Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “An Incredible Clean-Energy Future: Smart Homes, Smart Grids & Smart Thinkers” like energy entrepreneur Saul Griffith

Transcript

“An Incredible Clean-Energy Future: Smart Homes, Smart Grids & Smart Thinkers” like energy entrepreneur Saul Griffith · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
0:07
Well it's a dangerous idea all right, we are reaching an electricity and energy tipping
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point at which the future of the world's climate and our future as a species that is not
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constantly racked by ever intensifying and ever more frequent natural disasters hangs
0:24
in the balance and that perhaps we're all arguing about the wrong things, how we supply
0:29
and generate electricity, whether we use nuclear, how much we use solar, how exactly we should
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manage the increased demand that artificial intelligence is likely to throw up.
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We may be looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope.
0:44
We may instead want to look at the demand side, not the supply side, how we use the electricity,
0:50
when it arrives into our home, how we store the electricity, whether we use batteries
0:55
in our homes, whether we plug electric cars back into the grid, whether or not we have
1:00
local substations that are smart grids and smart homes that manage the supply of energy
1:05
that's coming onto your street, into your house, into your car, into your stove top.
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Saw Griffith is one of the world's leading experts on the energy revolution, on basically
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decarbonizing everything and electrifying everything.
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Saw has founded a dozen Silicon Valley technology companies in the energy space,
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he's founded Research and Development Labs, he's founded non-partisan, non-profit organizations,
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he was instrumental in developing the Biden administration's climate action plan.
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He has recently undergone the very, very stressful experience of having Elon Musk's
1:40
doge cuts come in horrendous ways for his research, not just on climate change, but also on
1:48
pandemic research, which he was involved in, and we begin in a somewhat subdued and
1:53
mournful way about the state of affairs at the moment, especially its consequences for American
1:58
scientific research, but do not be put off by that full-on beginning, because we pep up and
2:04
start to talk about the incredible opportunities that lie so close within reach to electrify
2:09
everything, exactly how that would work, and why many of the climate chaos naysayers who think
2:15
that we'll never get proper base load power, and what's going to happen when the sun doesn't shine,
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and the wind doesn't blow, Saul is the man with all the answers, he himself is an engineer,
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he himself is an entrepreneur, he actually walks the walk. I hope you enjoy, as much as I did,
2:30
the one the only Saw Griffith.
2:32
So I hear you've been having a lot of fun with contracts with the United States, and
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someone is there anything about this that you can talk about, or are you under some gag,
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some Elon Musk gag order? Why not really under gag order, so I'll say what I can say,
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so there's sort of two pieces of my American life, there's my running a research lab American
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life, and that has effectively been cancelled, all of the contracts there that we were doing with
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Department of Energy and National Institute of Health and Department of Defense and others,
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because we were doing creating new technologies for climate reasons, and so you get a one-page
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letter from the administration saying we're canceling this because the pandemic is over,
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even though you're working on the technologies to prevent future pandemics, they're like,
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cancel that, we don't need this particular energy efficiency thing anymore, cancel that.
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What does energy efficiency have to do with the pandemic? Were those research projects initially
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greenlit at times? Two things that my research lab worked on were climate energy stuff, and then
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for historical reasons, we've been helping building isolation units to prevent pandemic outbreaks
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for a long time. Who could possibly need an isolation unit when the pandemic's over,
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because there's never going to be another one, so we're all good. Yeah, when there's measles
4:00
outbreaks in Texas and stuff, so we need more. Not happening, but it's pretty blunt, it's
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unclear whether they even pay the final invoice, guess we'll find out, but that's happening all over
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the country. They're canceling lots of university research contracts, so science is getting
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really kicked in the ass there in a very unproductive way. It's giving the game away to the rest of the
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world, because that is traditionally America's economic engine is this research becomes the new
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things. The other side of it is rewiring America, which is a nonprofit we started to work on climate
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electrification in the US, got a large contract, $2 billion contract to work with the EPA environmental
4:44
protection agency on something called the greenhouse gas reduction fund, so we were literally
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deploying electrification in low and middle income communities to help them improve their
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health outcomes, save money on inner energy and decarbonize all the ones, so three good things,
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but because it's associated with the IRA has been cancelled. What's the IRA? The IRA was Biden's
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climate policy inflation reduction act. That was the largest dedicated climate policy ever made
5:10
anywhere in the world. That sort of came into existence in 2022, and you were involved in the
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bringing of that into existence in the Biden years. We technically lobbyists and advocates and
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we helped draft proposed policy pieces for that through rewiring America, and we shaped a large
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part of that, particularly the pieces that were facing households and small businesses,
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and what's called the demand side of the energy system. So the supply side is where the energy
5:41
comes from, the demand side is where it's used. You need to decarbonize both at once, so we
5:45
were proud of our efforts to make sure the demand side got roughly equal shift in that big
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piece of climate policy. What does it look like to reform the demand side? Oh, electrify the cars,
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electrify the homes, electrify the small businesses. So decarbonization equation is pretty simple,
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electrify all the things and make clean electricity. There's still about 20% of other emissions,
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but most of those are from agriculture and industry, and they'll be taken care of
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in changing land practices and changing technologies from making cement, for example.
6:19
Right. I mean, I think this is what's interesting about your message is that we spend so much time
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looking at the supply side and going, where are we going to get electricity from? Can we are
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renewable? Do we need renewables and plus batteries? And how are the batteries going to work? And
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like, what's the, do we need nuclear? Do we need coal? The batteries are really in that side.
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Let's be, let's be clear. Well, yes, that's true, but the, but I'm talking about when you get
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into conversations with people who are talking about supply and their problem is that the sun
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doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. So the supply is going to have to,
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for people who aren't watching on YouTube, who are listening to the podcast, the iRoll.
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The iRoll, the shade that your face just gave off when I said the wind doesn't blow and the sun
6:58
doesn't shine. Tell me what, tell me what's wrong with that. I'm the fuck at full of iRolls.
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I can tell you've had it. You've just, you've been through four months of the Trump administration.
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You're like, so if you had to, just, we'll get back to the demand side because it's interesting
7:11
and electrifying everything. But have you had to lay off people and literally close research labs
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and things? What, what would you be doing about a laid off about 85 people?
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Across our activities, which is really hard. These are like amazing people. For example,
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rewiring America, we had 184 job applicants for every position we hired for. So like, you really
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aren't getting extraordinary humans at that point. So when you lay off any one of those people,
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these are really solid people and they've oftentimes moved across the country to work on the projects
7:46
and things like that. So it's, you know, pretty awful human story. But we're just average.
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This is happening to all any climate group in the U.S., any research organization. So it's
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really Australian media is not fully capturing how bad it is on the ground for things associated
8:08
with the enlightenment. Yeah, I mean, I don't think American media is either because there are so
8:13
many other distracting things. There's, you know, here he is. Here he is taking a Katari 747
8:19
for Air Force One. Here he is, you know, bundling people off to an El Salvador prison. Here he is
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like talking a Putin about Zelensky. And it's like meanwhile, there's this stealth destruction of
8:30
research. Well, I think he's like, I think the people think he's the Manchurian candidate. I think he's
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everyone's Manchurian candidate. Like he's being used by the oil and gas industry to push their
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agenda and he's being used by the cryptocurrency people to push their agenda and the, you know,
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the worst version. This is like, look at the new set of America's alliances that it's building.
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It's all Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Russia. These are all the largest oil and gas producers in the
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world, alongside America. So the fossil fuel industry is the silent partner in this administration.
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Are you collateral damage, though, of Donald Trump's infatuation with Middle Eastern Arab bling
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or are you collateral damage of Elon Musk's infatuation with government expenditure in the form
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of Doge? Where do your cuts come from? These cuts are administered by Doge. The great irony of Doge
9:27
is that my stepmother-in-law started the thing, the zombie body that was occupied by Doge.
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Which was what? She started something under the Obama administration called the government digital
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service. The idea being, she had previously been working on a project called Code for America.
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Like, what if we got some software programmers to write apps to make government more efficient?
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Like, in America, you have to go to the DMV to do everything. That's the Department of Motor Vehicles
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to get your license registered over there. In Australia, you can do about half of it online,
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and when you get to service New South Wales, it's typically very shortway times and easy to do,
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and everything's clean and digital and all the records are straight. That's not true in the US.
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So she was trying to build infrastructure at the federal government level in the US,
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called the government digital service, to just make everything easier, make, literally,
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make government more efficient. Because they had built that infrastructure, it had access to
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a lot of records throughout all of the other agencies. So when Doge was looking for a piece
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of infrastructure that had clawed into all of the agencies to go to its work, that's the
10:39
zombie body that had occupied. Oh, God. I mean, I'm normally someone who rolls his eyes at claims
10:47
that any introduction of attempts to have agencies talking to each other or some kind of a national
10:53
identification card could be misused because they might provide future nefarious leaders with
10:59
the keys to a turnkey totalitarian dictatorship or something. And I'm usually like, just get out of
11:05
yourself. Let's just make things more efficient. But you're telling me you did. You actually did.
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I mean, it's incredible that in the States, you can get employed using a social security number
11:16
and you can get a job. And the employer doesn't have the ability on the social security department,
11:22
doesn't have the ability to cross reference whether or not you're a legal, you're legally entitled
11:25
to work in the country with the Department of Immigration because there's so much privacy
11:30
that the two agencies don't talk to each other. In every other country, the immigration would just
11:34
talk to the equivalent of social security and go, no, this isn't a person, this person isn't a
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person now in our country. But so anyway, all right. So your stepmother is that she destroyed.
11:45
Yeah, if I'm trying to create headlines. Yeah, she destroyed.
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Your stepmom fired you basically. Yeah, no, she wrote a great book
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called Recoding America, which was about this and about government efficiency. So she's
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kind of America's go to expert on how do you create actual real government efficiency. So
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it's just tragic irony for the poor lady. Amazing. Okay. So all right, my condolences,
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getting back to batteries and supply and demand. The point I was trying to point to,
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which I think is really interesting about your work, is that it's just fascinating to shift
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our focus from the supply and how we generate electricity to the way that we consume electricity.
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And when most people think about consuming electricity, they think, oh no, is he going to start
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haranging me to turn off my lights and set my thermostat to more moderate temperature.
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But it's actually much more complicated than that. It's about smart grids. It's about using cars
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as battery storage. It's about integrating local networks at a community level and so on.
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So I'll shut up now. Can you just briefly articulate your vision of what we need to progress towards
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in order to make the thing cohere? So we know that it's really the only path to zero emissions
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of everything is electrifying everything and clean electricity. You got to make all that clean
13:15
electricity. But you had kind of, and till batteries, you had to use the electricity as it was
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generated. Now if it batteries, you can store some of it. But this is why we designed our energy
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systems as we did was so that you could be constantly using the amount that you wanted.
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And all of these efficiency programs that the government has sold for 20 or 30 years,
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was trying to get you to be efficient at the times of day where the grid was strained.
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And those ideas linger on because we had public service and advertising campaigns all
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through our childhoods telling us to turn the lights out and yeah, etc, etc. The new world that we
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live in, there's going to be this enormous number of batteries on the demand side where we use
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energy and a lot of computers on the demand side that can control things automatically turn them
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on or off or up or down. And they are the things that are going to balance the generation or
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supply side. And you have to think about both of them at once. The other thing you've got to
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think about, which, you know, I'm not going to, every time I open mouth saying anything about
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any once political policy, they think I'm criticizing them. So hopefully labor doesn't take this
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as a critique, but everyone's heard about their 82% renewable target for the electricity system
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by 2030. But that was literally planned as though you just, it's the existing amount of electricity.
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But what you really need to do is because when we electrify the cars, we need a lot more electricity.
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When we electrify all the gas heaters and gas cookers and gas things, we need a lot more electricity
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to replace those things. And so you really need 82% of 200%, so 160%, which is just to say like,
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even structurally at the level of federal governments, like we have kind of not been conceiving of
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the problem correctly for a long while now, because electricity, like the technical term,
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is it couples the sectors. It means industry is going to use more electricity. Transportation's
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going to use more electricity. So is your house. So is your small business. So the residential
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commercial, they all get coupled together. And now you've got to manage that all at once.
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The good news isn't I just finished writing my new book called Plug In. So shameless plug for
15:38
Plug In right there. I think I kind of described it at household level. So for the average punter,
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I don't know if you've talked average punters with your show or not, but for the average punter.
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I'm so hoity-toity, I've never spoken to an average punter. I have a rickshaw
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techie telling in the morning. All of the loot mates. So you have us.
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This is this is a central Sydney operation. We're in we're in the boutique parts of town. That's
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true. By the way, I'm dialing in from Walongong. So Walongong. Good on you. Talk good on you. Punter. Yeah.
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This electrification means the opportunity to cancel two of your subscriptions, right? So we
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subscribe to energy in three different ways. Essentially, when you buy a petrol vehicle, you're
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signing up for a subscription for a lifetime by and petrol. So you've got gas heating and gas
16:28
cooktop. You've got a subscription to gas that you sign up to. And then you've got electricity.
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Everyone who has an internet account knows that it's not wise to have three subscriptions for
16:38
everything. So when you electrify your house, you eliminate your gas and your petrol and you just
16:45
have this one subscription. That's sort of the punter's eye view of what this sector coupling
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means. And the good news is for Australians that our electricity because of rooftop solar
16:57
is so cheap because we're going to have we do have a lot of renewables and we're going to have
17:01
a whole lot more. This electrification is going to save us a ton of money individually as households,
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which I think is a good news story. Even better, it keeps a lot more money circulating in your
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community. So think about it this way. Today in my community, there's about 12,000 people,
17:19
about 4,000 households. We spend probably $25 million a year as a community on petrol.
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In the future, we'll probably spend $5 million on electricity instead of that $25 million
17:31
to power all of our electric cars. And so that $20 million stays in the community and
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a lot more gets circulated. So that's the good $5,000 saving for your household. There's this
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making more jobs and more economic activity in your community, which is a good story. And then it
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actually adds up nationally. I think we import $40 to $60 billion of oil a year into Australia.
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If we use sunshine instead, we don't need to do that. It's like a few hundred million dollars a day
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that we say. Okay, I want to get to solar capacity in a second. When you say that when you're
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estimating $5,000 a year on electricity, is that at current electricity prices or is that
18:13
a future utopian electricity price? That is comparing the total cost of energy for your household
18:21
today, which is your petrol and your gas and your electricity. Right. I mean, what I mean is,
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if you flick to switch right now and all of the petrol cars in your community of 12,000 people
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were suddenly electric cars. If you switched it right now and you had the price of electricity
18:38
in Australia right now, not some magical future price, you'd be saving about $4,100 a year.
18:44
Amazing. Okay. When you said that you pours on this, you're like, holy shit. Everyone said
18:50
solving climate change was going to be expensive, but you're just telling me I've got $4,100 in my
18:58
pocket. So we why are we doing all this immediately? Exactly. And we aren't doing it because of
19:03
finance. And I hate it. But if it's cheaper, then why isn't it? So why is it? So I'm in the market
19:10
for a new secondhand car. Why is it more expensive? I can tell you why you want to buy a second hand
19:15
electric car. We can try to deal right now. Why is it? So I'm looking at a hybrid. Why am I not
19:23
looking at an electric? Why is it not apparent to me that an electric is the right decision for me
19:29
now rather than either a plug in hybrid or a hybrid? Or am I just mistaken about that?
19:35
A hybrid might be the right answer for you right now, but more likely the cheapest answer is
19:40
would I need rooftop solar to make that true? No, if you're powering, it costs you about 20
19:46
cents a kilometer to drive a petrol car. It'll cost you about 2 cents a kilometer if you're running
19:51
an electric car off rooftop solar and it'll cost you 6 to 10 cents a kilometer if you're running it
19:57
off the grid. Right. So you save on the electric car right away, the only concern is does it cost
20:05
more upfront. That used to be very true. It's increasingly less true. You can buy pretty competent,
20:11
pretty cool electric cars for roughly the same price as a new petrol car now.
20:17
But when nobody really shows you the calculation when you're making the decision, you're going to
20:23
save this few thousand dollars every year. Well, presumably surely we should have a government
20:29
policy that gives you the rebate upfront so that that is obvious to me when I buy the car,
20:35
right? That would be an excellent policy to have. I suspect it may be a policy that you've advocated.
20:42
Yeah, I mean, and one way to think of this is like, you know, given the good news headline,
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$4,100, $5,000 a year savings every strand household, we should be going healthily there at it.
20:53
Why don't we do it? So it's a matter of like, so we should go at climate action fast,
20:59
but we also should make it fair. So you and I can actually have a fairly jockey conversation
21:03
about whether we choose a hybrid or an electric, but if you're a single mom in the Western suburbs,
21:10
you probably don't have a credit score that or kind of access finance to buy the new electric car.
21:16
And there's not a huge number of electric cars on the second hand market that are cheap enough
21:20
and you know, if you're a poor punter in the regions, it's a similar story.
21:24
And so we're not the the savings are in the future, right? Yes, it's the $100 you don't spend
21:31
every week on petrol, but the problem to enter into that future, you have to have a bunch of cash
21:36
today. And absolutely, you could design federal government financing programs to solve this.
21:43
In fact, the original mortgage that was invented during the Great Depression,
21:47
the 20 year mortgage, was kind of invented so that housing could be fair. Everyone could have
21:52
access to the debt required to buy a house. And it led to creating the the largest capital
21:59
market in the world as the American housing market, born off the invention of that mortgage.
22:04
So create a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for electric cars? I mean, for the whole kit of
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electrification, that's what yeah. And Australia had a precedent. It's a bit of a dirty word
22:14
now, hex, but hex was trying to solve a similar problem. Education is expensive. That's the
22:20
higher education. Just be aware more than half of our listeners are not in Australia. So the higher
22:24
education contributions scheme is a system of interest free loans with no credit check that
22:32
you only got paid back out of your subsequent taxes. So a way to go functionally to university
22:38
for free with no upfront cost and no private sector debt trailer. Yep. And it's got the lowest cost
22:46
of administration of any kind of debt and it gets the lowest interest rate. So we could create
22:53
things that look like that. You could just do it for the rebate upfront. Australia has every
23:00
conceivable reason to do this because we save so much money not having to buy the oil.
23:07
Yep. Okay. You mentioned earlier, just for a probe something that in this future of the
23:14
demand side being electrified, there'll be batteries everywhere and computers managing the
23:20
the demand. Are those batteries in the electric cars? Are they in the electric cars and also a
23:27
separate storage battery that's connected to your rooftop solar? Are there batteries in addition
23:32
to that? How widespread to batteries have to be on the demand side? I have been obsessed for a
23:41
couple of years with where should the batteries be? Should they be way out there on the transmission
23:47
grid at the wind farm? Should they be at the substation in your local community? Should they be on
23:54
the side of your house? Should they be in the car and even should they be inside appliances? So should
24:00
you put a battery inside the stove? In fact, we have a company in the US that's doing that
24:07
that makes it cheaper to install the stove because you don't have to run the high-amp. So it could
24:10
stove heat up even faster. It's like better than gas because you've got this battery right there
24:15
in the stove. Right. So literally there's that whole spectrum of where the batteries could be.
24:22
I'm reasonably convinced if you were trying to make it cheapest for everyone, the batteries
24:27
should sit on the street about one for every somewhere between 10 and 50 homes.
24:33
And they can sit out there and it can help the grid upstream, the big grid balance itself.
24:38
It can help absorb all the solar that's coming off the Australian rooftops, a lot of which is
24:42
currently being curtailed, meaning it's not getting used. And it could help get higher utilization of
24:49
the local poles and wires and the more electricity you carry over the same set of wires means that
24:55
portion of the cost of electricity goes down. So that would be a good place to do it.
25:00
But I now am convinced that we're going to have some of these batteries everywhere. The market
25:05
will sort it out. It'll just be a dog's breakfast and it'll shake out however it shakes out because
25:13
nobody's going to have the vision at a municipal level to install it the way that it should be done.
25:17
Yeah, it's a dog's breakfast and then there's some psychological reason. So a lot of Australians
25:21
wanted on the side of their house. So if there's a blackout, they can still keep their
25:25
chest freezer running so they don't, you know, the right. I mean, a lot of Australians
25:33
are shooting wild pigs on a weekly basis. The unspoken thing that we should just...
25:38
I know. Willingong is full of people hauling wild hogs around on their shoulders.
25:47
What about the wild deer on my land yesterday? I was like...
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Is that true?
25:51
Edison.
25:52
Can you shoot a deer in Willingong?
25:54
That's... I don't know. So any of your readers or listeners...
25:57
Well, they're a pest. So I think you could, surely.
26:00
Yeah.
26:01
Deer are not native.
26:02
We like shooting foreign animals here.
26:04
Absolutely. Yeah, Americans, deer, no offense Americans.
26:11
So one thing that we should just point to that is implicit but maybe not everybody is getting
26:17
is that if everyone's got an electric car, then one of the big batteries in any given house
26:24
is the car, right? Because presumably you can...
26:29
And it's massive... I mean, a car has a car battery is a massive source of energy,
26:34
which is why it's taken so long to perfect them. And so the idea would be that you could charge
26:38
your car when electricity is cheap and not many people are using electricity at three in the
26:43
morning. And then for the rest of the day, assuming you're not driving it all day and that when
26:48
you're at work or whatever, if you're working from home, it's plugged in, that could also feed
26:52
electricity back into your house or to the grid or to your local battery or whatever. So
26:57
if people think a bit confused about where all these batteries are,
27:01
you're correct me if I'm wrong, the linchpin of the home's electrical supply is the car.
27:08
In so far as it's a place where you can store electricity when you're not getting it from the grid.
27:13
Yeah, and that may be how the future works out, but there's some technical and some psychological
27:18
reasons why people won't use their car as a battery. Talk to me.
27:23
Well, you might be like, it will degrade your car battery faster. That's not really a huge concern
27:30
because they should do a 400,000 kilometers before they're worn out.
27:36
There is the version of range anxiety, which is like, I just always want to imagine I can get
27:41
in my car and it's fully charged so I can drive the camera on a whim. And if you're donated
27:48
10 or 20 or 30% of the battery to the grid, you don't, you know, and so is it enough value to you
27:55
for that battery to get used to compensate for the, what if my mother calls me in the middle of
28:01
night and I've got to drive dad to hospital? I say. So I think that's the psychological reason.
28:06
And then there's lots of regulatory reasons. And then there's warranty reasons the car
28:12
companies are concerned about how do you deal with the warranty if this car is doing something
28:16
other than driving. So there's commercial reasons, there's psychological reasons, there's
28:20
regulatory reasons. And I think that should temper our enthusiasm for all 20 million batteries
28:27
doing batching up the grid. What's more important for the car batteries to do than back up the
28:33
grid is to absorb the huge, huge amount of solar that's going to be generated in the middle of the
28:39
day. So what really matters is where the cars are during the day and are they plugged in absorbing
28:46
this very cheap energy for one of our most energy intensive things, which is our driving.
28:52
So, and you're not talking about the car having a solar panel on its roof. Hello, I suppose
28:56
it could have that. You're talking about the car being plugged in at a time, wouldn't it?
28:59
I have a motor scooter in the corner over here. It's got solar on both sides. That's awesome.
29:03
You never need to plug it in. Perfect for hauling a dead deer and a hog on the around will and
29:08
going on. But what I correct that you're what you mean is that you just have to make sure
29:15
the cars are plugged into the into the electricity that is feeding the car is actually renewable
29:20
electricity. So it's happening at during daylight hours when the sun's shining or are you talking
29:25
about the car generating its own electricity from solar panels? Yeah, absolutely. The most
29:29
likely future for Australia is the cheapest energy system has a huge amount of solar during the
29:34
middle of the day. We get some wind that some is during the day, some is at night, but the big
29:38
bulk will be in the middle of the day. And so absorbing that into cars is pretty cool.
29:44
Right. Yes, you could then use some of that in the cars. Over night, people only use a few
29:49
kilowatt hours to keep the fridge on in a couple of lights in the TV. So it can totally help.
29:55
And you could suck that out of the car theoretically. You can suck the exception of all of the
29:59
concerns that you just raised. Exactly. And batteries. So let's just talk. I just want to
30:04
address this battery thing because the rolling of your eyes was consistent with the extent to which I
30:10
hear this as a pushback, right? That battery technology just isn't there yet. And if you need
30:19
base load. So talk to me. The sun ain't let's here we are. We've been dropped in. We parachute it
30:24
into a neighborhood. The sun ain't shining. The wind ain't blowing. There's no thermal.
30:30
There's no thermal. There's no volcanic. There's no hydro. There's nothing. It's three in the morning.
30:35
What do you do, mate? Well, we will have snowy hydro at three in the morning. And because
30:41
it won't be used that much during the day because we'll get most electricity during the day from
30:45
solar. The snowy hydro will be a nice overnight resource. But how many? But that can't feed the
30:54
15 million people in your several hours of Victoria. I mean, with the electricity. The sun may not
30:58
be shining in Wallara on any given day. But it's probably shining in Byron and Abelade and Ballarat.
31:06
And you know, they even tell me something sunshine coast might have some sunshine when I think
31:12
the sunshine coast does have some sunshine. Yeah. So the other thing is everyone who a lot of
31:19
people make the mistake of thinking about this is like where I am right now is not sunny.
31:25
But statistically, it's always sunny somewhere in Australia. It is unwise to imagine disconnecting
31:31
yourself from the grid. We have it like if we all work together and are all connected, it'll be
31:36
sunny somewhere. It'll be windy somewhere. And those statistics really help you. It's a good reason
31:42
people have heard it for silly reasons. But eventually, we will connect Western Australia
31:47
to East Coast Australia because the free mantle doctor comes in at two o'clock, which is
31:52
in Perth. So that wind energy will hit the free mantle doctor is a big wind, a big wind that
31:58
comes off the ocean, right? Yes, I'm in a fight surf and the free mantle group is a famous
32:04
law. It's one of the most predictable fantastic gust of wind that comes off the Indian Ocean,
32:09
hits the West Coast of Australia. Okay. So you've got that. And also, I mean, the thing,
32:13
other thing I don't understand, but so this becomes down to an engineering question then because
32:16
of course, the University solved some of the day night problem. And of course, the sunshine in
32:22
the desert. I mean, there are huge, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of miles
32:26
in Australia, which are just always sunny. Yes. Yeah. So, but are you going to coat that in
32:34
solar panels? Like how much that's why I say it's an engineering question. How much of that needs
32:39
to be covered to guarantee that 30 million people. Solar panels were literally free and you put them
32:46
in southern Northern Territory, East and West in Australia, like right in the middle in the desert,
32:53
in Australia. Yeah. And the really hot pit when no one lives that electricity will get to Melbourne
32:56
or Sydney for somewhere between 12 and 15 cents to your house. rooftop solar and Australia is
33:02
four or five cents a kilowatt hour on top of your house. So even if solar in the desert is free,
33:09
it will still be cheaper to have as much of your energy as you can get from your rooftop solar.
33:15
Right. That's just a truism. So this points to one of the problems with the engineering problem,
33:22
which is really a regulatory problem for this Australian energy market. So we have something called
33:27
National Electricity Market, the NAMM and it's governed by AMO and AMC and all of these acronyms.
33:34
But that is really just a partnership between the generators, meaning the supply side and the government.
33:41
And they have, or forever, they do studies on lowest cost energy source for Australia,
33:45
but they only consider the cost of generation. But the real cost of electricity is the cost of the
33:50
wires to get it to earning those wires. The wires to get that free desert solar to Sydney or Melbourne
33:58
is two, three or four times the price of just having rooftop solar.
34:02
Right. And to be clear, for foreigners, this is also because we're talking about places that are
34:08
1,500, 2,000 kilometers away. It's a long way to travel. Yeah. In Belgium, they don't have this problem.
34:15
No, they have a little bit of this problem in America, but not so much. There's a few places in
34:20
the world, but we are a little bit unique. Okay. So it's not the distance that cost you the
34:27
distance cost you two or three cents. It's the local poles and wires that really cost you. They cost
34:32
you 10 cents, 12 cents. Local where I'm using it or local at the source. Poles between you and the
34:38
substation, but which means between you and the edge of wall and wall, somewhere in wall and wall
34:44
down my rail, perhaps there's a substation that connects the electricity to your house and that
34:49
connection that go, you know, there's one pole every two times. Right. I was that right. So if the
34:55
whether the solar farm is 2,000 kilometers away or whether it's just up the road, the price is
35:01
going to be roughly the same because I'm using my local poles. Yes, that's what dominates your
35:06
cost of electricity. And that is why it is an easy and true statement to say any electricity
35:12
you can go from rooftop solar will be cheaper than any other electricity you can buy.
35:16
Okay, but this brings us back to the skeptics question about what happens when the sun
35:20
ain't shining over my house. You said we could get it from the west coast. Now you're telling me
35:23
that's too expensive. Here I am, huddled at home, cold up in the morning. There's no sun, no wind.
35:29
Coming from the west coast will be cheaper than the current electricity because, you know,
35:33
it'll cost one or two cents to generate that solar in the desert as opposed to 10 cents or more
35:39
for the coal or the gas in Victoria or. Right. And what do we pay now? What is a normal consumer
35:44
pay? In Australia, anywhere between about 28 cents and 50 cents a kilowatt hour. So even shipping
35:50
the solar in from thousands of miles away is going to be half the price of what we're paying at
35:55
the moment less than half the price. No, it'll be a half to two thirds, I would guess. If I was
36:00
importing the free mantle doctor to Willa Maloo, I think he'll knock on your door or she'll
36:06
knock on your door for 20 cents a kilowatt hour. Okay. Okay. But what you can get off your rooftop
36:13
or if we had the right regulations, your neighbor's rooftop, that can come into your home for five minutes.
36:18
But I keep saying so. The sun ain't shining and the wind ain't blowing where I am. So what would it?
36:24
Enter, you know, batteries. So I got a mate. He went to MIT, which is a little technical college
36:33
down the road from Harvard in America. And he now lives in China and runs a battery company and
36:39
he will he'll give you a quote to put batteries in your community for $84 a kilowatt hour,
36:46
about $150 a kilowatt hour. At that price, some these batteries will do five to 10,000
36:53
charging and discharging cycles, which means they'll go for 10 years. So if you do them,
36:57
charging discharge them once a day for those 10 years, it's going to be four, five or six
37:04
cents a kilowatt hour for the storage of that electricity. So any generation you can do locally
37:11
with solar, five or six cents into that battery, only half of it should have to go into that battery
37:17
because you'll use some of this solar as it's been generated. Anyway, net net that should cost maybe
37:24
eight to 10 cents and then delivering over your local wires a few more cents. And so that'll be
37:29
also half the cost of, or could be. Remember, all of this is a theoretical dependent upon
37:37
not screwing up the electricity market with regulations and market rules.
37:42
We have extraordinary history. In fact, I've made a great graph once that showed as we applied all
37:48
of our neoliberal ideas to market design for electricity grid. What we made happen was skyrocketing
37:54
price electricity. We did a bad job. Right. Right. And we're probably not alone there globally.
38:00
Everyone, everyone, everyone fucks this up in some, in some different but nuanced and
38:06
occasionally hilarious way. And so the skeptic of major change here says things like,
38:15
okay, so I've got my battery. But the problem, the challenge has always been peak demand,
38:21
you're like, base load power and peak demand. Right. So, you know, I've got my electric car and
38:26
I've got my battery in my house. But even still, I need to buy electricity from the grid because they're
38:33
not sufficient for my home's usage. So if, so, you know, they tell, they'll tell horror stories
38:42
about how like, oh, here's this green community in California, which did it all, but they still have
38:46
to have these really inefficient gas turbines, which are basically just rocket jets bolted to the ground
38:52
to switch on to supplement the electricity demand at 5.30 p.m. on a really hot summer's day when
38:58
everyone turns their air conditioners on. Is that a real critique? Like, what happens in those
39:04
moments where all of a sudden everybody needs more energy at the same time than their batteries
39:09
can provide? It's not a real critique, but it's not exactly wrong. It's like many of these things.
39:17
This stuff is absolutely complicated. And it's a mixture of technology and regulatory and economics.
39:24
So it's also to come lots of ways people can go wrong. But I'd actually go to your first question.
39:30
The guy, you know, you're a mythical person. What about base load power? I was like, I would ask
39:35
them, so what do you think base load power is? And you're a proxy for this person. Oh, okay.
39:43
I'll put on my skeptics hat. Base load power is the ability of a network to provide power
39:51
that is consistent and unwavering regardless of what the demand does.
39:57
And what was the origin of the idea of base load power? Well, I think most people are thinking of
40:01
coal. And now they're talking about nuclear, but something that will just turn on and on and on
40:05
and doesn't isn't susceptible to the wind or the substitutes of base load power is not really a
40:11
thing. And it's actually as much of a problem as it is a solution. Right. So it turns it takes
40:17
about eight hours to 12 hours to turn on a gas power, a coal power plant and some number of hours
40:22
to turn on a gas point. So you can't dial them up or down because they run pretty much efficiently
40:27
only at one set point, meaning full throttle. And so we had cheap electricity in Australia at night
40:34
for many, many decades because you couldn't throttle down the coal overnight. So everyone would
40:41
fill their water heater with hot water from coal generated electricity overnight. And we called
40:46
that base load power, but it's not really. It's just like we can't turn it off power. Right.
40:53
And now we're just going to have a different challenge instead of not being out of turn it off
40:58
at night, we won't be able to turn off the soul that's being generated during the day.
41:03
That's right. So it has always been a problem of matching supply and demand and base load power.
41:10
It just was a convenient way of saying we can't turn the coal off in a hurry.
41:16
So we could need our demand in a base load. And if we use geographic diversity,
41:23
so from South Australia, Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, mixture of solar, wind and hydro,
41:29
where home and host we can have electricity 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
41:34
Right. Yeah, but let's go once they've filled it. Then your skeptic might say,
41:40
oh, but we need a 100% of electricity. I don't think you can get the last 10%
41:47
because the sun won't shine in the wind. But this is the mistake in there is like we don't have a
41:55
100% electricity system today. We have about 150%. We have a lot more coal plants and gas plants
42:01
than we need because you need redundancy to guarantee you that when you're doing maintenance on
42:10
the wilder coal plant and when you're doing maintenance on the Gladstone plant, somewhere else
42:15
can fill in the gap. It'll be the same with renewables. We will have more than 100%.
42:22
Now, once you have more than 100%, it's even less likely that it will be the wind won't blow
42:28
everywhere in Australia because right more than you need. And it turns out you can build a cheap,
42:34
you know, we actually did a study at rewiring Australia with a wonderful young woman who's doing a
42:39
PhD at the University of South Wales. If you look at the country and you said, okay, with battery is
42:45
at this cost and we wind at this cost and wind and solar at this cost, how much oversupply
42:52
would give you the lowest cost system? And so that you can probably afford to double the amount
42:57
you build to guarantee that you have, it would guarantee that you have higher reliability
43:02
electricity than we have today. Right. So it sounds like, yeah, it sounds like what the base load
43:09
boosters are actually saying is what's good about base load is that it is always there at a maximum
43:17
level so that if at three in the morning, the sun started shine, like if in three in the morning,
43:22
everyone got up and started their day and like wanted to start doing everything, they'd be able
43:27
to at three in the morning. And you're saying, well, everyone isn't, firstly, everyone isn't going
43:32
to do that ever at three in the morning. And secondly, it doesn't, it's not actually necessary to
43:39
have the same amount of energy coming in at three in the morning as at six p.m. And as long as
43:45
the, as long as you're managing the factor that you've got more than enough for the highest possible
43:50
demand at any point during the day, you're going to be okay. And that you would do that when the
43:55
sun ain't shining and the wind ain't blowing by diversifying the sources of supply. So that there
44:02
are big wind farms and big solar farms everywhere. And so that when locally a rooftop can't cut it,
44:11
it'll default back to the local battery that's at the end of my street. And if that can't cut it,
44:17
then we bring in electricity from elsewhere. Is that, have I got that kind of right?
44:22
That is right. And it just reminds me, you expect, he's typing, he's typing, ladies and
44:30
gentlemen, his eyes are darting around the computer screen like he's looking something up. We're about
44:34
to get a number. I feel like we're about to get a number. I was actually going to flirt with the idea
44:39
of doing live podcasting of a graph. Wow. Is that crazy? Well, it's only crazy that the vast majority
44:47
of the audience listens to this instead of watching it, but I can tell them the graph if you want to,
44:51
or just tell me the graph. I have a mate called Fred. He lives in North Sydney.
44:55
Made up. True story. Fred Hopley. Wonderful guy. Fred has a 15 kilowatt solar system
45:02
on his house. He has two electric cars. He's got three teenage daughters. Runs an all-electric
45:07
house. He has an engineer and he collects all of the data. So imagine I'm putting a slide up
45:15
in your mind, which is just three years worth of. So that's a thousand data points of how much
45:21
solar is house made every day for over those three years and it's a thousand points, which are
45:27
how much energy his cars use and a thousand points of how much energy his home is.
45:32
Over those three years, he produced 145% of the energy he needed.
45:37
So on more than half of the days in those three years, he was a net exporter of solar energy to
45:43
the grid. He was a net importer for most of the days in May, June and July, because even with that
45:53
giant solar system, there'd be a few dark rainy days where he had to get some from the grid. He's
45:57
still every day you got some from the solar, but it wasn't enough to cover the house for those
46:01
three months. So his story could be true for the great majority of Australians and in fact,
46:07
a great majority of people on earth who live between 35 degrees and all from 35 degrees south,
46:13
you could get the majority of the energy from the roof over your head to power, not only your
46:18
home, but your cars as well. Where does 35 North cut through? I think Sydney's 34.
46:24
Okay. 35 is maybe Naruma. No, I was thinking, I was saying, but Europe is excluded from that then.
46:34
Southern Europe's, shits it in, Portugal. It's just better anyway.
46:39
All of the UK did. They knew what was up.
46:44
And honestly, as the price of solar gets cheaper and the price of batteries gets cheaper,
46:47
this latitude goes up and down. So it's probably all probably true closer to 40%,
46:56
but it really just means even at 45 degrees north, you can still get 10 or 25% of your energy
47:03
from your own house, but you'll rely on the network to fix and win power for more of your energy.
47:11
Anyway, this is to say Fred built an oversupply more than his household needed,
47:17
but it guaranteed him this much, much cheaper electricity. He stored
47:21
ton of it in the two batteries that were on four wheels and used garage. He also had a couple of
47:27
batteries on the side of his house to store the rest. And he estimates that he's saving somewhere
47:32
between $89,000 a year because he does a lot of driving. He's got teenage daughters.
47:37
They are not skimping on hot showers.
47:42
I love that your case study print is actually named Fred because it makes it sound more like an ad
47:49
from like that, you know, meet Fred. Fred used to be a silly man. Fred used to get his energy
47:55
from coal fired power plants, but then Fred got smart. Now Fred has bloody, bloody,
48:01
Fred is actually super smart. He's now he writes thought pieces and policy pieces for how we
48:06
should reform the electricity bucket. Maybe I should talk to Fred. You should absolutely talk to
48:11
Fred. I recommend. Okay, put us in touch. I have another friend or Chris who could tell a similar
48:16
story. Chris is not as good a name for the ad. No, that's why I use Fred, but there's, you know,
48:21
and they're not got a friend called Sarah and I've got another friend called. Terrible.
48:25
Patrick's good.
48:28
Meet Patrick. Patrick runs her whole house off solar panels and batteries.
48:33
These are all people I interviewed in the book. I just wrote to plug it again shamelessly.
48:39
Because I actually think the world is in need of some good climate stories and Australia is it now.
48:45
We have crossed this economic tipping point for a few reasons. We don't have the worst
48:51
electricity market policy in the world. That probably goes to California.
48:56
We've got compared to the US, more expensive gas and petrol. We've got cheaper sunshine than
49:02
anywhere. We've got great wind and we don't have tariffs on Chinese cars and batteries.
49:09
And so also, so we went first and we can do all this. And so the book is like talking to all of
49:15
these people who used to call these people early adopters. Now you just call them
49:20
average Australian saving. Just clever Fred. Just clever Fred.
49:25
When you say, can we just talk, we're bumping up against the time limit here, but I want to
49:30
understand a little bit about regulation without being boring about it, but just very broad brushstrokes
49:35
without getting too deep in the weeds. What is terrible about California's energy market and
49:39
regulation? And if you were Grand Poo bar of the world and waving your magic wand and you could
49:45
just tell governments to do whatever. What is good, what is a good regulated, well regulated market
49:49
look like? Oh, California's a litany of problems, but basically because it was a vertical state owned
49:56
monopoly, meaning PG&E owned and so Cal Edison owned everything from the generation all the way
50:03
to your meter. They didn't really allow competition. They're scared of rooftop solar. They make
50:08
the permitting and the interconnection for the rooftop solar take 90 days in Australia. That's done
50:14
over your phone in one day. Wow. By the way, my evil stepmother-in-law was trying to with my help
50:23
make that political problem, because that would have been genuine efficiency as opposed to whatever
50:29
the hell Elon did. And because they, you know, they caused a bunch of fires, went bankrupt a few
50:38
times. So we're still the California, the electricity purchase is still financing PG&E's bankruptcies.
50:44
It should have been, there was a point after the second bankruptcy where the state of California
50:49
could have repossessed PG&E and I think they should have. And just what would that mean,
50:54
re-nationalize it at a state level? Well, if at least have the option to rewrite the rules,
50:59
but what they let happen was a New York investment bank fired out and then restructure it and put
51:06
more fees on a top to make more profit to get their investment back. And so that's costing the
51:15
California electricity by, I'd pay 80 cents a kilo at what our US.
51:19
Wow. At my house in San Francisco, because they also penalized me because I put a giant solar
51:23
on my roof in California, which cost me literally 10 times more per what than my one in Australia.
51:28
So these are the problems with California. Right. And that's basically because it's a protected
51:33
monopoly. It's a state protected monopoly. So they could, would it be better for them like,
51:39
would the libertarians in San Francisco and like Silicon Valley be right to say just rip up the
51:47
monopoly, deregulate the whole thing and allow a free for all where individual companies can compete
51:54
with each other? There was a few moments where I was even hopeful that under the libertarian
51:59
deregulation friendly Trump presidency, you could actually make genuine progress on American
52:05
energy policy because you're like, okay, let's fix up. Half of this problem is the regulation.
52:11
So let's fix that. And that was one interpretation for a few minutes that the optimists thought
52:17
could be the definition and the defining goal of the government of government efficiency.
52:22
But that's not what they did. They just shut down science. So that was a missed opportunity.
52:28
I think the summary for Australia is a different market and is and actually this is a summary
52:35
for the whole world. We designed the rules of the electricity market in the 20th century.
52:40
Nearly everywhere in the world. Nearly everywhere in the world built the same touch of wise and
52:45
used the same technologies made by the same companies. Like Siemens and GE, stuff is on every
52:51
pole, every substation in every country in the world. These things look the same work the same.
52:57
And we wrote the regulations for a model where coal or gas out there made electricity and it went
53:03
one way to the demand side where the consumer is and they paid money for it. But the collective
53:12
Australian rooftops will be larger than all with the generators over here and the supply side.
53:18
And so why aren't we designing a new market that acknowledges that they're
53:23
as powerful a market player as the generators. We guarantee the investments of our generators
53:31
and our transmission companies and our distribution companies. So if you're a distribution
53:35
company or transmission company and you're new South Wales is crazy, they're owned by foreign banks
53:40
and we're guaranteeing them roughly 9% returns for their investments in infrastructure.
53:45
You could ask just curiously with the libertarian mindset or a socialist mindset interpret
53:50
for yourself which one it is. But like if I'm allowing a Singaporean investment bank a 9%
53:57
guaranteed return to put an asset on my distribution grid to make the grid work, why am I not
54:03
giving a 9% guaranteed return to the household that's buying a battery and putting solar on that's
54:08
going to deliver the same service to the grid. Right. So we have this incredible asymmetry in market
54:14
design where the technology is now flipped all over to the demand side being able to be an
54:18
incredibly important and useful asset in making it cheaper, more reliable grid.
54:24
So I don't think I think you're only one or two political steps in a couple of podcasts away
54:29
from getting all of the skeptics that use strawman me with on this interview from
54:33
from not complaining about whether we have nuclear for the they're fighting the wrong battle.
54:40
Even if the nuclear is free it won't get it won't be cheap once it gets to you compared to this
54:45
magical rooftop solar. We should get them on a libertarian like get the government off my roof.
54:51
Right. Treat me like you'll treat an international finance company.
54:58
Guns, God and solar that would be how I would sell it. Right.
55:04
Because this is how you know you've got to redesign the markets and redesign the regulatory system
55:08
to acknowledge now that the majority of assets are over here on the demand side and they're
55:12
going to do just as much work as the assets over here on the supply side. So why protect the
55:17
plutocracies and the monopolies and the oligarchs over here when you could be protecting the young
55:22
families on the demand side and making sure that they've got a better shake at cheap electricity.
55:28
Cheap. Cheap. I love it. I mean also what I don't understand this in these international banks
55:34
that are investing in what do they bring what do they do what are they what is the Singaporean bank
55:39
doing Australia and ventilment mate it's Macquarie bank they just what do they do Macquarie
55:47
bank business model is find monopolistic infrastructure and get paid guaranteed return and buy it
55:57
but but they don't own the the qualified power plant. Oh they own some of all these things.
56:04
I thought the point was that they own the wires. I don't know if they own I mean I wouldn't
56:09
surprise them. I don't know. Bit owners of the coal-fired assets but it's
56:14
but the point is I mean my only point is there's no value they're not bringing any value there's
56:18
no value ad like the assets already exist. No and remember the 90s that already exist they're
56:24
already there and we're paying a money for the privilege of having them do what exactly just
56:30
have them on their balance sheet. Well remember that they used to be called municipalities
56:34
and they used to be owned by your city council. I had a great conversation with the mayor of Newcastle
56:39
she and her her energy nerd buddy on council were wildly mad because in the 80s Newcastle
56:47
owned its wires and so in the 2020s Newcastle has this giant bus dip over the ton of solar making
56:55
unbelievably cheap electricity but they can't use that for their other buildings because they
56:59
have to sell it to the grid for paint. You're going to turn us all into socialists. All the
57:06
materials. I don't think it's socialism. I think it's just people who want I believe in markets
57:12
and capitalism. I just think we all are naive if we don't believe that they are not
57:17
monopolized and taken advantage of by large corporations. We don't have a union of households
57:22
that's represented on a emo or the name. Literally. Well we do have a union of I mean the union
57:30
of households is supposed to be called the parliament of Australia or Congress of the United States.
57:35
That's what our union who lobbies them. Us right here dammit on this truth speaking show.
57:44
This is the voice of the people. Just asking questions. Just asking questions. A lot of people
57:50
are asking, Saul. A lot of people are asking about that base load power. I don't believe you are
57:55
mad about the gas industry lobbyists that you could sort of smell as you walk the halls in
58:01
Canberra. Lastly, I guess it hasn't escaped your attention that the man who has gutted so much
58:09
out of this research into electrifying everything is the man who electrified cars for the first time
58:17
that Elon, like what do you make of that? That Elon's legacy that like he starts his famous career
58:22
being the champion of the trend. I've actually started Tesla. You're not even going to give him any
58:30
credit for it. No, he's retarded. Somebody described it well. He's a cook. So as an investor,
58:36
he had a clause in his investment that I get to consider myself a founder by virtue of this
58:42
investment. So that's how he became a founder of Tesla. It had been running for some years,
58:47
and the guys were doing real work, including a good friend of mine, JB Stravel,
58:53
who honestly did all the engineering, and he was at Stanford with a mate of mine when I was at
58:57
MIT. His hobby was putting batteries in old vintage Porsche 914s. If you write a book about how
59:06
Elon is actually, you know, fraud in terms of his founding of Tesla. What are you talking about?
59:13
The millions of dollars you would make. All right, we all love Elon. Praise B to the great man,
59:25
but I look forward to your next book, a revealing exposé of the history of Tesla.
59:31
American political situation is relying on the cult of individualism, denying our group
59:37
efforts in creating these magical technologies. The most extraordinary machine ever built,
59:42
the biggest, most complicated machine on the planet is the electricity grid, and it was built
59:47
by the contributions of thousands of people, right? I think getting away from the idea that one
59:52
genius is going to save us here would be very healthy. Well, if we have one genius to save us,
59:58
it's you, Saul. Thank you for speaking with us.