The Health Pulse

SAL GILL: It's a new year. It's a new beginning. There is a new administration in Washington DC. And there are certainly a lot of new and disruptive things happening in the clean energy sector. It's a very exciting time.

And we're very pleased to launch, in these very exciting times, our second season episode one of Electrifying AI, where we will be discussing some of these transformations. And also starting with our own transformation first, in which I have now become the host of Electrifying AI for this season.

Our goal for this new season is the same as it has always been. It's to provide a venue for clean energy enthusiasts to gain up to date insights on the latest developments taking shape in the electricity sector. Along the way, we'll also help try to demystify the connection between the greatest machine ever built, the electric grid, and the greatest enabler of our time, data analytics.

So to help us do that we'll have a series of special guests this season who hold a variety of different roles throughout the electricity space and industry. And to get us started, our guest for the debut episode of season two will help us get an overview of where the industry is right now and where it is heading in 2021.

So I'm pleased that we're joined with David Roberts. David has spent more than 15 years thinking and writing about the intersection of clean energy and politics. For much of that time, he wrote for Grist and Vox. And he's recently created his own online community called, appropriately enough, Volts.

David has also appeared on a variety of TV shows, radio programs, and podcasts like MSNBC'S All in With Chris Hayes, Pod Save America, and NBC'S Why Is This Happening. David, we are so excited to have you on the podcast today. And thank you for joining us.

DAVID ROBERTS: Glad to be here.

SAL GILL: Excellent-- so David, let's dig right in. So on your website you talk about one of the challenges of writing for a journalist or for a journalistic organization is that you're forced to write for an audience of strangers who know nothing about you, your past work, or your subject matter. So help our audience get to know you. How did you wind up moving from Tennessee to Seattle, and then getting plugged in to covering the clean energy industry?

DAVID ROBERTS: Well, it was all pretty random. It's not a very good story because of how random it is. I was a student-- a philosophy student for a long time. In the late 90s, I got my master's in philosophy, and then was getting my PhD, and dropped out just before dissertation. So I'm part of the ABD nation.

And then I moved to Seattle and bounced around. Crappy tech jobs for a while because I had no experience, no job experience, no real marketable skills, nothing under my belt but a bunch of philosophy study. So anyway, long story short, in 2004, the very first time I ever went to Craigslist, I stumbled on an ad for a editorial assistant at a small web publication called Grist.

And at the time, there were four employees, I think. Grist had four employees. It was very small. So I just wrote this long cover letter saying I have no experience in journalism or environmentalism, but gosh, I sure do want this job. And talked my way into it.

And so then I just grew with Grist. I was with Grist for 10 years as they grew up to 30, I think-- 30 people or somewhat. And I moved over from being an assistant into full time writing over that course. So the point of all that is I'm entirely 100% self-taught in journalism, and in environmentalism, and in climate change. I learned about it entirely through doing it, which has some advantages and disadvantages.

SAL GILL: Hey, that's the best way to learn, right? So can't go wrong with that.

DAVID ROBERTS: Yeah, so then Volts-- I'm sorry, then Vox asked me over there about five years ago. And I stayed there for a while through the Trump madness. And then when that was finally over, I decided it was time to go out on my own.

And so now I'm running Volts. And I'm just writing all and only what I feel like writing. And returned to having a stable community that stays with me-- an audience stays with me over time so that I don't have to, for instance, explain why climate change is bad at the beginning of every single article.

SAL GILL: OK, cool-- that sounds like a lot of fun. It sounds like a very exciting venture. And I was going to say, I can see your philosophy coming in in some of your articles and your approach to climate change. I'm really looking forward to this dialogue.

I have one more get to know your question, David. And at the end of the episode for our listeners, I want your answers to this question too so please stick around. But David, there is no other place to begin, really, other than starting off with what is really happening in the energy space with the new administration and with the change in DC, with Biden joining Washington, now.

So he has put climate change very high up in his agenda against his three other priorities. I believe it's racial equity, it's around-- climate change is the other one. And then there's two others. So you know--

DAVID ROBERTS: COVID-- don't forget COVID.

SAL GILL: Of course, yes, COVID is the other big one. How can we forget that? And actually, we'll come back to COVID as well later. So how do you see what is happening-- and even though it's the early days of Biden-- but there's already been so much that's been happening from Paris Climate Agreement to a whole bunch of executive actions coming through. So how does David Roberts view what's happened in DC and how it impacts our industry?

DAVID ROBERTS: Sure-- I think the best way to summarize it-- what's happened in the climate politics space over the last 5 to 10 years is almost no movement on the Republican side-- some rhetorical movement, but almost no policy movement. But on the Democratic side, it has gone from a peripheral issue seen as the activist left pet issue to being a central priority for the party as a whole.

And you're seeing that very much reflected in Biden's administration, insofar as he has freedom of action, for instance, in executive powers over the executive branch. He's absolutely going gangbusters. From the second he walked in there was getting back in Paris, but also this whole series of executive orders undoing a bunch of last minute Trump deregulatory stuff, getting to work on establishing what's called a social cost of carbon, integrating carbon concern into every agency of the government.

So in that sense, it's incredibly heartening. There's been an incredible flurry of activity. Biden promised on the trail a whole of government approach to climate.

And it's really-- you're seeing that now. You're seeing it in the State Department, Department of Defense, Commerce, the Fed, which I think is really significant. You're seeing it across everything Biden has control over. So the big hinge-- the big question will come with legislation.

He can only do so much with executive powers. He needs something to pass. So there's the question of the filibuster, whether that's going to stay in place. And if it does stay in place, what can be squeezed through the Budget Reconciliation process, which is going to be-- you can get a lot of climate spending, a lot of infrastructure spending through that process.

But you can't get anything like an actual comprehensive climate bill like Biden campaigned on. So the big question just comes down to-- it's the same with all his other policy areas. It's do Democrats care more about the filibuster or more about accomplishing the goals they promised?

SAL GILL: Right-- and we're already seeing, like you're saying, some of these challenges with some of the latest confirmation hearings. Where even though it's a 50-50 split, even within the Democratic space, it could be challenging to get some of these things through.

DAVID ROBERTS: Yes, you need to-- I mean, we're in a period of two years now where to get anything done beyond executive action, you need total Democratic unity-- all 50 Democratic senators on the same page. Which means Joe Manchin is our emperor and ruler for the next two years. And his whims now determine what happens in the country.

SAL GILL: You have nailed that. So how-- let's talk about in, that context, how do you view this energy transition as being different from some of the other ones that have happened in the past? What's your take on that?

DAVID ROBERTS: Well, it's different in a number of ways. Big picture wise, I think, it's different in a number of ways. I think, first of all, the previous ones were mostly-- just happened. They just happened based on economics and stuff like that. Slowly, some sources became more expensive and rare, other resources became cheap.

So one, previous transitions were-- I don't know, you call it accidental-- just things that happened as a result of forces and not intentional things. So this one is intentional if we ever really muster the intention. We're claiming we want to do it. So it's intentional in a way the previous ones weren't.

And two, I think it's going to be faster. This is a pet theory of mine. There's a really well known analyst, Vaclav Smil, who is well known for throwing cold water on all this talk of the clean energy transition.

And his whole point is previous energy transitions take a long time. They take on the order of a century. For something like whale oil to give way to coal or something like that, it takes a long time. And so his thing is all this talk about completely transitioning our economy by 2030, or 2050, or whatever is just kind of la la land.

So my thing is one big difference of this energy transition to the previous ones is those previous ones were shifting from one kind of physical source of energy to another kind of physical source of energy. So you had to shift out all the production, all the machines, et cetera. And that takes a long time.

One thing that's happening with this energy transition is we are doing that. We are shifting sources of energy. But we're also shifting from-- the way I put it is, from stuff to intelligence. We're substituting computing power for a lot of the stuff that used to be done physically or require physical force.

We're substituting computer power for stuff-- for commodities and machines. And computing power is getting cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper, unlike commodities, which-- physical commodities, which tend to get more expensive. Computing power is just getting cheaper and cheaper and more and more powerful. And it evolves and iterates much, much faster than physical machines-- physical stuff.

You can have iterations of digital technologies almost instantly, depending on how you work them. So insofar as you can substitute computing power for stuff, you're going to move a lot faster because digitization in the digital world just moves much faster than the physical world. So to the extent this energy transition is dematerializing, I think it's going to move faster than previous ones. So that's what I would say.

One, it's intentional. Two, it's going to be faster. And three, because-- I mean, and a lot falls out of that because it's intentional and because we need, and want, and are trying to do it fast.

It's politically, I think, much more fraud than previous transitions because you're trying to displace a lot of what are more or less active and healthy business models. If you discount climate change, you're trying to-- basically, on a large scale, you're trying to strand a lot of what is today, valuable energy. And that's just politically something we've never done before and don't really know how to do.

SAL GILL: So David, there's also a lot of momentum from the investment community too. There's a lot of things happening with ESG investments. There's the CEO of BlackRock announcing, in his annual letter to CEOs, about how he sees climate tech and clean energy as a cause for optimism about capitalism. So do you see that may actually help accelerate as well this transition?

DAVID ROBERTS: Yeah, I completely do. I think it's one of the signs that climate change has gone beyond the activist community and has really nestled within the mainstream now. So it's no longer an if, it's a when, now.

I think everybody-- almost everybody-- in every industry now acknowledges this is a thing that's going to happen. This transition to clean energy is going to happen. And we're just haggling over the details. We're haggling over the timing-- how quickly we want to do it. And that mental shift is a big deal, especially among the people who control vast quantities of capital.

The way I sort of joke about it-- I did a long post on Microsoft's many initiatives. And the way I summarized it is in the corporate world I spent a long time-- essentially in the early 2000s, around the time of Al Gore's first movie where there was a lot of green talk, a lot of green signaling, a lot of green virtue signaling, a lot of green washing, a lot of-- but it was mostly coming out of PR departments, basically.

And I think what's happened, over time, is in the corporate world concern over climate has escaped the PR department and made its way into engineering-- into the shop floor. And now the geeks, like the engineers, have been gripped by this problem. Because above all, it's just a really super fascinating engineering problem.

I mean, this is the kind of thing that smart engineering students love to get their hands on. It's just a huge challenge how to do this. And so you see much more substantial action coming out of the corporate world. What Microsoft is doing is genuinely inspiring. So I think they're one of the top accelerants right now.

SAL GILL: So David, on the topic of climate change-- and this has been a burning question for me to ask you this since we organized this episode. And for their listeners who are tuning in, we're just coming off of a big major episode in Texas related to a winter storm that basically took out most of Texas without electricity. And David, what's your perspective on that? What do you think happened? And then, what needs to happen to avoid this from happening again?

DAVID ROBERTS: Well, this is one of those things when you talk about the electricity grid and especially, when you talk about utilities and utility regulation where, literally, everything is more complicated. No matter what answer I give-- no matter what answer I give, the truth is actually more complicated than that.

But I think stepping back, the main lesson is just-- the range of weather conditions for which we need to plan is widening all the time. Which any sort of planner can tell you is just devilishly difficult. Texas is a good example. Most of Texas grid planning is around the summer peak because it's usually hot in Texas. And usually, the peak demand in Texas is summer, so the whole system is built around that.

And even the climate forecast for Texas is it's going to get warmer and warmer. So it's not like that's going to change. But what's also going to happen with climate change is that amidst that general trend towards more warmth, you're going to get more frequent freak super-cold events like you like you just saw.

So just think about it from the perspective of the Texas grid. You build this entire grid designed around summer. And then you need to build this entire parallel grid and set of resources that are going to sit idle for nine years out of 10, until this one freak event comes along and it's needed.

And when you think about it, that's just incredibly expensive. It's incredibly expensive to have a whole infrastructure built for rare freak events. And that, unfortunately, is going to be the rule of-- that's going to be the rule from now on for every region of the country, every part of the world is-- just the range of stuff you have to plan for is much wider.

So that to me just means resilience has got to move up to number one in grid planning. What Texas had was a very cowboy market where their reserve margins were kind of low. And they were flirting with a kind of just in time delivery system, which normally works great. Texas ratepayers saved a ton of money over the last 10 years with the system. But when something like this happens, then you're completely left out.

SAL GILL: And the fact that they are separate from the other two big interconnects in the United States.

DAVID ROBERTS: So part of resilience-- I mean, resilience moves in a number of directions. One is down to more distributed energy, more local resilience, better insulating of buildings. Texas buildings are just terribly insulated because they don't worry about cold very often, so they lost heat almost instantly. They had no backup. Distributed solar panels, and batteries, and micro grids-- all these ways of making the local areas more resilient.

And then the other direction to go for resilience is outward, which means Texas needs to hook its grid up to the rest of the country. If it could have imported power from other areas of the country, it wouldn't have run into this. And it's just been trying to escape federal jurisdiction.

So resilience means one, bulking up your distributed energy and your local resilience. And two, also reaching outward in interconnecting more broadly across the country. So Texas needs to do both of those, and so does every other area of the country.

SAL GILL: David, that's a really important point that you mention. And you've been writing a lot about this lately, as well. And the realm of transmission and, perhaps, how there may need to be a different realization of transmission is still the fundamental backbone of, perhaps, even the entire economy of the United States and for that matter the world. So where have we gone off on transmission? And how can we get back on track?

DAVID ROBERTS: Well, it's not so much that we went off. It's just that the world changed. And the model by which we build transmission has not caught up yet. So in the old utility model, where most power came from big centralized fossil fuel plants, if you're a utility, you just go 20 miles outside of town, build your giant coal plant, and then run a transmission line from the coal plant to the city or the power load where it's needed. It's all very simple. It wasn't very complicated.

So a lot of things have changed now. One is renewables have come on the scene. And renewables cannot just be sited wherever you want to site them. They're most intense-- they're most powerful in particular areas of the country, which often happen to be very remote from load centers-- from demand.

So this raises the need for long distance power transmission, the high voltage direct current lines-- HVDC lines that everybody talks about. It's a relatively new need. And we just don't have a model for who pays for those.

And right now, transmission is still regulated at the state level. So if you want to build a giant multistate transmission line, you have to negotiate with every state agency, every landowner, every county. And every one of those entities has a veto over the line. So it's almost impossible to build these things. So we just need national grid planning, in a way that the current system is not set up to do.

SAL GILL: And that's also-- that ties in very nicely with what you said earlier about the advancements on the computational side of things. How can we take advantage of aspects of development in that realm? And apply it to our industry, specifically the transmission space, perhaps, from the perspective of reducing grid congestion.

Are there any advanced algorithms that can be introduced to help with those types of issues? Or other areas that, perhaps, may reduce the interconnection queues-- which like you were pointing out, that's been a challenge, as well, for a lot of jurisdictions too.

DAVID ROBERTS: Well, yes-- I mean, everything is getting digitized. Everything is getting computerized. And that's true of the transmission system too.

You have, for instance-- so we know that the capacity of a line varies with the heat of the line. And so the heat of the line is always fluctuating. But we just didn't have the tech, up until very recently, to monitor those lines in real time basis. So we just had to guess at their capacity. And we always guessed low to be conservative.

So now we have LiDAR-- we could put a little box in the transmission tower with LiDAR that watches the line. And can tell grid operators in real time what the actual capacity of the line is. Which just enables you to send a lot more power through the lines.

And there's a bunch of-- we have a lot more sophisticated power flow control technology that we didn't used to have. Just by switching on and off circuit breakers, you can reconfigure the topology of the grid-- the physical topology of the grid, which makes power move through it differently. That's always been true.

But before, it's just been grid operators learning this arcane art on the job. And using their intuition to know where to do it. But now, of course, we have massive computing power. So we can compute on a minute by minute basis.

What's the optimum topology of the grid right now for our goals? And a computerized algorithm can chew through those calculations and spit out exactly what it is. So you could update the topology of the grid every 10 minutes if you wanted to.

SAL GILL: And do it in the cloud too.

DAVID ROBERTS: Which gets you a lot more efficiency. So all of these serve, basically, to increase the performance of the stuff we've already built, which is one of the great promises of digitization. It just gets more out of existing resources.

SAL GILL: Absolutely. I always wish we have more time for these discussions because they're so interesting. One last question I have for you. And this is going back to one of your articles from Vox, which really-- I was very fascinated by, and actually inspired by, and that was this concept of shifting baselines that you talked about.

And I recall you gave an example of the fisheries industry. How the fishers were becoming used to their being less and less fish and that being normal. And perhaps that same type of analogy could be extended to climate change and the impacts that we're seeing on the grid. So I'd love for you to share with the audience this concept of shifting baselines. And how can we learn from that?

DAVID ROBERTS: Sure. The fisheries example is great. The fisheries is where this whole concept was born. And it's not that individual fishers get used to changes. It's that a particular generation of fishers comes in, and whatever the population of fish is when that generation starts, that's their normal.

So they might experience a little bit of loss of that population, but then the next generation comes in. And that's slightly diminished population is not-- they don't experience it as diminished. That's just their new normal. That's their baseline. That's their new baseline.

And so every new generation comes in and sets a new baseline. So no one generation or person really experiences the decline of the fish population as such. No one can take it all in. And yet you go from a robust fish population to the fish being, basically, fished out without any generation of fishers really experiencing a big change.

And it's only in experiencing a big change that we become activated, and care, and see something as a problem, and try to solve it. But when things just eat away marginally over time, we just continually update and continually adjust. And so never really experience it as a crisis.

And that is, paradigmatically, what's happening with climate change. So even someone 50 years ago would have experienced a different physical climate. Fewer storms in some places. Earlier winters in some places.

But no one generation of people experiences a sharp enough or dramatic enough change in the climate to really be galvanized by it. And so every new generation comes in, and it's a new baseline. And so what happens is the climate just is degrading before our very eyes. But we're not emotionally experiencing it as a crisis.

Only things in a very narrow time frame-- because of how humans evolved to care mostly about their immediate circumstances out on the savanna. We need to watch out for lions or whatever. But we don't have the machinery to pay close attention to things that unfold on giant timescales and giant geographical scales. We just don't have the emotional machinery to take that in.

So it's only through our intellect that we grasp these things. Insofar as we've learned about climate change, we have learned about it through our intellect, through our instruments-- through our scientific instruments. And we've had to piece it together intellectually to paint a picture of what's happening.

And it's just very difficult for humans-- socially, psychologically-- to take that kind of abstract intellectual knowledge about what's happening and feel it in our guts. We're just not designed to feel changes on those time and geographic scales. I mean, this is part of the central challenge of climate change and a lot of other modern global problems.

Once you have a global population that's as big and as powerful as us, you get lots of these emergent problems that just grow by increments. They're just not on the time scale that we're built to heed. And that's true of like the spread of diseases and economic inequality-- like name it. All these problems, you have to grasp them with your intellect.

And you need big cooperative solutions, which are also always difficult politically. If we just needed to build seawalls around big US cities, that would be one thing. If we could somehow solve the problem or protect ourselves on our own, it would be one thing. But we need everyone in the world to be acting vigorously at the same time. So it's just the trickiest kind of problem.

And as you can see from our response to COVID, it's not like we do much better if it's faster and even more devastating. Even that doesn't really activate our-- just look at how we-- and I'll wrap up with this. Look at how we reacted to 9/11 versus how we react to COVID.

COVID has taken immeasurably more lives. It's done immeasurably more damage. Arguably, more damage to our international-- Just on a human level it's done way more damage. But because the deaths have been portioned out on a slow steady drip, they just don't have the cumulative emotional impact that losing all those lives at once did.

It's not rational, but it's just how humans are built. So politically, we have to compensate for that. We have to design our way around this limitation of human psychology.

SAL GILL: Those are some great, excellent insights. And I hope in the electricity sector that we learn from this experience, as well, what's happened with COVID and not just take climate change as a cumulative impact. We definitely need to act on it sooner than later.

David, this has been such a terrific conversation. And I feel like I'm on a news channel. And my producer is telling me, Sal, you're cutting the time. You're cutting the time.

DAVID ROBERTS: The cane is going to come out and yank you here in a second.

SAL GILL: Yes, my producer is Phillip. And he's very conscious about sending me messages when the time is running close. So thank you, Phillip, for that. For our listeners, I'd love to invite you to David's new community and sign up for his newsletter. It's at Volts-- V-O-L-T-S-- dot wtf. Yes, that's right.

David is also on Twitter. He tells me it's drvolts. Or you could call it at Dr. Volts. But I definitely encourage you to check out those links. He has done a lot of great pieces on transmission. And there's a lot more coming from him and some wealth of insights.

We'll include links to all these as well at the bottom of the video. So you'll have access to them as well as. For our podcast listeners on Spotify and other big platforms, you'll get access to those there too.

And whether you're watching us on YouTube or listening to one of our podcast on your favorite podcast streaming platforms, we really thank you for joining us today. And make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss one of our latest Electrifying AI episodes.

And David, one last question before we let you go. So we're building an Electrifying AI playlist on Spotify. And we would love to hear from you if you have any recommendations for tracks that we could add.

DAVID ROBERTS: In terms of electricity themed songs, my favorite has always been the one from Schoolhouse Rock. I'm sure you guys probably already have this on your playlist. But the Schoolhouse Rock song about electricity and power.

And it's amazingly sophisticated too, I guess, relative to what you see these days. So that would be my choice. I have a million other songs I'd recommend. But in terms of electricity themed songs, that's the way I'd go. It's very educational.

SAL GILL: Nice choice. One of these days I got to convince somebody on Justin Timberlake. But I'll work on that.

DAVID ROBERTS: I'm a huge JT fan. You don't have to convince me.

SAL GILL: Well, we'll work on that. Well listeners, we would also love to know what song would you recommend. So if you have a pick, you're more than welcome to tweet it to me at the Electric Sal. That's pretty easy to remember. So I don't need to spell it out.

And we may just include your pick in our Spotify list and also send you some cool Electrifying AI gear as a result. So that's all the time we have. And I'd like to thank you, again. And please check us back again with our latest episode. Thank you.