Nick, Quincy Lee, the CEO of Electric Era, and Ramez Naam, a highly experienced climate tech and energy analyst and investor, dive deep on all things energy and electrification in 2024. Starting with a focus on mobility and the power sector, Quincy, Mez, and Nick touch on topics as far reaching as geoengineering, the power of narratives, and their expectations for decarbonization across other sectors out to 2050 and beyond.

• Why decarbonization and electrification need to be led by product superiority
• What to expect in energy and electrification in 2024 and beyond
• Other trends and topics beyond transportation and the power sector worth your attention 

Don't miss out on this podcast if you’re interested in learning more about the state of climate tech, electrification, and energy broadly, and more! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or your favorite podcast platform to catch all the latest episodes.

Timestamps:

00:05:00 - Mobility and Electrification Outlook for 2024

00:13:27 - Battery Energy Storage on Grids

00:19:19 - One Story of the Decade: Grid Overhaul

00:31:27 - The Winning Technologies in Energy Generation

00:39:52 - Transitions from ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Energy Sources

00:43:58 - Why Better Products Win in The Energy Transition

00:47:00 - Why More Focus on Agriculture & Land Use Change is Needed

00:50:50 - The Case for Geoengineering via Sunlight Reflection & More

00:54:50 - A Call to Action for Optimism & to Work on Climate

Learn more about Electric Era on their website: https://electriceratechnologies.com/ and follow Ramez Naan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ramez

If you love listening to The Keep Cool Show, please leave me a 5-star review on Rate My Podcast: https://ratethispodcast.com/keepcool

Thank you so much! 

Plus, stay up-to-date on all things Keep Cool here: https://keepcool.co/ and follow Nick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickvanosdol and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasvanosdol/

Nick:

Welcome to the Keep Cool Show, the podcast in which we cover how cutting-edge climate technologies connect to the world in which we live. I'm your host, Nick Van Osdahl.

Ramez:

If we want to hit 1.5 degrees C, we've missed that. Sorry. That's just where it is.

Nick:

1.5 C is dead.

Ramez:

Long live 1.5 C. Without solar radiation management, without stratospheric aerosol injection or sunlight reflection, which honestly is the most ignored area in climate tech. But don't get me started on that. We could spend an hour on that. But 2 C is actually quite plausible. And the world doesn't end at 1.6 or 2.1. So we have a shot. Now, I think it's instructive to look at what did happen with coal generation in the U.S. and in Europe, because it has plunged like Europe even faster than the U.S. But the U.S. I did the math right up until the start of COVID. We undid 28 years of coal growth in the U.S. in 11 years to primarily market forces and some regulation. The regulation was not a ban on coal. It wasn't a nationwide carbon tax. It wasn't a cap and trade program. It was a set of local and federal ordinances that had things like controls on sulfur emissions, private-public partnerships to phase out a coal plant and build a gas plant or a solar and wind farm in its place and provide jobs. And coal is a dead man walking in the U.S. and it is in Europe, too. Even people thought, you know, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, well, Europe was going to see coal demand soar. It didn't happen, to be honest. So I think we can substantially reduce the consumption of this, but I agree with Quincy, it's not going to happen just automatically. We're going to have to create policies that phase out dirty technologies, even as we use a combination of policy and innovation and better products and lower cost points to grow the new clean sector. People are not going to embrace clean energy if they see it as more expensive and worse for them. We have to provide a better product, but we can use some carrots and sticks to accelerate the turnover of the old technology, the replacement of the old technology with the new as that better product comes online.

Nick:

Quincy, Mez, welcome to, I think what I'll call a special edition of the Keep Cool podcast. It's great to have you both on. Usually I only have one guest, so I'm excited for a little bit more of a round table format. And I think we'll touch on all kinds of different topics ranging from mobility, electrification, energy in general, climate, climate tech. So I'm super juiced about this one. And sometimes I dive right into the deep end, but given that there's three of us on the call today, why don't we take a moment and do some introductions? It's always interesting to trace how good folks like yourselves got to where you are today. So Quincy, why don't we start with you and then we'll go to Mez.

Quincy:

Nick:

Thanks so much. Maz, over to you.

Ramez:

Nick:

Quincy:

Nick:

Yeah, there's a couple things in there that I think are important that I'll double-click on. For one, I think it's interesting to kind of concretize this idea of there's the actual data of what's happening, whether it be electric vehicle or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle sales. And then there's also narratives that a lot of folks are exposed to. We've definitely seen more articles of late across a variety of publications put with headlines such as like, you know, are EV sales in the U.S. slowing or why is this happening? When in reality, the underlying data, as you said, is, you know, EV sales in the U.S., China and Europe grow every year. China in many ways is actually still leading both the U.S. and Europe. So sometimes there can be this dichotomy between what's actually happening on the ground and the narratives that are percolating and sort of metastasizing across media and the common knowledge. So that's a really important component of all these types of conversations is bringing people home to and cutting through the noise, as you said, to what's actually happening at a state or national or even local community level. I think the second point you made is also excellent, which is there's a lot of different things we could point to with respect to why EVs are a wonderful technology. I mean, at the most basic level with an ICE, you lose so much of energy to heat from the combustion engine, and that's fundamentally just not something that you have with an electric car. Mez, over to you. What did Quincy's opening spark for you?

Ramez:

Nick:

Quincy:

Ramez:

I very much agree. I think it's if climate change didn't exist. EVs would still win. It would just take longer. It would have taken longer to get to this point. But with a lot of these technologies, like solar and like EVs, what happened is early on, the tech was very expensive. Government subsidies helped scale it. That got it to where it's cost competitive or now potentially disruptively priced. And now market momentum will just carry it. Now, that doesn't mean that we should drop all policies. But these things are so competitive that they are just going to win on quality and cost, but we need to move faster. So there's still a role for policy in that as well.

Nick:

Quincy:

Nick:

Ramez:

If you do the math just for the U.S., if you look at in the U.S., if we electrify all ground transport, that is nearly a doubling of electricity consumption. If you electrify all ground transport and electrify all building heat, that's coming a little bit less than tripling of total electricity consumption. And so those are the numbers that Quincy is talking about. This is a very big deal. I think when we talk about the grid, you can incorporate a lot of things in the grid, but I think it's worth separating sort of the poles and wires from other assets we put on, generating assets, storage assets, demand assets. And something that most people, lay people who think about renewables don't realize is renewables and the clean energy economy in general, including EVs, have more dependency on the grid than fossil sources, right? People think, oh, solar is going to make me energy independent, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, if you live in Southwestern Arizona, you can do batteries and solar or Australia. Australia, you want to allow the entire subcontinent of Australia, and you have five hours of energy storage, you can like power the whole thing. Most places are not like that. And so we need more grid buildout, poles and wires. We talk about transmission. That means the trunk of the system, the long haul and higher power capacity lines. That's a bottleneck. And then distribution, you know, the last mile, the last five miles where you plug in your EV charging or how you connect to a home or how you plug in a solar power plant, that's another bottleneck itself. But I think it's interesting to think about like in all scenarios, we need more grid build out, except maybe scenarios with micro nukes that you can distribute everywhere. Any other scenario, you need a lot more grid build out. But the building out poles and wires turns out to have incredible regulatory burdens. It's really, really hard to get permission and to go through a thicket of local level, state level, federal level, and monopoly utilities trying to block you to actually build a transmission in particular. And even for building distribution, and I would love for Quincy to opine on this in a sec, you know, getting the power connection for a multi-vehicle high-speed EV charging site for passenger vehicles, let alone for electric semis in the future. Those look like the connections for large factories or small towns. And those are things that grid operators are used to building out with a planning cycle of five, seven, 10 years. So in a way, the role of energy storage or one role of energy storage in the grid is Quincy said this a bit, is you can just, and you said it as well, Nick, you can just deploy batteries faster than you can get permission to build out the grid. That doesn't mean that we don't need to build out the grid, but it means you can be more nimble and you can solve a lot of the grid problems. You can also use the grid more efficiently. Because people don't think about this, but the power lines that go by your house are not always fully loaded, right? We have to build out the power line capacity for those peak demand moments for when people are drawing the most. But in the middle of the night, you know, at 4 AM, those power lines are not completely unused, but they might be running at 50% utilization or 40% utilization or less. And so with batteries at the edge of the grid, you can say, okay, well, at times when the grid is not, doesn't have high stress on it, I'm going to use those times to fill up a battery so that when the peak demand comes, I don't have to draw on those power lines and strain them or build out new ones as well. And that's really where what Quincy and Electric Air are doing, I think is super relevant and helps us move faster.

Quincy:

Yeah, I think a good mental shortcut for the listeners is to kind of think about it between the difference of building like a custom skyscraper, like almost that level of complexity and permitting required to build a new substation is required to build a new substation. Or to a smaller degree, like a brand new home is what's required to almost install you know, local distribution lines or upgrade those lines and install the transformers on site that's required to deliver, you know, a thousand homes worth of power in an individual public fast charging station. So that's kind of one trajectory, which is the status quo. And then, as Mez said, there's an emerging trend of using storage to defer that or augment that approach, which is the equivalent of like an automotive production line where you can just kind of hammer out batteries quickly at scale with predictable systems and precision manufacturing processes. And in doing so tap into really attractive economies of scale. So it's, I think like the difference between building, you know, the present day version of building the grid is like building homes and versus like a storage based approach. It's like an automotive factory. And obviously that type of solution and others are going to be required if we want to kind of gracefully grow the load that's being distributed through the electrical grid by 3x over the next several decades. The traditional approach, while Mez said it well, needs to go in conjunction with this. I think it's best going to be optimized if it is complemented by best integrated solutions and approaches to a variety of different technologies. But in our case, EV fast charging stations, we use an onsite battery energy system and advanced software controls to approximately lower the demand from the grid by about a factor of three X. That means we can essentially push approximately the same amount of energy through and to service the cars that show up, but with a three X less investment in deployed infrastructure. Backtracking for a second, I think one other kind of new surprising area that's emerged to me recently that's going to translate to new load growth is actually advanced humanoid robotics, which is a pretty novel field. I think everybody's seen the Tesla Optimist video, folding a t-shirt.

Quincy:

So if you haven't seen it, check out the show notes. That is a note is a tele-operated bot, but the broader point is that humanoid robotics will commoditize labor and they're going to be built at scale by a variety of different companies, including agility, which is an Oregon based company and Tesla. who's building the optimist bot. And what's surprising, I guess, and exciting is that those powertrain systems are going to be electrical. So they're going to consume about as much power as a car on average in a given day. So I know some folks on the Tesla team and have talked to them about this and they're sizing for like a 90% duty cycle. And that translates to about 10 kilowatt hours of net draw per day, which is literally the amount of car drives on average in America. So if that takes off, which I suspect it will, that's going to be maybe another doubling of the grid approximately, depending on how many are produced. So super exciting, but again, another big challenge for energy nerds everywhere.

Ramez:

Yeah, this is one place where I'll disagree. And, you know, I'm not normally thought of as a pessimist or a curmudgeon, but I'm dubious on the humanoid robotics, to be totally honest. There's no real way to short that sector. But if I could, I would. But that doesn't erase any of the demand for the demand growth for electricity is still enormous. And so data centers, as you mentioned as well, that again, and if these robots come on, another way to think about it is we're going to electrify manufacturing. Whether that's the current type of factory robots that we have, or the fact that we're going to probably electrify making steel, whether we do it via direct electrical processes or via turning electricity into hydrogen by splitting water and using that to make steel. There's a whole lot of industrial stuff. whether it's robots or something else that today is, I don't know, I think the last number I looked at is 21%, 22% of global emissions, about a third of energy use is industrial energy. And so that stuff we don't tend to think about because it's out of sight, out of mind for most of us that don't work in factories or steel smelters. That's going to electrify as well. And that's another enormous chunk.

Nick:

I'd be curious at this stage to maybe pick both of your brains on really like the generation side of this, because that's sort of, we've talked about solar a bit, but we haven't talked a massive amount about, you know, what technologies are really going to win on the generation front as we talk about all these things in terms of load growth. And obviously there's a lot of spatial variability, as you alluded to, Mez. Like what works? in Arizona or Australia might look very different than what works in Germany or Japan or China, or I was just in Brazil for 10 days, and they already have actually a reasonably clean grid from a lot of kind of legacy hydropower assets that they've built. But there's certainly a question of how much more of that capacity you can build. So, you know, zooming all the way out, I'd be curious what kind of broader trends we're all seeing on the generation front, because I think for listeners, it's also good context that while variable renewables like solar and wind have grown a lot massively, and the technologies are improving massively over the last few decades, know, in a sense, we're still sitting at a point where last year, coal demand production, seaborne volumes was at an all-time high. So hopefully inflection points are coming soon. We haven't quite hit the mark yet where there's really meaningful global emissions reductions in generation. It certainly happened in certain countries. But yeah, with that set up, I'll pause. And maybe we'll start with you, Meza. I'd be curious what you're seeing on the generation front that's salient to you.

Ramez:

Nick:

Quincy:

Ramez:

I've got some thoughts on that. I mean, that's that's sort of a Vaclav Smil line, but I think Smil is, in the important ways, he's largely wrong on that, or he can be. I don't think we're not moving fast enough in climate. Like if we want to hit 1.5 degrees C, we've missed that. Sorry. Like that's just, that's just where it is.

Without solar radiation management, without stratospheric aerosol injection or sunlight reflection, which honestly is the most ignored area in climate tech. But don't get me started on that. We could spend an hour on that. But 2 C is actually quite plausible. And the world doesn't end at 1.6 or 2.1. So we have a shot now, I think it's instructive to look at what did happen with coal generation in the U S and in Europe, because it has plunged like Europe even faster than the U S but the U S I did the math right up until the start of COVID we undid 28 years of coal growth in the U.S. in 11 years through primarily market forces and some regulation. The regulation was not a ban on coal. It wasn't a nationwide carbon tax. It wasn't a cap and trade program. It was a set of local and federal ordinances that had things like controls on sulfur emissions, private public partnerships to phase out a coal plant and build a gas plant or a solar and wind farm in its place and provide jobs to people who work there. Uh, the Sierra clubs efforts in this place funded by Bloomberg actually. So we used policy tools and economics at the same time and a better technology, both gas and renewables and batteries as better technologies to help achieve that. And coal is a dead man walking in the U S and it is in Europe too. Even people thought, you know, Putin's invasion of Ukraine or Europe was going to see coal demand soar. It didn't happen to be honest. So I think we can substantially reduce the consumption of this, but I agree with Quincy, it's not going to happen just automatically. We're going to have to create policies that phase out dirty technologies, even as we use a combination of policy and innovation and better products and lower cost points to grow the new clean sector. People are not going to embrace clean energy if they see it as more expensive and worse for them. We have to provide a better product, but we can use some carrots and sticks to accelerate the turnover of the old technology, the replacement of the old technology with the new as that better product comes online.

Nick:

Or I'll just quickly just tie it back to the beginning of the conversation, Quincy, where you talked about, you know, the electric vehicle that you drive just being a better product. I think at the end of the day, that's the type of stuff we got to get folks excited about. Like if I were, I live in New York City, so this isn't happening anytime soon, but if I was going to build a new home from scratch, like I would be fundamentally stoked and thrilled to be like, all right, I'm going to get my solar array. I'm going to get my battery. I'm going to get my bi-directional electric vehicle. And, you know, even just like the project itself would be incredibly fun and exciting to put together. And then just like tracking the cost of my electricity and how long I can go without pulling from the grid. Like all that stuff would just be incredibly fun to me. But I know you wanted to jump in, so.

Quincy:

Yeah, no, I think I just couldn't agree more with both points. And when we say better product as technologists and entrepreneurs, we're really saying like in the absence of subsidies, it should be superior, period, full story and stop. And I think EV's accomplished that. I think heat pumps accomplish that and other aspects as well. But it should be so immediately obvious to the end consumer and cause like such limbic resonance that it just is an inevitability that they get solved. And fundamentally electric platforms and powertrains in the EV world just and create that outcome. So I think like really hammering on the point that it needs to be more affordable, more reliable, more practical, and just have an enhanced product feature set and product capability is what every kind of technologist or policymaker even should be thinking about when kind of backing certain technology types. But I agreed not to disagree at all with as this point, it definitely has to be sticks and carrots. So excited about doing that work in the e-mobility space and seeing it play out in a variety of other parts of the economy.

Nick:

Ramez:

Nick:

Quincy:

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of a red flag to me when somebody starts calling you names just for trying to entertain an irrational debate on a subject. And that's just not appropriate in general. And I think the problems that face humanity, climate change aside, are so multifaceted that rational debate is the simple thing that gets you to the right conclusion. So I'm a big believer in exploring an idea, and if it is the wrong idea, you'll quickly discover that. So I commend you as for pushing on that for so long. I'll just briefly say, I mean, I think has covered the whole game bit incredibly well and impressed by how researched you are. So great job on that. I'll just briefly add that, you know, so much of working climate or kind of monitoring climate is feels like being an ant on the back of a, an elephant and you're, you're just kind of holding on for dear life and you can't really you know, make much headway on steering the elephant one way or the other. I think that's the experience, but I'll just briefly zoom out and say that, you know, we're living in a moment in time where technology across basically every sector is rapidly advancing to the point where I think solutions exist very clearly for many of these problems. And beyond just climate, I think society at large is rapidly innovating on everything from energy, intelligence, connectivity, labor, the space economy, which I keep a very close eye on, to the cost of cogitation. Thinking has gone down drastically over the last century because calories are so much more efficient. So every year is a drastically better time to be a human. And I think bringing a sense of optimism to our ability to control that elephant and an acknowledgement that there's actually an amazing amount of progress being done is super important to kind of keep your head above the water. Because I think when you switch from optimism to pessimism, you start to shift to a mentality where things can't get done and then things won't get done. So I would say for all the audience and just anybody in general, that you should realize there's an immense amount of things happening across all of the economy, across all technologies. And we're drastically shaping humanity into being like an incredible long-term species. And that's not to say there's a lot of problems that need to be solved. Like there clearly are, but we have the tools, we have the brains, we have the processes. Now we just need to do the work. So If you're feeling pessimistic about climate, like go and do the work, install something, join a company, uh, you know, actually do physical labor to get things done. And through that process, we'll all make this problem go away over time or, or adjust to it in a way that we, that I think the majority of people can live in.

Ramez:

Well said Quincy, well said.

Nick:

Yeah, it's a really good call to action. And I actually really like the ant analogy because I think you're right that experientially it can feel like we're this ant on the elephant's back. But if you think about like the ant as an animal species, it's an incredibly successful species. And what ants do really well is, you know, individually they kind of bite off what they can chew, right? And so obviously, if it were any one person's task to navigate and solve the complexity of climate challenges, that would be intensely overwhelming. But what I think really resonated for me in your call to action, Quincy, is every one of us can take off a very bite-sized piece of a single challenge, or perhaps multiple challenges, individually. And there's no shortage of places where you can plug in, and you can really take the time to kind of think through, you know, what's most compelling to me? What do I want to work on? You know, it doesn't have to be in the power sector. It doesn't have to be mobility. Perhaps, you know, someone listening is really passionate about plastic pollution and wants to think about, you know, even just weekend beach cleanup, like that moves the needle even in a small way. And if everyone in the world kind of took it upon themselves, kind of tend their little piece of the global garden, then I have no doubt that we'll make a massive amount of progress. Well, we've already gone for an hour. I think we could probably do this every week and have an interesting discussion, but probably a good place to pause for today. Quincy already gave a great call to action. Mez, any other calls to action that you would want to add? And then, you know, for both of you, I'd also love to invite you to just put a quick plug in for where folks can follow along with your work, your thinking, or, you know, Quincy, in your case, it might also be people should go take a look at Electric Era's job board, all that good stuff. but I won't put the cart before the horse.

Ramez:

I think Quincy nailed it. You know, you want to make the world better, get involved, go do something. There's lots of ways to do so. You can find me on Twitter at Ramez or planetary.vc.

Quincy:

Excellent. Yeah. And then I think generally we're hiring a lot of folks right now. Our careers page is up to date. We're starting to really think about our V3 EV fast charging architecture. We're going to do a pretty interesting DC microgrid design with an integral battery. And there's a lot of work to do on that. So we're hiring power electronics engineers, electrical engineers, and you know, you're basically joining like a world class team. So check out our careers page at electriccarotechnologies.com or follow me on Twitter at Quincy Edmund Lee. Mez and Nick, it's been great to talk to you guys today. Thanks for having this. Absolutely.

Nick:

Yeah. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Looking forward to the next one. We can schedule it for six months or a year and check in on some of our predictions or progress or what new wrinkles have presented themselves, and I'm sure we'll be in touch in between. Thanks so much. Thanks for tuning in. So you don't miss the next episode on another cutting edge climate tech, make sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. We'll see you soon.