean, I want to kind of return to this beginning question, though, that I asked you about sort of the differences we're seeing in Texas versus California, but also just largely the permitting regimes in Democratic versus Republican states. When you looked recently at the state of clean investment following the IRA, did you see any kind of differences on partisan lines?

I don't see any clear trend there. What we did see was a difference between wind and solar power.

So solar power has actually been setting new records for annual investment and capacity additions every year for the last several years. That's exactly what we want to see under the financial environment of the Inflation Reduction Act. And if we're trying to decarbonize the grid and meet growing demand for electricity in America, we need to be smashing record growth rates basically every year from here on out.

until we decarbonize the grid. And so that's good. You know, solar added, you know, I think is expected to add nearly 40 gigawatts of capacity this year, over 30 last year, you know, up from 20 in 2022. So it's, you know, nearly doubled in a few years. Batteries are also growing a lot faster than we projected in our modeling. The big concern or the red flag that we saw in our data was for wind power.

Where, you know, the first quarter of this year was just atrocious. It was one of the slowest quarters of wind construction we've seen in probably a decade. And I think there's probably a few different pieces of that. So the first one is that the subsidy for wind development, the production tax credit, actually fully expired before the Inflation Reduction Act passed.

So if you didn't start building a project, I think by 2019, you were no longer going to be eligible for that subsidy. And so what that did is it can kind of collapse the pipeline of projects in various stages of development. Everybody rushed to complete projects or start to commence construction and lock in their eligibility for that credit before it was expired. And that meant, you know, a bunch of projects got built in the 2020-2021 timeframe because they were, you know, being finished after starting a year or two earlier. Right.

solar power was different. It was starting to step down. It was phasing out in increments, but it was still, I think, at about 80% of its full value when the Inflation Reduction Act passed. And so solar projects were basically able to continue development with much less policy risk than the wind industry faced. So the good news is that would be a transient effect, and we would expect that kind of hangover to wear off in a year or two.

It also, the wind industry was hit harder by inflation than the solar industry, partly because we have a much more Western supply chain, American and European supply chain for wind than we do for solar. The bigger concern is that it's just a lot harder to site and build wind farms than it is solar.

And that's for kind of a basic physics reason, which is that the wind speeds are driven basically by the sun. They're driven by heating the planet to differing degrees at different points. So that creates a bunch of movement in the atmosphere. And that's what we feel is wind. So the wind speeds vary basically proportionate to the variation in solar resource across the country, kind of the best wind sites worldwide.

have about double the wind speed as the worst sites, and that's also true for solar. The best solar sites have about double the incoming solar radiation or insulation than the worst sites. The big difference is that solar panels convert solar insulation to power output basically proportionately or linearly. They convert something like 20% of the incoming sunlight directly into power. Wind farms convert the wind speed into electrical power at the wind speed cubed.

So if you double the wind speed, you get eight times more power output. Oh, I didn't realize that. Okay. Yeah. And what that means is that, you know, if I have to move my solar project because the local county doesn't like solar or because I've, you know, got vetoed by one of those permitting processes, I can move it, you know, 50 miles away or 100 miles away or even 1,000 miles away, and it will have very little impact on the economics of that project. Mm-hmm.

But if it's a wind farm and you have to move it from one valley to the next one over, that could be, you know, a five-fold difference in the resource potential. And so you really have to build wind in very specific sites. And that means you really got to get, you know, social approval. You got to get, you know, actual permitting approval. And you have to be able to connect to the grid at those locations, right?

And, you know, humans don't tend to like to live in places with screaming fast wind speeds on a regular basis, right? We don't, you know, we like to be in places that are more mild weather. And so the best windiest locations are, you know, sort of mountain passes and, you know, the great wide open Great Plains and places where not a lot of people live. And so the grid doesn't go there today for the most part. Or if it does, the lines are relatively weak and we can only connect, you know, the first few hundred megawatts before we run out of capacity or space on the wires. Right.

And so that also means that wind power is, I think, more dependent on solving transmission expansion and permitting challenges than solar is. Okay, we'll have more with Jesse in a minute. But first, we have a quick break.

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Now, in this back-to-school season, for a limited time, you can get $20 off when you give someone an Atlantic gift subscription. Start them off on a lifetime of good learning at theatlantic.com slash learning. I want to pick up on what you were just saying about why wind developments are so challenging, right? Because you drew out a few things that are just...

kind of outside the purview of just lawmakers right now, right? Like supply chain issues are not entirely in our control. Financing landscape, interest rates, you know, tax credits sunsetting, obviously that's a little bit more in our control. But in general, these are just issues that are often much bigger than just what do policymakers want to do in either Congress or in state legislators or whatever right now. And that's what's so frustrating about permitting, right? Because it's entirely in our control. It's entirely a question of like what

rules are we going to put forth for how developers get to build things in America? But the place that I have the most sympathy for skeptics of this focus on resolving permitting problems is the like over focus on the federal level, right? So there's a lot of people who care about federal policy. And you mentioned NEPA. That's the National Environmental Policy Act. You know, that's kind of the big environmental law that passes in the 1970s. And the NEPA

process includes a lot of other things than just the specific bill. But it gets a lot of attention because I think there's kind of a psychology of people who work in policy and they want to work on federal policy. It's like the big thing to do. I mean, maybe it's because they live in D.C. or it's just like a slog to think about, like, how do I get through all of the problems that exist in each of the 50 states or all 3,000 counties or the 90,000 localities that exist in the whole country? I mean, it's just like less exciting to do that kind of work.

And not that I don't think federal stuff is important, but if I were to say which is the bigger constraint, I do think that local and state, you know, both permitting but also politics is really at the core of this. So why do you think that we don't focus more on state and local permitting? Well, no, I do think that's a big factor. I mean, I think if you can go to Congress and with one stroke of the pen or, you know, a thousand pages of legislative text, you know, change the law in 50 states like that has a lot of appeal. And there's a there is a lot of legitimate leverage to those kinds of victories, you

But the reality is that this stuff does get built on the ground at the local level, and it intersects with all kinds of local permitting and political challenges. What I think you highlighted there was a couple of really important things, though. One is that they changed the rules midstream. I think what you hear a lot from business is just tell us the process and stick to it and make it a finite length, and we will navigate it. But if you...

change the process midstream or you allow for an innumerable number of, you know, of challenges on an indefinite period, we don't even know what game we're playing and we don't know how to do it. Right. And, and the risk is open-ended and I'd rather develop something else that, you know, put my money somewhere else where that's not the challenge. And so, you know, the, the thing with NEPA and the reason I think it draws so much attention for reform is

is that it's just so obviously, I think, been used in a way that it was not really intended. You know, the National Environmental Policy Act basically just says you have to consider environmental impacts in basically anything the federal government does. So that includes, you know, permitting on federal lands. That includes federal funding for certain things. So all highways that get federal funds, even if they're not on federal lands, like all of those factors, you know, they have to, anything the federal government touches is

It's a requirement that you think about the environmental impacts of that decision. That's a smart thing to do, right? We should be thinking about the environment. What's interesting about it is two things. One is it doesn't actually require you to change your decisions.

It just requires you to say, "I thought about it." - I considered it. - Yeah, I considered it. Yep, I considered that this would pollute the lake and then I continued anyway, right? Like that is consistent with NEPA, right? As long as you gave it an adequate consideration, you don't have to show that your decision changed at all. You just have to have a binder somewhere that has an environmental consultant assessing that impact and make it clear that you assessed it.

People really don't realize that most environmental lawsuits are not, "Hey, I think you're polluting this lake." It's, "Hey, I don't think you put the comma in the right place." I mean, that's a little bit derivative, but like they're saying you didn't do the process the way we expected and like that's the lawsuit, you know? - Exactly. And so it's not a Clean Water Act suit where you could actually say, "No, under the Clean Water Act, this project is illegal." It's purely a process violation.

And so, you know, local opponents of projects have figured this out a long time ago. And what it basically does is open the door for a never ending set of challenges. You know, you come in and you say, all right, you didn't consider, you know, the impact on this endangered, you know, newt or bird, right?

you know, that we just found in the area or something like that. And then they say, okay, well, that's, you know, I got to go back and look at that. And then when that's done, you're that group or another group says, ah, and you also, you didn't consider the sun glinting off of the turbines and how that might, you know, disorient a migrating bird or something like that. Right. I mean, you can raise any number of, you know, what on the surface look like legitimate considerations. Mm.

that then all have to be considered. And again, don't have to affect the decision in any material way. But until the government has shown that they considered them, the process can't proceed. And so if we go back to square one and we just say, look, our goal is to ensure that the federal government and really all developers are considering environmental impacts when they're making decisions. That's a great goal. The process that we've created to do that

is, first of all, not guaranteed to actually have any material impact on decision-making, which doesn't seem ideal. And second is just set up to allow a kind of never-ending set of lawsuits by, you know, we should be clear, like well-connected, well-funded organizations that understand how to, you know, exploit and use the legal system. Not just every citizen and certainly not, you know, some of the least engaged and least, you know, empowered communities that we might be most concerned about the impacts for. Yeah. I mean, I think

to me, there's like obviously no perfect system. The question is, which way do you want to bias the system to go towards? And because of the experience of building out the highways and also just massive energy projects like dams and different things like that in the mid-century, we decided to bias the system against change. And like,

The question is, like, are you willing to get a few bad projects built in exchange for getting a bunch of good projects built? Or is the cost of a single bad project so bad that we're just like, no, unless you've passed, you know, thousands and thousands of layers of view, you're not allowed to do anything. That's a great way to frame it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I want us to take on, I think, the big pushback I get because a lot of our conversation has sort of assumed that you need to have these big projects. It's assumed we need to build these utility scale, massive solar and wind projects in order to respond to the climate crisis and to electrify the grid and to meet our energy needs. The

The response I get sometimes from people who want to see that electrification happen and want to see us respond to climate change, but are really suspect about these big projects, whether because they have, you know, conservationist concerns or they just don't really like the idea of massive development or, you know, whatever. They have ideological concerns with this sort of approach.

is that we can actually do this with just small scale solar. We can do what California is doing and try to find every single rooftop possible to put rooftop solar on, and then we can also lower our demand in other ways. What do you say to people who argue this? - That's not correct. - Okay. - It just doesn't add up. We should do as much distributed generation as we can without breaking the bank. I think one of the big problems

is that distributed solar in the U.S. is like three to four times more expensive than it is everywhere else in the world. You know, in Australia, you can build projects for a rooftop solar project for about a dollar Australian per watt now. So that's, you know, 75, 80 cents per, you know, U.S. per watt. It costs three to four dollars a watt for the same project, the same scale project in the U.S. That's just nuts. And again, it actually probably has to do with permitting.

Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, the biggest thing that the industry points to is the fact that, you know, you mentioned how many thousands of municipalities and counties there are out there. You know, every single one has a different permitting office. They have different, you know, inspectors who interpret the code in different ways. They may have adopted different, you know, code standards and, you know, update them at different periods. Or historic preservation stuff. Like I know someone in D.C. who tried to get a rooftop solar on his house and it was just a minefield. He was like, I'm just trying to do something good. You said you wanted me to do

me to do this. Exactly. And so there's just this thicket again to navigate that makes it a very challenging process. And it makes the customer experience pretty terrible. When my roof sprung a leak, I called a roofer and they were there two days later and they fixed it. And I wrote him a check and that was it. That's how easy it should be to put solar on your roof. And instead, it takes like six months before you can get a project interconnected and there's all these different steps.

And as a result, it's not a very competitive market either because the customer experience sucks. So you have to sell really hard rather than have people go and just get online and buy it, you know, at a low cost of customer acquisition. And because you got to be really good at navigating all of this, you know, bureaucracy, and that's just a barrier to entry for many smaller firms. So, you know, permitting reform at a local level and streamlining and standardization seems to be one of the solutions to do more with distributed energy as well.

Putting that aside, if we could do that and could drop the cost to a dollar a watt, which is comparable to the cost of utility scale solar projects today, but without having to build the transmission and without having to build out, you know, greenfield sites in the desert or the farmland or something like that, we should max that out. Like that should be a great way to develop lots of solar. We just don't have enough rooftops, enough land area in developed areas to do that. And we can't only power the grid with solar power.

We need solar and wind, and there's no real viable way to do distributed wind at any scale.

And we don't just need wind and solar, we need all kinds of other stuff too to compliment them and make a balanced kind of energy diet of technologies that can be there when you need them for as long as you need them so they can fill in for the weather dependent resources. And those largely, they all exhibit big economies of scale as well. And so you need to build that large scale or in certain locations like geothermal plants have to be where the earth is hot and you know,

Nuclear plants have to be large and they have to be where the permitting can get agreement and where there's coolant water and things like that. And second, it has to all be clean, right? So we need to basically rebuild the entirety of our current grid twice, all with clean electricity. And you can't do all of that with rooftop solar. You maybe can do 15 or 20% of it, but nowhere near all of it.

Yeah. There's a 2016 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and they said that if the U.S. put a rooftop solar on every single building where it was technically feasible, that that would only generate about 1,400 terawatt hours of energy annually. And to put that into context, we need to generate nearly 11,000 terawatt hours of electricity a year in order to get to net zero emissions in 2050. So it's like, you know, you're getting like

a little over like a tenth, you know? Yeah, exactly. We use about 4,000 terawatt hours today, so it isn't even enough to meet today's electricity demand, let alone the kind of double or triple that we need to decarbonize the country. That's right. Yeah, so I mean, I think that that's one of those things where I'm like, people treat that as like it's like an ideological disagreement. I'm like, this is just like an empirical one. Like, do we have the ability to actually meet our energy diet here? It doesn't seem possible.

I mean, these are the technologies that are kind of available anytime you need them. You know, they're reliable, clean energy, and that includes nuclear power and geothermal and maybe natural gas with carbon capture. If we can do that in a clean manner, there's some designs that do that without any air pollution by burning in a pure oxygen environment, oxycombustion. So, you know, different ways to do this.

You need technologies that are going to produce a lot of energy and be there when you need them if you want to reduce the amount of wind and solar you have to build. So that mostly means nuclear, geothermal, and fossil with carbon capture, maybe fusion someday.

You know, so if we really want to kind of land spare, like, and reduce the amount of, you know, greenfield solar and wind, it's not distributed solar that's the solution. It's nuclear power. Yeah. Right? And geothermal energy and these kinds of things. Yeah. So, and I also think that, like, one of the things that becomes really complicated about these conversations is that often people with very similar lifestyles

end state desires, like they want a clean energy economy, have very different intuitions about the small, the democratic ways to get there. So Leah Stokes, she's a UC Santa Barbara professor, and she looked at wind energy opposition in North America from 2000 to 2016. And she finds that like 17% of wind projects are facing opposition, often by a small number of people. The median figure is 23%

So on average, 23 people are the ones who are responsible for this opposition. And something that when I would present these findings to people who are skeptical about doing all this permitting reform is that they would say, you know, well, if these developers would just work with the community, if they would get these community benefit agreements, then you actually would get better projects in the end. Like there are a lot of people who believe like, yes, maybe the NEPA process or these permitting processes are onerous, but they make benefits.

better projects in the end. I'm really skeptical about this because I think that like it really depends what your definition of better project is. I think often it means a smaller project, which means you're making it harder to meet our clean energy goals. But I think on addition to that, I also just think that like it's not really clear to me that even if you were getting slightly better projects, that outweighs the problems of delay. So I don't know how you think about this issue. I know it's like a very, very difficult and thorny one, but I

How do you respond when people bring that up to you? No, again, I mean, I think it's like we talked about earlier with NEPA, like NEPA isn't a process by which we hear these concerns and then address them.

It's a process by which we hear these concerns and then write a study and stick it in a binder and move on with the day. Right. Yeah. Right. And then allow for unending legal suits to raise some future issues. Right. To empower a small group of, you know, five or 10 or 15 or 20, you know, people who are able to hire a lawyer to indefinitely delay projects. I would just much rather we have a process by which we hear those voices.

We study the evidence for the decision making, and then we have a process to weigh the costs and benefits, including the cost of not building the project, right? Which will have real public impacts in a variety of different ways.

And so I think that's just an important thing. I mean, you mentioned something earlier, which is that the kind of the regime we've built is meant to protect the status quo. That is the definition of conservatism. Yeah. Right. Like the environmental regime we have is not a progressive regime. It is a conservative regime. That's not a value statement. That's just a descriptive statement. Right. It is there to stop things from changing, to keep it the way it is now.

We know we have to change, right? We have to change the system that we've built. We have to build a cleaner energy system. That means basically rebuilding and remaking how we produce and consume all of the energy products in the country in a matter of 25 years or so. We have to change. That's a fundamentally progressive project.

And so what we need, I think, are institutions that can reflect legitimate environmental concerns in a progressive way. And that's just not what we've built. You know, that's not what we have today. And that like raises sort of like, because I think a big part of this underlying this conversation is sort of

how does ideology actually make its way into material reality, right? Because when I think about how Republicans talk about clean energy or the environment, even Republicans in Texas, who I think are very well aware of the benefits of renewable energy, I mean, they would often, when the blackouts were happening, there were people who would blame wind and solar, renewable energy for the problems. I mean, you have anti-EV laws coming out as being proposed or just a bunch of

things that kind of try to classify, you know, natural gas as renewable, as clean energy. And then you have Democrats who I think care very sincerely many times about transitioning to a clean energy economy. And they, you know, pass all these laws. They put all this money in. I mean, they're the force behind the IRA getting to passage. But at the end of the day, like, I mean, it seems like there's also this question of is your ideology pro or anti?

or is it for or against building things? And that's going to dominate, I think, a lot of the times whether or not you actually like the things that are built. So like in Texas, I don't think that they care more about renewables than the people in California do. It feels like in Texas, they just let things happen. And I don't know how you think about that. No, I think that's very true. It's that in Texas, the kind of culture and regulatory footing of the state is that we build and develop energy resources.

whatever it is, right? Whether it's natural gas or oil or wind or solar, right? These are the resources that Texas is endowed with and our economy is built around developing those resources. You know, I don't think that's what you would put in the mission statement of the state of California, right? But you probably would in the state of Texas. So I just, yeah, I do think that that is a big difference.

You know, and it's probably true that people in California care more about wind and solar than they do in Texas. It's just that, you know, the state infrastructure and culture are not oriented around the idea that we need to build that. Now, that's starting to change. I mean, this struggle around climate is causing all kinds of rifts, right? And all kinds of, I think, productive discourse like this podcast, right? Where we're trying to think about how we can

address all of the priorities of environmentalism, you know, and environmental justice and participatory democracy, right? All these legitimate values in ways that are fundamentally progressive and designed to build and change things, not to keep things the way they are today. Well, Jesse, always our final question. What is something that you felt was a great idea, but it didn't end up panning out in the end?

I guess I would say hydrogen. Okay. You know, for my entire career of studying energy issues from way back into the 2000s, you know, we've always had this sort of dream that hydrogen would be another carbon-free energy carrier like electricity that we could use in lieu of fuels. And, you know, that promise is still there. And we now have actually a set of policies in place to support the growth of cleaner hydrogen production systems.

But one of the metaphors for hydrogen is that it's like a Swiss army knife for fuels, right? It can do all these different things. It can power cars. It can be used to make electricity. It can decarbonize steel. It can produce high temperature, you know, process heat for industry. It can heat our homes, et cetera, et cetera. All of that is true. It can do those things. But like a Swiss army knife, if you have a real tool for that job, why would you use a Swiss army knife? Yeah.

So the more we've studied hydrogen over the years, over the decades,

the more real tools for the job we've identified and the number of things that it seems like a good idea to use hydrogen for is just steadily shrinking. - Do you own a Swiss Army knife, Jesse? - I do have a Swiss Army knife. I use it when we go camping and we might need one of these tools we don't have around, but I never use it in my house. Do you? I use the scissors when I need the scissors. I don't use the scissors on the Swiss Army knife. - No, I feel like Swiss Army knives are the kind of thing that you want when you're 13 years old and then you kind of find it every time you move. You know what I mean?

So I think that, you know, hydrogen on paper, it sounds really great. It can do all these great things. What we're realizing is that anywhere you can do something better, mostly anywhere you can use electricity directly rather than use electricity to produce hydrogen to do something else, which just carries a lot of unnecessary efficiency losses and new infrastructure you have to build.

you ought to do that better thing first. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jesse. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, you should definitely check out his podcast, Shift Key. It's a great climate wonky podcast. But thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Good on Paper is produced by Janae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Anna Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smirciak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And hey, thanks to everyone who has already reviewed the show. It really helps us reach new listeners. And if you haven't yet and you like what you're hearing, please head over to Apple Podcasts. Leave us a review. I'd really appreciate it. I'm Jerusalem Dempsis, and we'll see you next week.

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