You're listening to Redefining Energy. Your co hosts from Berlin, Gerard Raid and from London, Lawrence Segal. Episode one hundred. Wow, I can't believe this is one hundred episode. How long have you been doing this? It's going to be five years this ortime. Time flies, my friend, every really does, especially considering our modest starts in the Red Lion pub behind.
Yeah, that's true, that's true. You me getting drinking too much wine and talking about everything and anything in the energy space and then decided to do a podcast out about Look. I like to thank all our listener because we are reaching now nine hundred thousand downblades. Can you believe that? I can't believe that either, I really can't. It's fun for me. I don't
regard it as a burden. I think there was a period where it was a little bit of a burden when we're trying to get our hands around the technology and what to use and what not to use and all this. But now it sort of works right. Yeah, but wonderful guest, And thanks to our listeners who just vote for us and listen to us and comment and we share. I mean guys who will not be there without you. So there is this new ranking of podcasts on Honorable Energy Who's been released and yeah,
it's incredible. We number two. That's very good, very good, very I want to know who's one number one, the Energy Gang. But of course the Energy Gang, the original Energy Gang, was really our inspiration when we started. So I asked the two member of the original Energy Gang to join us for episode one hundred. Yeah, it was great to actually have a conversation with Catherine and Jigger. Can you introduce them? Yeah,
of course. Yeah. Catherine Hamilton is the chair at a business called thirty eight North Solutions, which is a public policy firm focused on clean energy innovation. And then you've got Jigger Shah, who is director of the Loan Program Office at the US DOE Department of Energy, and he's been many years entrepreneur in the space. You know. Yeah, it's really great to have these two guys on because they just have so much knowledge and experience. And Catherine
has been a false behind the Inflation Reduction Act. Oh yeah, and actually these guys, these guys have changed the world absolutely right, that's it, because what they've done is they've impacted changed like very few other people in the world had to after the movie. Really, it's a pleasure having the moment on the show. So let's bring them in, Catherine Jiga, Welcome to the show, guys. In order to have a great debate, the old idea was not too much to concentrate on the present, but look at the
future and ask ourself, did we succeed the energy transition? So let's assume we're in two thirty. Let's assume Elon Muski is finally on Mars. I'm not if Twitter's going to work from us, but let's assume did the energy transition work? Catherine, you are only giving us seven years to make this work, and that is the least amount of time it takes to build any sort of transmission. Ah, what are you making us do here? I would say we will have made a lot of progress. We will have built
a lot of things. We will be well on our way in a bunch of different ways, and there are other places we're going to be really needing to do some catch up. Jar what do you think part of the problem with the energy transition is that many of us think about this from a technocratic point of view, So it's really, will the technologies be ready to scale, Will it be down the cost curve, Will it be fully approved by
bankers, Will we have institutional capital available. One of the things that we will have accomplished by twenty thirty in a big way is that everyone in the world will view the energy transition as a good thing, like that it's actually better, good quality jobs, better for the environment. It's actually a good
thing, which I don't think is exactly true today. That's why India and China continue to build coal plants, because they're not sure that the energy transition will allow them to have enough energy for everyone to live a good life. The second thing we're going to accomplish by twenty thirty, though, is that there will be more of an understanding of what it means to have a good
quality job. One of the things that I find frustrating is, you know, having been in the solar industry for such a long time, so many people in the solar industry who have been installing solar panels for the better part of twelve fourteen years still don't view themselves as being in the solar industry from a career perspective. There's no pension, they barely have any stock in the companies that they're working with. They may have moved from company to company.
There might be in their fifth company installing solar panels. Right, they don't have a certificate that's is that they're a good solar installer. They only have whatever their friends says about them, right, the referral. And so I do think we're going to fix that by twenty thirty people will be able to get paid more for being better at their job. They'll actually be able to
get paid more because they do work correctly the first time. And then the last thing I'd say is that the solar and windustry have the same problems that the oil and gas industry have, which is it's not clear to me, but they're always thinking about what it means to be part of the community for thirty years. Do you want to be friends with the people that you're with there? What does it mean to be friends? Are you giving back to the community, are you being a good neighbor? All of those things I
think will be solved by twenty thirty two. I think people will recognize that they need to have a community benefits plan written and in place with the community that they're putting ten gigawatt wind turbine farmen or three magawatt solar farmen. Right, they're going to have a level of agreement. And so those things mean that we might be able to get everyone excited about the energy transition, which
is not quite true today. Well, and I would just put a finer point on that and say that if you can't see yourself as part of the future, then you don't want to be part of that future. And what we're doing is giving people the ability to participate in their own future and be part of the solution. And I say that from someone who's a lot of my family is an Appalachia and Appalachia, a lot of that economy was built
on one resource and now they have to figure out what's next. And they've been fighting it up to now, and now it looks like people are starting to understand. Like Jigger said, I'm excited about it. I want to be part of it. There are jobs available for me to be in it. But also I can see myself and my family as part of that economy. Right now, what's happening. It seems that from any generation, we're a bit of too crossholds, from a bit of a centralized system to a
decentralized system or hyperd or whatever. And I like to hear your opinion into a thirty about certain technologies geothermal, nuclear, whether it's fission or fusion. Do you think in those carbon free baseload technology will have done significant progress or it's still pilots and labs and everything. So Jigger should speak to the nuclear piece sense. Jigger, you're much more involved than that. But I do a lot of work in geothermal and hydropower, and I think both of those,
yes, have a much rosier future into twenty thirty. And I look at some of those technologies that are really trying to do more with less, having less land and water impact, and really trying to kind of think use a traditional base load technology in a way that's innovative and more cost effective and easier to scale. So I see those technologies as really being on a strong
growth potential. Of course, when and solar are so cheap, the issue for those technologies are going to be much more about being stranded without trans mission or not have enough land to be on. So I see those as the strongest technologies. But I'm sure Jigger will have something to say about nuclear power too, Catherine, Can I just follow up question on geothermals. Firstly, Yes, if I look at like we've spent the last let's say fifteen years
renewabilizing the electricity system, that's what we've been doing. But what we actually haven't looked at as heat and heath's a really difficult one. So if I look at geotermal and you sort of say, actually, it could solve both problems. It could enable you to electrify more, renewablize more of the electricity system and also supply heat. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts on
how you see that, on what the potential is. Absolutely that is an amazing ability of geothermal is that it can do multiple things at different times. And some of the new technologies are also able to be load following. They can be useful in a lot of different ways, some of these closed loop technologies that don't use water and that are able to produce heat and electricity. And I think it will depend on, you know, what's the better value
at the location and whatever the mix is there. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, or I'd answer the question from a slightly different place, which is that the grid is the largest machine that we have in the world that no one seems to really prioritize optimizing. When you put a trillion dollars into something, normally you actually wanted to run efficiently. You wanted to run sort of a high capacity utilization if you're gonna put that much money into it.
But the grid is run in a way where we're saying, well, you know, people get dedicated capacity in the grid. That's what this interconnection QUE means for solar and wind, is that someone wants dedicated capacity. Why do you want dedicated capacity? Like if we just said to people, no dedicated capacity, anyone who wants to connect to the grid can as long as they're using safe equipment and all those things. Well, then what you would have
is a series of curtailment. So at the time at which you had too much solar too which when you'd curtail, and that curtailment could be captured by storage, so you could co locate storage and you could say, well, instead of curtailing, I'm going to dump that power into storage and then I'm going to put it on the grid when there's room on the grid. This
entire system that we're talking about now costs real money. And so whether you decide to build a lot of new transmission to inefficiently use it for solar and wind or other things that need to have dedicated capacity, or you force solar and wind to have long duration energy storage or other things they're co located so that they can actually meet a much higher capacity utilization, or you decide to
do geothermal, you improve hydro dams. There's a lot of new technologies now that can get ten to fifteen percent more out of the same resource, or you put in nuclear. It's all more expensive than nineteen dollars a mega one hour, all of it. So part of our problem is that somehow the Googles and the like facebooks and Amazons and Apples of the world think that they need to pay nineteen twenty nine dollars thirty nine dollars a megudar, while at
the same time saying we need to be twenty four by seven matched. The only way to be twenty four by seven matched is to pay seven cents to kill what hour? Now, guess what, if you want geo thermal to work, you gotta pay seven cents of kill what are right now? Probably ten? But I think we can probably get it down to seven. Hydro is the same. But these projects are not moving forward because people are saying I'm not going to let you move forward unless you give me power at thirty
dollars a megudar, and the same with nuclear. So to me, it's not about the technology, although you know we can have a conversation about it. It's about reframing what it means to generate clean firm generation. Because I do not believe that we are going to build three x the grade in the United States that we currently have, which is what all the models suggest. We need to get to US seventy percent penetration rate of solar and wind, so I think we might get to one point eight x the grid maximum.
If that's the case and you want to decarbized by twenty thirty five, which is the president's goal, well then you're going to have to use the grid more efficiently. So that either means overbuilding solar and wind and putting the excess power into long duration energy storage which then gets dispatched over time, which is expensive, or it means moving to nuclear or geothermal or hydro or other things.
But all of its seven cents of kill one hour, and once we decide that that's what it costs, then all of this becomes a lot easier. But right now we're in fantasyland and we think we can actually get it done at twenty nine dollars a mega hour, and that's not going to happen. We need to shift the discussion from only about clean firm generation to flexible generation and flexible demand, because that's how we're going to get to one hundred
percent. I was just up in Ontario this week and they're talking about having to build natural gas and they were super clean, they completely decarbonized, but they're finding additional demand growth and corporates like Jigger mentioned that are saying we want one percent renewable, we need to match it to our Well, we're going
to have to work on the demand side too. We're going to have to have a lot more distributed energy generation resources that are going to be brought in to be much more flexible as well, so that we don't end up having to build more fossil fuels. Yeah, you know, I totally agree with you, by the way, Like I mean, I'm equally working on virtual power plants at the Department Energy as well, and we have got to change the way that we manage the grid to be supply following instead of load following.
And I do think we have the technology to do it, and you're absolutely right. But I also think, Catherine, and I think you agree with me, that geothermal is just not going to get to thirty dollars a meguare it's not going to happen. Interesting and an excellent segue you took about batteries, and of course batteries that's for the grid, that's energy storage, but now its mostly transportation. And part of our energy transition is how fast
are we going to electrify the transportation sector? And my personal review and what we saw recently in China oppening and what happens China opens you hope to two years later and in the US, I don't know when, but I guess quite not far behind. Is that the ice sector is literally going to collapse, and the partitions they don't need to put mandate like nothing into a thirty
thirty five and so on, because that's going to happen. My prediction for two thirty is that we're going to be like nowhere, everywhere, one hundred percent of the new vehicles just going to be electric I'm not sure about text us, but in Europe that is for sure, and in California is for
sure. And when I took to young researchers and they're wonderful to see the speed at which the technology for a battery, the density of battery to cost, the amount of R and D that has been put in battery makes me hopeful about the extremely rapid electrification of transport or am I the only one thinking that? Leron? Can I just add one thing too, It's not just batteries, because it's also semiconductors, it's electric drives, you name us.
The speed of innovation in and around the electric cars is amazing. And let's be clear, if you look in China today, by D has now overtaken Volks are going to be the largest producer of cars in China and it produces only electric and hybrid cars. So that's the reality of us. I agree with you, and I think it's going to speed up because China is forcing us to compete with them in different ways than we did before. Now listen, I'd love to hear what Chigger and Costom think of about I agree with
you on that. I'm a huge fan of electric vehicle. So I mean, I'm running the Loan Program's office, and we clearly had a big role to play in electric vehicles and continue to play a big role in battery manufacturing, critical minerals, EV charging and all that stuff. I will say that I feel like people are being a little unrealistic about how long it takes to change over the fleet. And I also think people are being unrealistic about the
comfort level of Americans. I don't think that the vast majority of Americans, even in twenty thirty will want all of their vehicles to be electric. The way it's going to work is they're going to have one main vehicle that's electric. There other vehicles will be gasoline powered, because remember, the vast majority of Americans buy used cars. New cars are really only for wealthy people.
So they're gonna have one electric then a gasoline powered car, and they're going to shift the vast majority of their miles to the electric car because everybody knows
intrinsically that the cost per mile is cheaper with electric. But I do think that from a comfort standpoint, it's going to be a long time before people decide to retire the internal combustion engine vehicle from their lives, because I just think that there's a comfort that people have culturally around being able to fill up their gas tank in four minutes and all these other things that the electric vehicle is not supposed to copy. I don't want it to be able to be
charged in four minutes. The fact that I can charge it in my garage is the best way to integrate with the grid. So I think you'll see a lot of vehicle miles traveled moved to electric. But I don't think you're going to see this sort of full transformation to electric vehicles. I don't know.
I agree with part of that jigger. But on the other hand, I look at other things like incandescent lightbulbs, and you know, it took a little while for people to go to CFLs, but then once LEDs came into the market, and we're a better quality, better lighting, cheaper. It's just happened. That's what you buy when you go to the store. You know you're not going I'm looking for an incandescent light bulb anymore. The same happened with low flow toilets, which people complained about for so long.
Oh they're terrible, They're not working. Now that's the only thing on the market, and that's for a number of reasons. You know. Part of it is just regulation that we've been, standards that we put into place, but other is just that the quality was there. There was no reason not to. It was better cheaper, and I think we will reach a tipping point for evs where it'll just be cheaper. And yes, you might have your old Galope in the back just in case you absolutely have to have it.
But even in rural Virginia, where I spend a ton of my time, people out there are talking about getting electric F one fifty lightnings. They're talking about well, mostly about getting the Mustang. Actually you're talking about EVS, and I find that really hopeful. I find that signals to me, huh, people are seeing this not as this is a climate change issue. This is about making my life better. Yeah, as usual. I don't
think we differ from each other too much. The only thing I would caution though here is as opposed to LED lights and low flow toilets, there are people who actually make their money based on the car that they have, and for those people, I don't think an F one fifty lightning is going to work When you think about what the range looks like in an F one fifty lightning when you add an additional two thousand pounds into the bed of that truck,
or you're towing three thousand pounds, Like every single person in my neighborhood who comes to cut lawns is pulling a trailer, and the range on the F one fifty goes from three hundred miles to like ninety six miles when you're doing that. And so I still think that it's going to take a lot of time for people who actually have to haul thousands of pounds or do some
of those things to switch over. And I think that's fine, honestly, because I think we were able to switch over seventy percent of vehicle miles traveled to electric, which would drop the price of gasoline and diesel for folks,
and I think it would make a huge difference in climate change. Well, that's why I beg to defer, because we're coming from Europe, and does this quote Desperation brings innovation and you have the chance of luxury in the US to produce your own oil and be kind of oil energy independent, which has a lot of positive and of course a lot of downside between Yorpe. We need to import ninety percent of hour a certain way. China's the same.
We don't have the luxury to entertain a slow transition. And if you look where we need to import our oil from, it's from regions with people who don't really like us. So I believe that when we start the year, we know that we need to throw four percent of the GDP of a continent
to buy fossil fuel from outside Europe. It's just gone. And my opinion, and I don't know Jazz agree with me, is that And of course our distances are much lower than the US, but the fiction of transports going to go much faster child totally which is around And I would add as well, don't forget we haven't talked about gas. At the end of the day, it is a geopolitically imperative for us in Europe to get away from natural gas. And I say get away from natural gas. It's not just rushing
gas because buying expensive energy it makes sure that our homes are heated. But I mean, industry just cannot complete when you have to go an import energy from the say, so we have really big challenges in Europe that you don't have in the US, you know, and that's why we have to change, and the US has a choice. I think one of the biggest challenges in the US is exactly the sector that Jigger was somewhat alluding to before, which is long haul trucking boy in the US, that is really due for
disruption and innovation. We have to change that. They're just people dying on the roads every single day because they're driving too long, too far, just absolutely terrifying. And the US is massive, and so they're driving across the country. That's how they're paid, that's how they make their living. And I think that is due for an innovation, not just on the type of fuel, but also just in the way those jobs are supported and the way
those people have to live. I just think that's something that I've seen a little bit of that in innovation, and I think that's something that in the US is going to be a big need for disruption. Can I ask you a little bit about hydrogen and you've used and I'm coming from as I think
you've got Roll actually said it earlier on. You have everything right, You've got the resources possible fuel resources and massive renewer resources but you've also got stuff like an ammonia pipeline and ammonia infrastructure and stuff like that that we don't have in Europe. And I'd love to just hear your view and how you see that going forward, where hydrogen will be used in the US, and whether you're going to be exporting it or what should be doing with it. There's
a number of answers to your question. There are twenty seven or whatever different use cases for hydrogen than people are hyping these days. We are at maximum hydrogen hype cycle. From a private sector standpoint, there's probably three or so applications that are actually happening at scale, so ammonia being the top of the
list. But then some of the other existing use cases of hydrogen are being considered to be converted from dirty hydrogen to clean hydrogen, and so I think that that's where you're going to see the bulk of the hydrogen moving today. You know, I do think we all have to be quite careful about using header as a panacea for all of these things. For instance, like with steel manufacturing, I am not convinced that steel is going to go with hydrogen
as the way to decarbonize. There's similar things. Like you know, I think there's a lot of people who want to put hydrogen into existing natural gas pipelines and figure out how to then burn it on the other side, which to me is highly difficult. It's one thing to inject hydrogen into a pipeline, it's another thing to verify that those hydrogen molecules actually came out the other side and reduced the consumption of natural gas when burned in some sort of end
use case, and that data is not yet clear to people. So I do think that, and even on heavy trucks and medium d trucks, hydrogen could be an extraordinary range extender, basically for electric trucks that need to go a much longer distance and don't want to carry another five thousand pounds of batteries. That being said, you need refueling stations that are probably refueling two tons
a day of hydrogen to make that infrastructure cost effective. So you would need to establish corridors or use cases where you can get that concentrated refueling, like dredge trucks at ports or other fleets. And so we're very bullish on hydrogen in the United States, and certainly we're getting an extraordinary amount of investment here because of this new forty five V tax credit that we put in place. But I do think that people need to be a little bit more cautious about
thinking that hydrogen is going to solve all the world's problems. Sugar, Can I ask you, look, we talked about it up to two thousand and thirty. I'd love to hear your vision beyond that. How do you see us if you're here in two thousand and forty, two thousand and fifty, how do you see the world. Do you look at a positively, look
at negatively? I always see the world positively. I think when you think about where we are, our forefathers couldn't have dreamed about all the things that we have at our fingertips, and the fact that we have access to all this information. You now have AI where can write essays in your voice, right. I mean, there's all this extraordinary stuff happening, which I think
is great. But in every generation you also have challenges, whether it's feeding the world, or figuring out how to reduce climate change, or figuring out how to reduce slavery that still exists around the world today. Human rights and so we always aspire to do better, but I do think that the tools that we have available to us are quite powerful. Nuclear fission will be commonplace again in the forties. You will see that being used, even at the
micro level. Nuclear will end up replacing almost all diesel generators in the world better than solar plus batteries. Storage will on the micro side, and then I think fusion will come. It probably won't be until twenty fifty, but we will end up in a much better place as a result. So I'm
quite positive about it. But I do think that the underlying trends around democracy and autocracy and figuring out how we become more inclusive, as Catherine suggested earlier, and how people see their own well being in this transition is going to be key, and I don't think we spend enough time on that. Yeah, Gerard, I was going to use chat GPT to respond to your question, but because I would probably give you a better response. But I digger
on this in some ways. I think a lot, obviously about public policy and the need for political will to do things, and how you're sort of necessity being the mother of invention or catastrophe, the need to change being the drivers I now fear the need for political will, because politicians are the least brave people out there in most circumstances. But I do believe in this generation coming up behind us, and they don't all have to be technologists, they
don't have to be engineers or scientists. A lot of these are just people who want the world to thrive. They want to thrive, they want to be in a better place, and they'll look at my kids, and eventually I'll look at my grandkids and say like they're the ones that are going to keep going as well all of ours, and that they're the ones that are going to take those solutions into the future in a way that we may not
even be able to imagine. I can tell you I'm probably even more optimistic than you are, because when I see the young generation, the people in their twenties and the thirties, and how well they are trained, and how qualified they are, and how absolutely determined there how to put the dis energy transition forward. Maybe I'm only tooking to our silo, but I love their thrust and their positive attitude, and the young generation is going to succeed the
energy transition. That would be my final world job. I love it, guys, really, thank you very much. I love the conversation today. This was pretty It was a treat for us. Great epis on one hundred and I hope to see you for episode two hundred if we still around. And here's the dirty little secret, Laune. Whenever the Energy Gang decided to do something that was remotely about Europe or about any other part of the world, I would go back and look at Redefining Energy and listen to you all
to try to make sure I was on target. Thank you Katherine, thank you, Jiga, Thank you so much. Guys, my pleasure, thanks for having thank you every brilliant yead. I'm so emotional. It's the French in you, that's what it is. Why, oh my god, I mean that's so cool. I feel part of something much bigger than me. Well, that's actually the energy transition is. It is great to see these let's call the early movers in this industry now really beginning to impact change.
And that's Catherine and Jaker, that's what they are doing. What's really interesting for us, based in your hope versus in the US, is even if the solutions are the same, the political and enjoymental contexts are so different in a certain way. We do the energy transition because we don't have a choice, But you know, us, they have a choice and they still do it. And of course it's more difficult because you've got legacy energy US who's
going to fight every inch of the energy transition. I think the US is much more practical about energy than we are because it's all about money. So if you've got to taxes, they're embracing both the past and the future. We in Europe are very dogmatic when it comes to it's either you're either in the fossil fuel camp or the renewable camp. But you can't be in both of them, right. I like the US approach and mustimation. Yeah, and at the end of the day, we all need together. And I
think it was great to have them. I mean, it's so grateful on the show episode one hundred and jad. I hope they'll join us for episode two hundred. I hope so too. Yeah, that'd be great, Okay, Jah, great epis. I really thank you Katherine and Jiga and I talk to you in two weeks time, look forward to its. Thank you for listening to Redefining Energy. Don't forget to rate the show and subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or the platform of your choice.