At first glance, solar energy production and livestock grazing don’t seem like they have much in common, but the two industries have formed a growing partnership with what’s known as solar grazing.

This episode of Grid Talk features Nick Armentrout who is the president of the American Solar Grazing Association. Armentrout reports a steep rise in the use of livestock to graze under and around solar panel deployments in rural America.

“There is vegetation in place to control stormwater. After the site is turned on and is operational, now you need to maintain that vegetation. You don’t want it to grow too tall and shade the panels and impact actual production.” said Armentrout.

It’s turning out to be a win-win situation for farmers and energy producers. Instead of machinery to keep vegetation in check, farmers use the land for grazing animals.

“Over 120,00 acres of solar are being grazed in the United States, so that is more than any other country that we’re aware of on the globe.” 

The trend benefits solar power generators, helping them maintain the land under their power assets, produces new income streams for small family farmers, and is inspiring a new generation of young farmers that want to help tackle climate change.

“I think it’s a fantastic situation, I mean, we’re just scratching the surface on livestock and grazing solar and the potential benefits for the animals in the system.”

Energy storage is considered the holy grail that would unlock a vast increase in solar and wind renewable electricity generation. 

That’s the topic for the latest episode of Grid Talk featuring Will McNamara who is a Grid Energy Policy Storage Analyst with Sandia National Laboratories.

Six national energy labs and a cohort of 200 partners across the energy industry have joined together in a moonshot effort to vastly expand energy storage in America. It is all being coordinated through the National Consortium for the Advancement of Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) technologies. 

“There was a proposal call issued by the Department of Energy offering funds to the national labs to create an industry forum focused on the many challenges that are facing long-duration energy storage technologies and create this forum so that the industry can come together and address these challenges,” said McNamara 

The goal is to boost storage technology on a large scale from about four hours duration to 10 hours.

“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow so we need to find a way to store the energy to make it dispatchable, hence the need for energy storage, so we are absolutely in this evolutionary period. We are building the constructs for the future.”

In his role as Grid Energy Storage Policy Analyst for Sandia National Laboratories, McNamara focuses on energy storage policy development at the federal and state levels. He has spent his entire 23-year career in the energy and utilities industry with a concentration on regulatory and legislative policy.  Additional areas of subject matter expertise include distributed energy resources, AMI/smart grid, renewables, and competitive retail markets.

McNamara has an M.B.A. from University of Phoenix, an M.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from the University of Iowa. 

Solar siting, the future of hydroelectric dams, and grid transmission buildout have been some of the most contentious and important areas needing attention as the U.S. builds out the electric grid of tomorrow. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Dan Reicher who is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy and is associated with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, as well as Dartmouth’s Irving Institute for Energy and Society.

The discussion centers on a program at Stanford called Uncommon Dialogues which aims to sort out divisive issues and make progress solving them.

“I started to look into this Uncommon Dialogue program, and I was really quite intrigued given the difficulties we have in resolving some of today’s big energy, climate and environmental issues,” said Reicher.

The idea is to get opposing parties together at least once and see if there’s any interest in really trying to resolve some of their big differences.

“I think we’ve got a good process, and we’ve tested it now in both hydropower and big solar, and I think it could work well on a lot of other issues. We got some of the biggest solar developers in the United States to sit down with some of the big environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy, the largest U.S. conservation group, and with tribal representatives and a whole host of others.”

The result was the groups bought in on an agreement about how to proceed.

“We’ve been moving forward ever since to really try to improve the way we site, operate, and transmit the power from these big solar projects, often measured in the hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and some of them approaching 1,000 megawatts.”

Dan Reicher is a former Assistant Secretary of Energy in the Clinton Administration. Mr. Reicher is currently attached to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Mr. Reicher joined Stanford in 2011 as the executive director of Stanford's Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy & Finance. Before joining Stanford, he was the Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google.

Mr. Reicher holds a B.A. in biology from Dartmouth College and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. 

Kansas, in the heart of America’s robust wind belt, has approved a new direct current transmission corridor to help speed the transition to cleaner energy. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Andrew French, the chairman of the Kansas Corporation Commission.

“Kansas actually approved a permit for the Grain Belt Express DC line to extend all the way across our state and all the way to Indiana,” said French.

It comes at a time of increased demand for energy - particularly non-carbon emitting sources. French acknowledges that navigating the regulatory and permitting process is difficult.

“Right now, you’re looking at a few years to get new generation online and it’s a tough spot. You’ve got a lot of customers that want power.”

“This is a complex industry even for developers that are very sophisticated. As they’re developing a wind farm, a solar farm, some other generation source, it’s really hard for them to anticipate how much it’s going to cost for them to interconnect,” the Kansas regulator said. 

He’s also optimistic about the future.

“There are a lot of things moving in the direction of a successful energy transition. There are also a lot of things standing in the way or complications. There is of course, public sentiment that doesn’t understand some of the reasons why we may have need to build new infrastructure and transition to different resources.”

Andrew J. French was appointed to the KCC in 2020. He has served as Chairperson since 2021.

French currently serves as the Kansas representative to the Southwest Power Pool and regularly participates in various SPP stakeholder groups. He is also one of 10 state utility regulators selected to serve on the Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission formed in 2021.

Before his appointment to the KCC, French practiced law with a focus on energy policy and the regulation of utility rates and services. 

French has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Kansas and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Kansas School of Law.
 
 

The sister plant to the ill-fated Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania is getting a new life. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Dan Eggers, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Constellation. 

Constellation will pay $1.6 billion to refurbish Unit 1 at Three Mile Island by 2028. It sits near Unit 2, the reactor that suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.  Unit 1 is an independent reactor, and its long-term operation was not impacted by the Unit 2 accident. 

Unit 1 closed in 2019 due to financial conditions, but Microsoft has now agreed to purchase all the energy from the plant to meet demand for its data centers.

“They are undeniably a sustainability leader,” Eggers said of Microsoft. “When we realized that this was a viable project in the sense that we could bring it back from a mechanical and technical perspective, we brought the opportunity to them, explained what it could be, and they were very enthusiastic.” 

Eggers says the need for additional generation made them take another look at TMI Unit 1. 

“We ran it for 20 years. It ran incredibly well, safely, reliably, dependably over that time,” said Eggers.

Daniel L. Eggers is the executive vice president and chief financial officer for Constellation. In this role, he is responsible for leading the execution of all financial activities for the Constellation business. He serves on the Constellation Executive Committee, which sets strategy and direction for the company.

Eggers joined Exelon in 2016. Prior to that he was with Credit Suisse for 18 years with a focus on energy-related sectors. 

Eggers received a bachelor's degree in Finance from Texas Christian University and received the Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2000. He also completed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Reactor Technology Course in 2023.

One of the largest investor-owned utilities in the country is preparing for an 80% increase in electricity demand by 2045. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Steve Powell who is the president and CEO of Southern California Edison.

With a customer base of 15 million people across a 50,000 square mile service area, Southern California Edison is changing the way it prepares for the increased demand.

“Our engineers that are frankly used to dealing with relatively small changes on the grid and small amounts of load growth and really focus on just making sure that the infrastructure stays reliable are now having to think very differently about how we plan for customer load growth and load growth is showing up really quickly,” said Powell.

Meeting the demand for carbon free electricity means more generation from wind and solar and other sources like nuclear and geothermal. It also means more transmission to get electricity to customers.

“You look at the California Independent System Operator's 20-year outlook and they're talking about 50 plus billion dollars of new transmission that needs to get built. We're going to need to build transmission miles at four times the pace that we've seen historically.”

Powell admits 20 years is a short timeframe, and the industry needs to move faster. 

“About 20% of the energy that customers use is electricity. By the time you get to 2045, I would expect 50 to 60% of it to be electricity based. So, customers are going to be two to three times more dependent on electricity than they are today. That means our level of service has to be better. Reliability is going to have to be better.”

Steven Powell is president and chief executive officer of Southern California Edison. Powell has held a variety of positions of progressing responsibility since joining the company in 2000, including executive vice president, Operations and senior vice president of Strategy, Planning, and Operational Performance.  

He has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. He has also held leadership positions in resource planning and strategy, gas and power procurement, and SCE’s plug-in electric vehicle readiness efforts.

Germany and Europe are somewhat envious of the massive federal spending now underway in America to ready the grid and the energy economy to combat climate change. 

That’s according to Simon Müller who is one of Europe’s leading thinkers on the future of energy and sustainability. As the director of the think tank Agora Energiewende, he took time to explain his views on the Department of Energy’s Grid Talk Podcast.

“When it comes to the buildout of renewable energies actually what we see in jurisdictions across the world is that now that you really have very competitive costs that it doesn’t take that much political will any more to go for quite large amount of renewables,” said Müller. 

After the global economic downturn from the Covid pandemic, Europe has watched the U.S. government put in place a stimulus package built around investments in clean energy and the electric power grid. 

“When you look at policymakers in Germany but also in Europe, they’ve been looking to the United States and the Inflation Reduction Act with a certain degree of envy. Why? Because it’s been perceived as being very successful at attracting investments in technologies that are very promising for the future and that are very strategic and position the United States on clean energy technologies.” 

Europe has struggled to match that government support.

“If we want to also play a role as a manufacturing hub going forward, we have to get our act together to find a response to that act in the U.S.”

Simon Müller is Director Germany at Agora Energiewende. He leads Agora's work in Germany on overarching energy and climate policy issues as well as in the areas of electricity, heat and energy infrastructure. Müller has advised governments in over 20 countries on six continents and coordinated and authored various studies on the transition of the power and energy system to renewable energies.

Müller is an alumnus of the Mercator Followship on International Affairs and is a member of the advisory board of the DLR Institute for Networked Energy Systems. He studied in Oldenburg, Bremen and Berlin (psychology, physics) and holds a M.Sc. in physics.

NV Energy and Google have pioneered new utility regulatory policy to help the tech company’s move to power its data center with renewable and green energy.

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Doug Cannon, President and CEO of NV Energy. 

Google executives say the agreement could be a template for similar pacts with utilities around the country. Higher revenues from new fee structures will be used to fund new geothermal generation resources in Nevada. 

“We really quickly recognized is we couldn’t just rely on that tariff book anymore and we had, if we were going to stay relevant in the business and we were going to be a value-add energy provider for our customers we had to change our way of business.”

Utilities that don’t adapt to the green energy push of the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft may be headed to challenging times. 

“We’re going to see some utilities bypassed.”

“What this product, what we’re focused on is real time green generation being injected into the NV Energy grid at the same time as Google was utilizing energy… there’s absolutely a real time match on that energy.”

Doug Cannon leads NV Energy’s daily operations and oversees the company’s commitment to deliver low-cost energy, expand its renewable energy portfolio and maintain industry-leading reliability for its customers. He has been with NV Energy since 2013.

NV Energy delivers electricity to nearly 1.3 million customers and nearly 50 million tourists annually throughout its nearly 46,000-mile service territory in the state of Nevada. 

Cannon earned a juris doctor from the University of Colorado School of Law and a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Colorado. He holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental geoscience from Weber State University.

Google’s data centers consume an enormous amount of electricity. That’s prompted the information giant to proactively engage in the accelerating energy revolution. From Nevada to North Carolina and many points between, it is gearing up to power the Artificial Intelligence wave by striking novel relationships with utilities and encouraging the transformation of energy regulation, state by state. 

That is the focus of this episode of Grid talk. Host Marty Rosenberg interviews Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s Global Head of Data Center Energy.

Google, citing industry sources, says and additional $2.5 trillion must be spent on clean energy over the next six years to address climate change. 

“What we have encountered is a universal recognition that we are in a unique moment in time,” said Peterson Corio. “For the first time in decades, we have real load growth in the U.S.”

Google’s response is to deepen its use of clean energy. 

“We are matching 100% of the electricity we use on an annual basis with new additional clean energy that we put onto the grid somewhere in the system or in the world.”

That effort will now be broadened. 

“Our higher standard of our 24/7 carbon-free energy goal actually takes that a step further and says if we’re truly going to decarbonize the grid where we operate, we need to make it first local, meaning we can’t just only sign a new contract for wind or solar, for example, in the Midwest to offset our data center in Singapore, right? Carbon is a global problem, but we also need to find solutions directly where we operate.”

Amanda Peterson Corio has 20 years of experience in energy project finance, development, and the procurement of renewable and traditional energy generation. In her current role, Amanda manages power procurement, energy policy, and energy infrastructure development for Google’s global data centers. 

Amanda holds an MBA from The Wharton School of Business and a BA in Business Administration with Honors from Boston University’s School of Management.

TerraPower, fueled with $1 billion from Bill Gates, hopes to be first out of the gate with next generation nuclear projects that will complement and back up burgeoning renewable energy generation. 

In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg interviews Chris Levesque who is president and CEO of TerraPower. 

The company is developing its 345-megawatt prototype. Ultimately, the units will be plugged in to the grid and replace generation at many coal-burning power plants. That will allow the new units ready access to transmission lines.

“We are the only construction permit for a commercial reactor in front of the NRC (U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission) today so by that objective measure, it means we’re next. It means the next American reactor is our Natrium Reactor in Wyoming; yes, so we plan to receive that construction license in 2026,” said Levesque

All kinds of nuclear technology should soon follow. 

“All the models show that the optimum mix on an emission-free grid is going to be 20% to 30% nuclear,” Levesque said. “I wish we could move faster, though. TerraPower is the leader. We’re trying to deliver as fast as we can on the first one and scale as fast as we can but we’re going to need multiple technologies.” 

“We really do need to triple nuclear, and we’re excited about being first but even when we deliver hundreds of reactors to triple nuclear, it’s going to require a really massive deployment.”

Chris Levesque is president and chief executive officer of TerraPower and also serves as a member of the TerraPower Board. He was appointed to that position in November 2018 after having served as president of TerraPower since 2015. Levesque leads this nuclear innovation company in the pursuit of next-generation nuclear energy. His proven track record in scoping, planning and implementing complex projects began with his service in the U.S. Nuclear Navy and features more than 30 years of experience in the nuclear field.

Levesque holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Master of Science in mechanical engineering and a naval engineer degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute.