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In this episode, I have a conversation (IRL!) with longtime energy analyst Ramez Naam about a wide range of nerdy but fascinating topics.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAs I previewed a few weeks back, on Wednesday, June 28, Canary Media held a live event in the downtown Seattle home space of beloved local independent radio station KEXP. It’s a gorgeous space, with a coffee shop and a small vinyl store, well worth a visit if you make it up this way.In addition to a lively panel about the IRA and plenty of mixing and mingling with a fascinating, diverse crowd of energy nerds, the event featured a conversation between me and energy analyst/guru Ramez Naam.We had a wide-ranging discussion covering everything from hydrogen to space-based solar power to geoengineering. Then we opened it up to Q&A and got a bunch of geeky questions about grid-enhancing technologies and performance-based ratemaking. It was so fun!As promised, it was recorded for all you wonderful Volts subscribers. Enjoy. David RobertsI just wanted to say before we started, I should have thought in advance how to say this delicately. A lot of us have been to a lot of energy events, a lot of us old hands, and especially in the early years, we got very accustomed to seeing seas of gray hair at said events. And so it's just such a thrill that things have come as far as they have and this room is full of exciting young people doing cool stuff. Makes me feel old, but it's a small price to pay.Ramez NaamAre you saying that we're old now?David RobertsYes, I'm afraid, yeah, if you do the math. Also, this is being recorded for my podcast. This will be an episode of Volts. So maybe everybody in the room say hi to Volts listeners at home. You could have been here, but you were too lazy. I'm joined today by Ramez Naam, who is a longtime energy guru I guess would be the word, forecaster, VC guy, now author of books on climate change and Sci-Fi books and other books, speaker, et cetera, et cetera. Somebody I have been looking to for wisdom since I started this back in the dark ages.So I'm excited to talk just about sort of where things are now that we've been in this game for 20 years and how things have changed and sort of what's next? So the way Mez came to my attention, and I think a lot of people's attention in this world, was a 2011 blog post in which Mez said, here's the rate at which solar is getting cheaper. I'm going to make the bold prediction that it is going to continue doing that, which you'd think wouldn't be that revolutionary of a thing to do. But anybody who knows energy forecasts knows that as long as there has been solar, there have been people forecasting that it's going to stop getting cheaper, that it's going to level out, it's going to plateau.If you look at the forecast, it's just plateau, plateau, plateau. And the reality is just down, down. And Mez just said, yeah, it's going to go down. And if you just project ahead on existing learning curves, you get what looked like ludicrously optimistic projections, which you then updated in 2015 and then updated again in 2020, and both times found that despite having been decried for ludicrous optimism, prices had in fact fallen farther than your forecast. And you did a similar post on batteries, more or less, with the same structure. So I guess the way since, I think we agree that solar, wind and batteries are going to be the core of the electrify everything century, I guess my first question is just do you think solar is going to keep doing that?Ramez NaamYeah. Well, so first, David, it's awesome to be here. We've been together for twelve years now and we met basically on Twitter, arguing with this stuff back then. So, yeah, in 2011 I wrote a piece for Scientific American, a blog post, and at the time, the IEA International Energy Agency had a forecast for solar costs, said the cost of solar would drop by about half from 2010 to 2050. And my forecast was very naive. I'm not that smart. I was very lucky. I came from tech, where we have Moore's Law, and so I just applied the very same sort of very dumb learning model to solar.And because I didn't know enough about energy to know how I was going to be wrong, it worked, more or less. So my forecast was the cost of solar would drop about a factor of ten to 2050, and it actually dropped twice as fast as I thought it would. And again, there were various things wrong in that model and I've updated them since and found where the errors are, I think. Will it keep getting cheap? The future is uncertain, but the odds are yes. So my personal forecast is the cost of solar will drop by another factor of four by the time solar is about a third of all electricity generation on Earth, something like that.Now, could it be twice as fast? Maybe that's pushing it. Could it be half that rate? Yeah, but it's already the point, so I think it is clean electricity, especially solar, and now batteries have gone through, they're entering their third phase. The first phase was all of history from the 1970s to 2010, 2015, they were in their first phase. That was totally uncompetitive, totally policy dependent. Then with a second phase where new electricity from solar to wind became cheaper in some parts of the world than building new power from gas and coal, at least during the hours of the sun shone, or that the wind did, and that's their second phase cost competitive, and now they're into their third phase.We've seen this like next era, started saying this in 2018, 2019, they hit this phase where the cost just on a pure kilowatt hour basis of, let's assume new solar, new wind would be cheaper than the operational cost of an already built coal or gas power plant. And that's happening. That happened in Indiana, it happened in Texas. Again, it doesn't deal with intermittency and what you do when the sun goes down and so on. But it's on a bulk electricity basis and there's every reason to believe this will continue. Now, solar is the fastest of these technologies.Batteries are nearly the same pace. Wind is like half the pace. And wind has various problems, doesn't scale as fast. Hydrogen electrolyzers are going to look like batteries. I think. Batteries and EVs, EVs are still in their first phase. They're still more expensive than gasoline cars, but they are plunging in price and growing in scale at twice the pace of solar. So I do think there's lots of reasons, not in every single clean tech, but in those and the ones we make in factories, mass produce in high volumes, simple single part items, if you can, that those will have a very, very rapid learning rate for decades to come.David RobertsGood stuff. So, one of the big questions about the electrify everything model is wind and solar variable. Even with batteries, the batteries we have today, you can get two, four, maybe six, eight hours out of lithium-ion batteries, but you still have variability to deal with. And so, there's this idea that sort of you're going to get to, depending on who you ask, 60, 70, 80, 90%, and you're going to have to fill in the remainder with something else. And it seems to me whether that's 60% or 90% depends a lot on just how cheap solar and wind get.So, how far do you think electrify everything is going to go? Do you think these learning curves are going to be so far and so fast that we're going to end up needing less of that supplemental stuff than is currently forecast?Ramez NaamYeah, it varies on a variety of things. It varies on geography. So, for instance, Europe is harder to power with renewables than the US. The US has more sunshine and solar gets cheap the fastest. Europe or Japan or Taiwan or South Korea are these places that have winter peaking systems and don't have a lot of sun. So, they're more dependent on wind. It doesn't get cheap as fast. It also matters how big the grid is. Like if we built a Chinese scale grid in the US, you could have solar going from New Mexico to New York. You could have wind from the great plains going out to the coast.But if we don't get transmission built, and right now we're sucking at building transmission in the US, then powering New York in winter is actually really hard. So, those are like big variables. And in general, I have my opinions on what I think is going to get cheap the fastest. But I'm in general a believer in let's have more tools in the toolkit than we think we need because some of them are not going to pan out in certain areas. So, let's invest in all of it. Let's invest in small modular reactor, nuclear, nuclear fusion, transmission grids, ultra long duration energy storage, power to hydrogen.Let's do all of it and be in a certain way of more tools than we need rather than fewer.David RobertsAll right, you're doing all the above cop-outs. I'm going to push you on this. You have solar wind and battery, you have your variable core, and then you have your supplements to even out the power, smooth out the power. Right now, what's going to occupy that role, that supplemental role is up in the air, could be a lot more storage. It could be, as you say, a lot more transmission. It could be some sort of clean, firm power like geothermal or small nukes. It could be small natural gas plants with CCS, which is what you see in the models.In the big models, they have truckloads of natural gas with CCS all playing the same basic role, which is evening out the variability of renewable energy. So, I want to know, yes, we want to invest in everything. Yes, we want to pursue everything, yes, we want to keep our options open. But in your opinion, what is the mix that's going to play that role?Ramez NaamThe most underrated of those technologies is ultra long distance, like coast to coast, continent scale transmission. It's probably the one that has the best upside and the most certainty that we can do it. But it's blocked not by economics, not by technology, but by permitting, fundamentally. And we're not doing a lot on there, I think clean firm, whether you call it nuclear vision, SMR vision, fusion, geothermal everywhere, ultra deep geothermal can get power. Any place on the Earth has a big role to play. Ultra long duration storage is a wild card. Like twelve-hour storage, I'm convinced, is like that's going to be solved.But in Europe or on the US east coast, you need weeks or months of storage. And we don't think there's a few technologies that might do that, but they're wild cards right now. I think offshore wind has a huge role to play. And floating offshore wind is one of the most underrated technologies because in deep water you basically can't do bottom out offshore wind. So around Japan or the US west coast, I think floating offshore wind is probably also a massively underrated technology. And then my very favorite total wild card in these that nobody believes in really, but me, is space-based solar.David RobertsI knew it.Ramez NaamAnd that one, my friend Greg Rainey has been talking to me about space-based solar for a decade and I'd be like "No no no, Greg, 20% of the Earth's land area is desert, space launch costs so much why would we ever do this?" But in space, there's no clouds. You can just have it. You can get 24/7 power. You can beam it to Earth as microwaves that penetrate clouds and rain. And some models show it getting in at like two or three cents a kilowatt hour. Based on things like how cheap Starship is going to make launch cost, we think.Right. And isn't space — it's getting cheaper, right? Getting up to space rapidly getting cheaper?Space launch is getting cheaper faster than solar. Only two things in history have gotten cheaper faster than solar to date, which are computing and gene sequencing, or gene printing. But right now, we're in a phase where the cost of space launch is actually dropping faster than the cost of solar. And so, that, and then you have this other advantage: if you beam power back to Earth with microwaves — there's a variety of challenges with it, let me tell you. There are a lot of challenges — but if you beam it down to the same intensity as sunlight, rectennas are like three or four times as efficient, so you get four times the power for the same land area, and it works in winter.So that's my personal wild card. There's like six startups in the whole world doing it.David RobertsHas there been solar power transmitted to Earth from space, like, as it actually happens?Ramez NaamNo. And there's various problems with it. So we've had the first experiments of transmitting — we have lots of solar in space for satellites — and we have the first experiments happening for transmitting solar from one satellite to another. But the big problem so some startups are using lasers. Lasers are BS, because lasers don't penetrate clouds and rain. So why would you do it? Doesn't matter, but one of them just raised a bunch of money. Whatever. The way to actually do it is microwaves. But the problem with microwaves is, if you want to hit a target on Earth, you need these kilometer square arrays in space, and no one's ever built anything of that size in space.So if you want Sci-Fi that's totally Sci-Fi.David RobertsAnd do you fry the birds? Do you fry the birds?Ramez NaamYou can transmit it, I mean, you could if you're really good.David RobertsIf you wanted to.Ramez NaamNo one can get that good. No one can get that good at beaming microwaves yet, but you could transmit it at like, one sunlight intensity, but get three or four times the energy on the ground in the same area. So getting to where you can fry birds is actually a really really hard problem. It's not the problem that we have right now.David RobertsInteresting. And this brings up my lonely wild card. Since you're talking about lonely wild cards, the one that only I seem to care about, which is wireless charging of electrical devices, which I always thought conceptually solves all kinds of problems. I can just imagine power transmitters seeded throughout your city and every electrical device having a receiver able to receive power through the air. I mean, those technologies exist. Like, you can power something at a distance now, even at a reasonably large distance. There are, like, sonar versions, laser versions, there's X-ray, weird X-ray versions. I just thought, like, cut the cord, all these charging difficulties go away.Basically, everything electrical is charging all the time. When I do my little "the future" meme, the future world we're going to have meme, like, it's all wireless charging. Do you have an eye on that? Is anything happening there? Do you think that's going to go anywhere?Ramez NaamI have a little bit of an eye on that, but it still doesn't solve all the problems because it's really hard to do super long distance again unless you build these — if you want to penetrate clouds anyway — unless you build these kilometer square transmitters. So I think for a short range, like within our room, there are potential or maybe for, like, mountaintop to mountaintop. But getting it across a continent without bouncing it in space is really hard, I think.David RobertsAnd you are in tech, really, and not really in politics. But I'm curious what your take is. I wouldn't say that IRA has taken care of the funding problem. I mean, I think we still need a lot more funding for everything, all the time, everywhere. But there's a huge accelerant now, at least in terms of money. So what do you see then, when you think about the US decarbonizing?…
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