The energy transition is currently supported by three main pillars: science & technology, economics, and policy. In 2022 these three pillars are unaligned, with a lack of cohesion impeding progress. In today’s episode of the Energy Gang, the team explores three current events that highlight and exemplify the current state of the energy transition in the US and beyond.

The gang starts with the future of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. The original bill included a lot of provisions that were hugely important for low-carbon energy in the US. It died in Congress late last year after Senator Joe Manchin declined to support it. The big question now is: can anything be salvaged from that agenda and where do we go from here?

The US government’s investigation into the alleged dumping of imported solar panels has reportedly had a “devastating” impact on planned solar projects. Is now the time to create a domestic economy for solar panels or are we still too reliant on cheap imports? 

It’s an ongoing debate: the role of hydrogen in the energy transition. There is, of course, huge interest in the potential for low-carbon hydrogen in a zero-emissions energy system. But what role can hydrogen really play? And might other options be better for some uses?

Today we’re delighted to welcome back both Melissa Lott and Robbie Orvis. Melissa is the Director of Research at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and Robbie Orvis is the Senior Director of Policy Design at Energy Innovation. As always, your host Ed Crooks is here to anchor and lead the discussion.

Stick around for a thrilling conversation about policy, technology, and innovation. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @theenergygang and let us know what you thought of today's episode.

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Energy Policy: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

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AI is driving up demand for electricity. How can we meet that demand with clean energy?

It has been a big theme on the Energy Gang this year: the massive additional demand for energy that could be created by data centers for artificial intelligence. It’s an emerging issue that threatens to cause new challenges for the world’s attempts to achieve net zero goals.

So it is a great opportunity for us to have on the show a representative from Google, a company that relies heavily on data centers and is at the forefront of the AI revolution. It also has some ambitious decarbonization goals: the aim is to power the company’s operations entirely with clean energy by 2030. 

 Maud Texier is the global director of clean energy and decarbonization development at Google. She joins Ed Crooks and Amy Myers-Jaffe to explain how she sees the path to achieving that goal by 2030. Google’s objective of 24/7 clean energy requires sourcing renewable power that aligns with its consumption patterns. That means not just buying enough renewable energy to match its usage over the course of a year: every kilowatt-hour consumed must be carbon-free. It’s a challenging goal that it driving Google, like other companies with similar objectives, to explore new ways to generate power, store energy and manage the grid. 

Google is looking at or already investing in a range of innovative energy technologies, including enhanced geothermal, hydrogen, long-duration storage and advanced nuclear. Big energy users such as Google can do a lot to shape the evolution of the energy industry. But policy support is, as ever, crucial to achieving net zero goals. How is Google engaging with policymakers and regulators to help support the deployment of clean energy? New standards in the European parliament, aimed at improving energy efficiency, include mandates for data centers to report their performance. Are we moving towards an era of more stringent regulation of energy use for data centers and other large loads?

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Google’s demanding goals for decarbonization

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has a grandstand view of the energy transition. Where is it going next?

Jigar Shah, one of the originators of the Energy Gang, now runs the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, playing a key role in advancing clean energy projects. By helping to bridge the gap between R&D and large-scale deployment, it encourages private sector investment and supports the administration’s work to achieve its net zero goals.

Jigar was appointed Director of the LPO in March 2021 with a brief to “to rev those engines back up” after a quiet period under the Trump administration. He returns to the Energy Gang to discuss the progress he has made so far, and the goals he is working towards in the future. In particular, he talks about the hot topic of the moment in energy: how to meet increased demand for electricity driven by data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles.

Much of the new load being added to the electricity system will not be flexible. Data centers mostly need to be available 24/7. So how is the grid going to manage these growing demands? Host Ed Crooks is also joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe, Director of NYU’s Energy, Climate Justice & Sustainability Lab, to discuss Jigar’s views on the solutions to these challenges.

Topics covered include Virtual Power Plants, enhanced geothermal and advanced nuclear. Those latter two are among the handful of sources of energy that we usually think about when we are discussing “clean firm power”. Geothermal in particular is generating a lot of buzz lately. What will it take to get it deployed at scale? Is it pulling ahead of advanced nuclear in the race to commerciality and large-scale deployment?

The Energy Gang will be recording live from the Global Energy Transition event in June in New York. To secure a discounted ticket, use the ENERGYGANG500 discount code. Visit https://events.reutersevents.com/energy-transition/global-energy-transition-new-york to book.




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Jigar Shah returns to the Energy Gang

Fossil fuels still dominate the world’s energy supplies. Do we need different terminology to talk about what’s happening?

We talk about “the energy transition” all the time. But is that language misleading? 20 years ago fossil fuels were 85% of the world’s energy, today they’re just a few percentage points less. If there is a transition to low-carbon energy, it is happening only slowly, and it needs to move much faster to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. The world has made huge strides in both the cost and deployment of renewable energy, but can we really say that we are in a transition away from fossil fuels?

Host Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, a professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, and Amy Myers Jaffe, director of NYU’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, to discuss the way the language we use shapes our ideas about energy policy. Amy quotes her Tufts University colleague (and previous guest on the show) Kelly Sims Gallagher: “climate doom and gloom really disregards the progress that's been made”. That progress includes 56 countries, between them responsible for over half of global emissions, passing direct climate mandates to limit greenhouse gases.

But despite all that action, we still get the great majority of our energy from fossil fuels. The gang debate whether the current global shift towards low-carbon energy represents a real "transition", or maybe even a “transformation”. Or is it merely an addition of new energy sources on top of the existing ones such as oil and gas.

Ed, Amy and Melissa debate the feasibility of achieving net zero by 2050, considering the political and economic hurdles ahead. Innovations including carbon pricing, electrification, and advances in renewable energy technologies will play prominent roles in shifting us towards cleaner energy systems. Will they be enough?

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Is there an energy transition?

Conversations from the Gulf Coast Power Association conference. 

This bonus episode of the Energy Gang was recorded live during the spring meeting of the Gulf Coast Power Association in Houston, Texas. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Beth Garza, President of the Gulf Coast Power Association, Frank O'Sullivan, Managing Director for Clean Energy at S2G Ventures, and Ken Medlock, Senior Director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. The GCPA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a strong energy industry in the Texas and Gulf Coast region.

First up Ed speaks with Beth about the increase in electricity demand in the region. Unlike most of the US, the Gulf of Mexico coastal region has already been seeing growth in demand for electricity over past couple of decades. But now there are signs that this growth is being kicked into a higher gear as a result of a wave of new data centers, manufacturing facilities and LNG plants. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in this new era.

Increasing strain on the Texas grid is one problem. The catastrophic consequences of Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, in part caused by failures in natural gas supply and gas-fired generation, exposed how the system was unprepared for such an event. Beth Garza discusses the changes that have been made in the three years since then, and how the industry can tackle the new challenges facing the grid.

Plus, Frank O’Sullivan and Ken Medlock join Ed on stage for a panel discussion on strategies for integrating new technologies as the demand for power rises. They debate the key trends in electricity demand growth, and the ability of Texas as a deregulated competitive market to respond to these new opportunities and difficulties.

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Rising electricity demand in Texas: the canary in the coalmine for the rest of the US? | Bonus Episode

As half the world heads to the polls, how important will the results be for efforts to cut emissions?

Over half the world lives in a country that will be holding an election this year. The votes come at a time when resistance to the energy transition is building in many parts of the world, as concerns around energy security grow and some of the challenges of decarbonization come into focus. In the US, a finely-balanced election offers voters two sharply differing visions of the energy future. But there are other places around the world where elections could also shape the direction of energy policy, including the EU, where parties that are skeptical of climate action are on course to win an increased number of seats in the European Parliament.

To explore the ramifications of these key elections around the world, host Ed Crooks is joined by Energy Gang regular Amy Myers Jaffe, director of New York University’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, and by Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global energy & climate innovation editor at The Economist. The show is recorded live from NYU, as the gang take part in discussions on the outlook for elections and energy policy in 2024.

Together they debate the potential consequences of the US election for issues including permitting reform clean energy tax credits, and look at some other significant votes around the world, in India, Mexico, the European parliament among others.

While other countries are arguing over the right course for energy policy, China is betting big on low-carbon technologies, adding a huge amount of manufacturing capacity in solar, EVs and lithium ion batteries. Those are what the Chinese government calls “the new three” sectors, intended to drive export growth, and they are having a far-reaching impacts on energy all around the world.

The Biden administration has pinned its climate policy on using support for low-carbon energy to incentivize manufacturing investment and create well-paying jobs. But with China adding so much capacity in key sectors, sending prices for products such as solar panels tumbling, the challenges facing that strategy are growing. That is an issue that will play out in elections in the US and elsewhere this year: what does it mean for clean energy globally if China continues to dominate the competition?

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Energy Policy: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

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