Latest / Clean Power Hour / Navigating Complex Regulations to Drive Clean Energy with Nancy LaPlaca | EP178

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Navigating Complex Regulations to Drive Clean Energy with Nancy LaPlaca | EP178 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Nancy LaPlaca: So this is where I think the regulator's are really letting us down. We're living. We're pretending like it's 1980. It's not 1980 We could hit 1.5 degrees C rise this year, probably next year for sure with El Nino. And so I feel like our regulators are living in the past. We need to live in reality. We need to recognize the value that clean energy brings us.
• 1:18
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, want to go deeper into decarbonisation? We do too.
• 1:33
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• 1:39
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• 1:46
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour utilities taking risky bets on natural gas. I'm Tim Montague, your host Welcome to the Clean Power Hour. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. That is how you can help the show. And please tell a friend, that is another great way to to help the Clean Power Hour by spreading the word about the show. There are many many, many professionals who don't know this show exists. Check out our YouTube channel. Of course, we're on all the audio platforms, but check out our YouTube channel. Hit that bell, subscribe to the show. And reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from my listeners. My guest today is Nancy le placa.
• 2:25
  Tim Montague: She is a regulatory policy expert. Welcome to the show, Nancy.
• 2:30
  Nancy LaPlaca: Thanks, Tim, for having me.
• 2:33
  Tim Montague: I'm excited to bring this this nice topic to my listeners. You know, we we energy professionals, we all live under the the rules and regulations that pu C's are enforcing and and sometimes.
• 2:45
  Tim Montague: Well, it's a combination, right?
• 2:51
  Tim Montague: It's combination of utilities and their rules and regulations.
• 2:56
  Tim Montague: And then how the PUC the public utility Commission's are overseeing them and regulating them or not. But give our listeners a little background on yourself. How did you become interested in regulatory policy?
• 3:09
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah, thanks, Jim. My my path here was different than most people's, I'd say markedly. I started out as an advocate fighting clean coal integrated gasification combined cycle to be precise, with CCS, carbon capture and sequestration. And as many people now know, it doesn't work. Clean Coal is an oxymoron.
• 3:29
  Nancy LaPlaca: It does. It never did work. And carbon capture and sequestration, unfortunately, is a row that we seem to be going down. But more people are aware that it doesn't really work.
• 3:41
  Nancy LaPlaca: It's just not a viable, too expensive. Risky, doesn't scale.
• 3:46
  Nancy LaPlaca: And so I started out fighting clean coal. I did that for a few years. And then I moved into natural gas as an advocate. As a self funded public interest advocate at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, and with my friend Leslie Gluster drum and Leslie took on coal. And I took up took on fracked gas around 2007 2008. At that time, fracking was just getting started. And Colorado was an early state. And so I learned a lot about fracking, gas supply reserves. I had some excellent witnesses experts, guy named David Hughes, who's written many reports. He's kind of energy expert Richard Heinberg is right hand guy. He's written many reports called drill baby drill, and he's still a someone out there. He's been retired for many years now. But he continues to crank out reports about how fracking wells are increasingly depleting the laterals are longer, they use more water, more sand more chemicals. So I learned a lot about natural gas early on. Then I ended up helping a guy named Paul Newman, who was then a county commissioner in Cochise County, Arizona, because they were going to find a clean coal plant build a clean coal plant in his district that was quickly abandoned because they didn't have the water and doesn't work.
• 5:26
  Nancy LaPlaca: And so I ended up helping the Democrats in Arizona in 2008.
• 5:32
  Nancy LaPlaca: With an election because Arizona is one of the elected states. In that election. We meaning clean energy advocates. We won two seats, and I went on to become the policy expert and advisor to one of those commissioners whose name happens Paul Newman that is his real name. And Paul Newman, along with Democrats, Sandra Kennedy and current Arizona Attorney General Chris Mays, who's quite a brilliant energy analyst, and is now the Attorney General of the State of Arizona.
• 6:06
  Nancy LaPlaca: We formed a clean energy majority. And in the two years that we had that majority, Arizona passed one of the best energy efficiency laws in the country. That was 2010. And then honestly, in the 2010, election, the the anti clean energy forces dumped 10s of millions of dollars, and basically took over the commission. And so the, the trajectory that we were on pretty much ended, and it really hasn't been able to get traction since then. After working as Commissioner Newman's energy advisor for four years, then I went to work. I have my own consulting business. And basically I've been helping advocates. solar industry, the Illinois Solar Energy Association, I worked for doe for a while interconnection. So basically, Tim various issues around clean energy, but mostly working in the in the regulated states space, which as you mentioned, is where the public utilities Commission's have the most power in deregulated states, public utilities Commission's still exist, but they have much bigger constraints around their authority.
• 7:28
  Tim Montague: Yeah, here in Illinois, we're a deregulated state. Our PUC is called the Illinois Commerce Commission, the ICC I've had Karis Zalewski, the former head of that organization on the show, she now works for a clean energy developer. But and I, you, you, you, you referenced clean coal.
• 7:49
  Tim Montague: So I want to point out to our listeners that CCS carbon capture and storage is very much in the landscape of the federal government's incentives for energy. In the US US check out Episode 128, where I present an article by Peter Montague my father about the 45 Q incentives in the IRA. The title of that show is poison pill for the eye for the IRA old white men are ruining the future for young people. Because what CCS does is it incentivizes the fossil industries to burn baby burn, and to quote unquote, capture carbon from smokestacks, put it into pipelines, we are building 60,000 miles of pipelines in the United States to carry compressed natural compressed co2, liquefied co2 in pipelines, and buried in the ground in places like my backyard, which is central Illinois. I'm also in a cold state, Illinois, has massive coal reserves, mostly in the central and southern parts of the state. But we have mind mouth coal burning power plants in the state of Illinois that hold huge swaths of the population captive actually paying higher than market rates, because these are, these are plants that are fueling co ops and munis, which is, you know, 30% of the state's population, but probably 70% of the state's real estate, so to speak. So anyway. And I mean, one of the one of the emergent properties of that is that businesses in communities like Naperville, Illinois, want to leave Naperville because they're paying too much for power. So if you're a manufacturer, and you have a high energy bill, you're going wait a minute, my neighbors in Chicago are paying three and a half cents, and I'm paying 14 WTF. So, so anyway, but Nancy, you've got some interesting, you know, current stories and experiences. I would love to hear about your work with icea, the Illinois Solar Energy Association, that's my home state. I work nationally, but I'm very involved in the solar industry here in Illinois, and then also in your home state. What is it? Is it North Carolina or South Carolina? I think it's North Carolina, right? You're you're dealing with a co op or a Muni utility, which has been quite interesting as well. Yeah.
• 11:03
  Nancy LaPlaca: And Peter, I want to mention that when you told me you were Peter, Montague, son, I remember so clearly reading your father's analysis of CCS and 45.
• 11:10
  Nancy LaPlaca: Q. Yeah, back when it was kind of like, you know, the green screen air, you know, back when, you know, before, what was years ago, and, and your father was just a hero, you know, he he, he, he outlined it, so Well, I just remember that so well, while
• 11:31
  Tim Montague: he still is he still he's still writing, he's just blogging these days, he he no longer writes Rachel's news, which is what he's best known for Rachel's Democracy Now. Help news as it was known, but But anyway, thank you. I appreciate that. And yes, he is a an incredible person and I stand on those shoulders, so to speak. So that's
• 11:56
  Nancy LaPlaca: great. And I grew up in Illinois. Yes, I did. I grew up in River Forest. Okay, my family moved west, to around Downers Grove, Oak Brook area, and a lot of my family still lives there. Yeah. I want to mention something about the Illinois bill, which as you know, is really good the climate and equitable JOBS Act Seija.
• 12:14
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yep, 960 pages long. And really what what thrilled me about that law was, it was like a page and a half on retail net metering.
• 12:25
  Nancy LaPlaca: And if I was going to help someone write a paragraph about how we need retail net metering, and let's not mess it up by allowing utilities to reduce the rate or ad fees. Go right to that section of CGI. Interesting story about CGI Peter that I think people need to know, Tim,
• 12:46
  Tim Montague: you're calling me, Peter. Oh, I'm
• 12:48
  Nancy LaPlaca: sorry. It's okay.
• 12:50
  Tim Montague: It's understandable.
• 12:52
  Nancy LaPlaca: Anyway, that when you look at when that bill was passed, which was September 2021, I remember it well, that the utilities were not allowed at the negotiating table. Why?
• 13:03
  Nancy LaPlaca: Because they were being investigated for massive fraud.
• 13:06
  Nancy LaPlaca: And that fraud was so big. It brought down the Ohio Speaker of the House, Larry householder, and it more or less brought down Michael Madigan, who was the Illinois speaker, the house certainly did politics for 47 years, whose daughter Lisa was the Attorney General of the State. And the reason why that bill was so good was because the utilities for forbidden from being at the table to go cheat that bill. Now one of the things I love to show my students is when you look at Illinois, if you look at Illinois, so look, they went from zero to 60 miles an hour, boom, after after passing that bill.
• 13:47
  Tim Montague: Well, after fija, for we got it first, first we got the future energy jobs act, right. I was the real accelerant. We'd had an RPS. And so wait. And the goal was 25%.
• 13:57
  Tim Montague: By 2025, we were we were not going to achieve that. Right.
• 14:02
  Tim Montague: The RPS was quote unquote, broken, because we were not on pace. And then and then fija was an accelerant. We were still not on pace, though, with fija. And the amount of funding going into the program was too little. So the funding in Illinois for solar and this is great if you're working in another state to learn from this. It frustrates me, Nancy, that we're reinventing the wheel 50 times over in all 50 states, when there are some very good places that have set the foundation for how to do things. And I'm curious what you think about that I have my short list but but in Illinois, we fund clean energy incentives and zero energy credits, which is the nuclear equivalent with a small fee on consumer power bills or ratepayer power bills, right in the the IOU utility. So in Northern Illinois, that's comed, and central and southern, it's Amarin. There's also an American, which has a carve out in the western part of the state, West Central, a small part of the Quad Cities area, but for the most part, it's hammered in combat, then there's, there's the Munis and co ops which don't really play.
• 15:16
  Tim Montague: And that's, that's a much longer, more complicated story.
• 15:21
  Tim Montague: But, but that fee, if it's too small, there's not going to be enough money in the program. And that was the case with fija. So it was a boom and a bust. Right?
• 15:32
  Tim Montague: We got like two, two years of let's go. And we're doing large CNI, lots of residential, solar.
• 15:36
  Tim Montague: And end and utility solar took off because of that program.
• 15:42
  Tim Montague: Now, after that bust, we got Seija the climate inequitable JOBS Act, which is a fix and a and a complete kind of revamping of the RPS right and now we're on we're well, we're our RPS I think is 100% by 2040, or 2045.
• 16:06
  Tim Montague: Maybe think 2040. But so it's one of the better RPS is now across the country. But there's many places now that have 100% RPS is I'm sure you can rattle off all the states, but there's over 100 cities and states that have 100% goals now by I think 2040 or 2050. So
• 16:28
  Nancy LaPlaca: I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so Tim, that brings up an interesting issue. If there's no path to get there, then it's really difficult to get there. So I want to bring up a couple of things. One is I remember right Seija had about 600 million a year for clean energy was like five 600 million a year, something like that.
• 16:50
  Nancy LaPlaca: Well, that's a lot of money. Of course, it sounds like a lot of money. And it is. But it's dwarfed by fuel costs absolutely dwarfed. So so let me let me launch into another aspect then that you brought up a Muni. So my utility is very unusual in that it's owned by the local university. And the reason why it's owned by the university, it's actually a State University, is because the university predated the utility.
• 17:17
  Nancy LaPlaca: So it's technically a state owned utility. So my utility, I was the first customer and 108 years to intervene 108 years, which to me, tells you something about the process that the process is broken. The process.
• 17:36
  Nancy LaPlaca: My friend, Leslie, colostrum used to say let's put the public back into the public utilities commission, just like the UC utilities call themselves, um, you know, Arizona Public Service Company, Colorado public service company, no, no, these are private companies. They have taken the world public, and just used it. So again, my utility is a poster child for something that's happening in other utilities, larger utilities. And that is that the cost of natural gas is going up. So my utility, which had the worst, which has the worst solar rules in the United States, despite the university, claiming that has been defining sustainability since 1899, when the university was founded. And those rules called biocell, have resulted in 15 solar systems in 15 years.
• 18:24
  Nancy LaPlaca: Now, it was almost fun going to the Public Utilities Commission in North Carolina, and watching the faces of the commissioners as they realize that the town of Boone, which is known for being progressive in the state of North Carolina, had installed only 15 solar systems in 15 years. And yet, the cost of natural gas went up so much for this small utility, that they had to borrow 43% of their expected retail sales, just to cover the increase in gas costs.
• 19:03
  Nancy LaPlaca: So let me repeat that and unpack it because it's, it's a lot of numbers in this stuff. So my utility sells about $16 million worth of electricity a year 16 million. Well, the cost of natural gas went up so much, they had to borrow $7 million.
• 19:21
  Nancy LaPlaca: That's in addition to the money that they had already planned to spend for natural gas fuel, their 85% natural gas. If you look at Duke Energy, I just reviewed one of the fuel dockets, Duke Energy, one of the subsidiaries in North Carolina called Dec. Duke Energy Carolinas, had to borrow a billion dollars a billion because their natural gas costs went up so much. Now what I see from the regulators who are, you know, perfectly nice, smart people. And I would say, and I've seen studies that say this, that the regulators are more knowledgeable than they used to be. It used to be kind of a graveyard for former legislators who wanted to make more money or just keep working in government because it pays more than a lot of state legislative chairs. And so these guys are smart, but here they are. They let Duke Energy get away with this a billion dollars in extra fuel costs a billion. So we are allowing these utilities to take an unbelievable risk that natural gas costs are going to go down. And let me point let me point this out in the state of Arizona, which I know well, I lived there. 27 years, I worked for two members of Congress, the Arizona Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, a bunch of state agencies, and was a policy adviser. You have a state that has about 25% less solar than North Carolina. And yet it's much much much sunnier. They're literally running out of water, the Colorado River at the current rates. There's a there's a National Geographic article this month on the Colorado River. And what they say in that article is that the current rate of decline, the Colorado River will no longer be sending water within six years, six years, three to six years. Now here's what's scary about that. Tucson a city of at least a million people 100% dependent on the Colorado River, Las Vegas, couple million people 90% dependent on the Colorado River, State of Arizona as a whole 50% dependent on the Colorado River.
• 21:35
  Nancy LaPlaca: I mean we are looking at a disaster. And what did the Arizona regulators do? Just last week, they further devalued solar. So you have a state like Arizona, which imports all of its natural gas has to buy, has to build pipelines to import that natural gas and has to pay for that natural gas, whatever costs. And yet, the regulators are doubling down on natural gas and killing solar. And unfortunately, that's what we see over and over and over. And so you have a state like Illinois, which is, you know, relative to Arizona is much less Sunny, and yet Illinois, is going to crush Arizona on solar, it will crush them.
• 22:21
  Tim Montague: The I don't know, because there's a lot of utility solar happening in Arizona.
• 22:24
  Tim Montague: Well, and that's the other.
• 22:27
  Tim Montague: That's the other thing here, Nancy, that really irks us clean energy professionals is you can have really bad legislation in a state, let's say Florida or Texas, these are states that don't really have RPS is but they have lots of solar, they just don't have DG solar, they don't have distributed generation, they don't have strong residential and CNI incentives. The utilities are going oh, well, solar, wind and storage are the cheapest sources of energy we're going to install. Gigawatts and gigawatts of utility solar like Florida Power and Light is doing in Florida. And like next era is doing all over the country. Very large scale, and I have nothing against large scale solar. I'm a huge advocate, actually, for large scale solar. It's a both and though, we need to also take advantage of the fact that we have this built environment and brownfields where we can put the Digi on rooftops on old construction sites that are just dilapidated or on brownfields, true brownfields like landfills.
• 23:25
  Tim Montague: My own closed landfill here in the city of Urbana is now solarized with community solar that's targeting low and middle income off takers. And that's a beautiful thing. Because otherwise you can't do anything with a closed landfill except pray that it won't contaminate your groundwater which it often is doing.
• 23:45
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• 24:22
  Tim Montague: So but but but we were talking about we need to loop back to Illinois because you did quite a bit of work with a CEA around the time that we were getting CJ I believe. And CJ is good, but it's not perfect. Like there's a cliff coming for example, in net metering right? In 2025. The cliff is going to happen for residential solar, it's already happening for CNI, solar, if you take advantage of the smart inverter rebate, then the off taker does not get full retail net metering. Because I mean that the the smart inverter rebate is generous, it's 10 to 15% of a project's cost, coming back in a lump sum to the owner.
• 25:05
  Tim Montague: So it is compelling for the owner to take that incentive.
• 25:10
  Tim Montague: But it also then devalues net metering in and just if you're a listener and don't understand what happens when you devalue net metering, dig into, for example, nem 3.0, in California, where they devalued solar by something like 70%, I think is at the beginning of 2023. And it has crushed the solar industry there. The solar industry has fallen off a cliff, even though everyone was very pollyannish.
• 25:35
  Tim Montague: Last fall about well, you know, we're gonna do solar and storage now. And it's gonna, it's going to be okay, well, guess what?
• 25:42
  Tim Montague: Yeah, you are doing more storage, and that's a good thing. But the whole industry is tanking. Because when a consumer doesn't get a payback, they don't do it. That, you know, money really talks in energy.
• 25:56
  Tim Montague: It's economic, economics, trumps everything else, you could be the biggest environmentalist in the world. But if the payback period is 15 years, you're going wait a minute, I don't know, I don't know if I'm gonna be in this house for 15 years, is often then the calculus that get sun or this building if it's a CNI project. So what was your involvement with with CGI and icea?
• 26:18
  Nancy LaPlaca: Well with CGI and Nicaea, that 960 page bill had to become became rule. So it's kind of like the way Congress works. Congress passes a law like the Clean Air Act. And then the EPA, which is the agency they they are the ones that implement the rules that relate to the legislature Well, what my role with icea was to Help them understand how that law became rules. And to help the solar industry, which was mostly local and regional solar companies, which as you know, for sure kind of what happens happened to the solar industry, help them understand what needed to happen. In fact, the biggest fights Tim, were interconnection, and then wreck prices. So wreck prices, renewable energy credit prices, how much would would those rebates be and the interconnection agreement, when and how that figured in as a milestone, now your point about residential rooftop rooftop solar taking the shorts as well taken? Because really, we are busy killing clean energy. Now, I would encourage you go look at the CEA graph for Arizona. And you what you will see is it in the last few years, they kind of killed residential solar and 2013 when they killed that metering? Yeah. And since then, residential solar is actually more capacity than utility scale solar, you know what that means?
• 27:51
  Nancy LaPlaca: You know, 200 times more, you know, installations. It when you consider that one megawatt of solar is about 200. rooftops.
• 28:04
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah. And so basically what Arizona now now they're finally doing a little bit more utility scale solar. But what they're doing what the commission is doing by reducing that net metering by reducing the amount of money that people get paid when they send excess generation to the grid, similar to net metering, but not net metering.
• 28:26
  Nancy LaPlaca: Is it Yeah, like exactly what you said, it kills solar, it kills rooftop solar. And unfortunately, in this country, we've been doing that now for a while. I'm sure you know, this, look at Australia, one out of every three homes has solar.
• 28:42
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah, they have almost as many solar and solutions, solar installations we do in this country, but their populations, 25 million are worth 330 million. Yeah. If you look at what my utility did, which is if you put solar up, you must sell every kilowatt hour to the grid, every single one for three cents. No one in their right mind would put up solar. Because what happens if that kilowatt hours it goes to my neighbor, and utility sells it to my neighbor, for retail rate?
• 29:12
  Tim Montague: So basically, what is that retail rate? I'm just curious.
• 29:15
  Nancy LaPlaca: Well, here's what's funny to Tim, something to pay attention to. In 2021, it was nine and a half cents for my utility, one of the lowest in the country, then it got raised to about 11. That's where it is now. Yeah. What's it going up to very soon, like next month, almost 1515 cents a kilowatt hours. Why that jump fuel costs, because when you're 85%, natural gas, you are completely dependent on fuel costs. And something that we haven't even talked about yet is is the damages from those fuels. So natural gas, because it is climate, accelerant on steroids.
• 29:54
  Nancy LaPlaca: It's co2 on steroids is what methane is, it is 86 times worse for the climate than even co2, and it breaks down to co2 and water. So you end up with the same problem, you have a climate warming gas. So you know, the utilities by ignoring the fact that solar is a climate solution, that solar when you put solar up, the cost of your electricity, then is pretty flat. Unless your installer has an escalator. If you own the solar system. It's going to displace your fuel costs. And so we don't even recognize that I mean, states I think what's going to happen in the future is states like Arizona, which are still running coal plants on ground water. That is profoundly stupid. Profoundly stupid. That you're gonna
• 30:52
  Tim Montague: mean meaning they're using the groundwater for cooling.
• 30:55
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah, they're running coal plants. On groundwater. Yes, they are.
• 30:58
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah. You know, Duke Energy. You know, I looked this morning, Duke Energy Carolinas, which is North Carolina and South Carolina, Dec and DEP. They owned 350 megawatts of solar.
• 31:10
  Nancy LaPlaca: They own 9000 megawatts of coal.
• 31:17
  Nancy LaPlaca: 9000 megawatts. Most of those plants are 50 years old. Yeah, two years,
• 31:25
  Tim Montague: and they are being sunsetted.
• 31:26
  Nancy LaPlaca: You know, so So this is where I think the regulator's are really letting us down. We're living. We're pretending like it's 1980 it's not 1980. We could hit 1.5 degrees C rise this year, probably next year. We're sure with El Nino. And so I feel like our regulators are living in the past, we need to live in reality, we need to recognize the value that clean energy brings us.
• 31:55
  Tim Montague: I liked the point that you made in the in your opening remarks, you know that utilities are there as a service, right. And we gave them this special power of being a regulated monopoly in most markets, whether they're IOUs, or quote, unquote, public power, which is Munis and Co Ops, which you also point out is a misnomer, calling them public power sometimes, or many times.
• 32:20
  Tim Montague: And so the utilities are there for humanity, though, for society, right to provide us, you know, 99.99999%, uptime and electricity. And for the most part, the grid does work very well in the places like the United States. You know, I here in central Illinois seldom have blackouts or brownouts, so very seldom. So we have a very reliable grid. And I'm grateful for that. But times change, right, and the utilities are not changing fast enough with the times. And as a result, there is a ton of friction between the utilities. And the clean energy industry, which is consumers want clean energy, they want to decarbonize the economy, they want cleaner air, air pollution kills 6 million plus people a year globally, it's a massive health negative health impact.
• 33:14
  Tim Montague: It's causing climate uncertainty, climate chaos. And that is going to be extremely costly, both in health, food systems, migration, defense, etc, etc. I mean, the the cascading interactions, there are so many, most consumers just have no concept of the cost of climate change. It seems very distant, right? It's out there somewhere in the midst. And yeah, we're seeing fires and floods and droughts and, and we are seeing real and heat waves, right? We are seeing real impacts from climate change.
• 33:47
  Tim Montague: Now, for ordinary people in many parts of the US, not to mention the global South, right, where mass migration is occurring. And guess what people? They're gonna come to your backyard. And that's not a that's not a happy thing. I mean, we have we have immigrant camps now, right, in our major metros, from Venezuelan migrants coming all the way from Venezuela to North America, because things are not good there. Well, if your food system is disrupted, that's not good, right? And you have no choice but to migrate. Because Starvation is not happy. So, So climate change does have a very real cost. We're just just scratching the surface in terms of the real costs. But let's get back to this PUC business, and what does society need to do?
• 34:36
  Tim Montague: Right, you've got the regulated a regulated monopoly, the utilities, and then you've got this oversight, the PUC. And together, they're not getting the job done, so to speak, right, there's still a lot of friction for, you know, the transition that consumers and the clean energy industries want to make happen, and they want to fulfill these RPS is, but I mean, it's a it's a huge problem. I just came from Minnesota, okay, Minnesota had their state conference Cup last week. The wait times for interconnection with Excel, a major IOU that covers a huge swath of Minnesota are over a year for distributed generation, like community solar, and it's crushing the community solar industry. And, and the N XL is just going, you know, sue me.
• 35:36
  Tim Montague: Right? They, I mean, that's the thing is they are very, very, very powerful. So how do we change that?
• 35:43
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah. And that's a it's a conundrum, you know, back when they designed the system of state regulatory state regulators, which was, you know, back in the 1930s, Samuel insol, who's very famous guy who was you know, Edison's right hand man, they knew that when they designed the regulatory system that would be easy to capture the regulators. And I would say, one of the things that I feel like I've seen in my career is that it is so complicated that people just don't engage and that the utilities instead of directly addressing the problem, they've just made things more and more complicated. So it makes it more and more difficult for people to understand. So what do we do about this? Well, we have to hold our regulators feet to the fire. And one of the reasons why it has been so difficult is that it's really hard to appeal a decision by a Public Utilities Commission. The bar is very high, because they're quasi judicial agencies that have a lot of power. And so it has to be pretty egregious for court, a regular court of law to overturn what they do.
• 36:47
  Nancy LaPlaca: And then you've got utilities like Duke, Duke Energy, who's one of the biggest, most powerful lobbyists and campaign contributors in the state of North Carolina, Duke Energy, what's Duke Energy trying to do?
• 37:03
  Nancy LaPlaca: protect their monopoly? That's what they're trying to do. And so, by making things more and more complex, I think some of the solutions are, for example, look what Connecticut, Maine and Colorado just did. They just pass laws that don't allow utilities to use their money, to use their money to lobby and to, you know, to do things like take people out to dinner and stuff.
• 37:33
  Nancy LaPlaca: You know, they're they're imposing ethics, this should have been done a long, long time ago. Because the problem is that money talks, of course, and that that's what's undermining our democracy. You know, here in my little town, the university, which owns the utility dump,$25,000, the, the city council race where people spend one or$2,000, I was on town council for a couple of years, because they wanted friendly council people, they actually didn't win, despite spending more money than anyone, it really ever spent the whole history of the town. They didn't win. And this is the kind of heavy handed you know, putting your thumb on the scales that happens with the utilities. They're winning because of complexity. The problem I think that's going to happen that's happening is you have young people who are not just depressed, but angry and depressed, who see what's coming. And there's this, there's this gap. And I remember talking to people like Hunter Levin's about this, a over a decade ago, well over a decade ago. But you have all these people here who want to act on climate. And then you have the Public Utilities Commission's here we have so much power, and there's a giant chasm, and how do we affect the regulatory decisions, you have to go in there, unfortunately, and mix it up with them one on one. That's why I'm the only customer and 108 years and my utility to challenge them, despite the fact that 90% of the customers have wanted clean energy for over a decade. survey after survey after survey. I mean, you know, this, Tim, I remember back in 2009, when I was working for the Commission, we gave a PS, it was like $800,000, to do a deliberative poll, where you ask people what kind of energy you want, then you spend time and energy educating them and you pay them for their time, then you ask them the same questions.
• 39:35
  Nancy LaPlaca: Overwhelmingly, people wanted solar once they learned about it. But what is the utility doing since then killing solar, you're killing it, and they're locking us into natural gas. I remember talking to David Hughes, my witness about this in like 2007, we said, our what's what's going to happen in the future. Here's the nightmare scenario, we increase our fossil fuel burn, which is what we're doing, we increase natural gas, which is a worse for the climate than even coal. And we start running out of fossil fuels. And that's what's happening. The fossil fuels that we dig up are dirtier and dirtier, the health effects are worse and worse. We have coal power, that the utilities, you know, the to generate, it used to be three cents, now it's five or six cents, but the damages are 30 cents. You know, nature gas, the damages are, the damages are bad, too, because they're climate. So we have an industry that refuses to recognize reality. And we have regulators that let them get away with it.
• 40:41
  Tim Montague: I mean, the US with the assistance of organizations like the Sierra Club, have, you know, campaigned to close down coal plants and, and accelerate their migration to other technologies. And when one of the major trends that happened in the last 20 years is coal plants converted to natural gas plants. And there is a reduction in co2 on a per unit of electricity when you burn natural gas versus coal. But you're Are you suggesting that in the greater scheme of things that the industry, the natural gas industry, because of the leakage of methane from those wells, and from pipelines, that when you when you convert your economy to natural gas from coal, you're not actually cleaning the you're not reducing the climate footprint?
• 41:35
  Nancy LaPlaca: You're not at all and here's this here's an interesting aside. I spent a long time unpacking the grid greenhouse gas inventory and methane leakage, just put yours on that stuff. And here's here's an interesting side. Note that has a huge effect right now what we're doing. So the EPA has always followed the IPC C's GWP.
• 41:56
  Nancy LaPlaca: Okay, let's unpack that. The global warming potential of various gases, right. So the EPA has always followed the IPCC except for methane, except for natural gas. And they made the decision it was during the Obama administration, to not recognize that in the starting with the fifth assessment might have been the fourth that the IPCC upped the global warming potential of natural gas from an initial like 25 to 86. Why? Because methane breaks down really fast. And so there's no point in having 100 year timeframe to determine what the global warming potential is, it needs to be 20 years. Okay, so you have a fuel that is 86 times worse for the climate than coal. You have the utilities that are free to ignore that because of the EPA rules. And you have a situation where really natural gas once you look at leakage, which Dr. Robert Howarth has said for years, is more like four or 5%, not the one and a half percent, that the industry wants you to believe.
• 43:16
  Nancy LaPlaca: And yes, you add in that leakage. And it's way, way worse for the climate than coal. You you, you take this 86 times global warming potential, and the leakage and it's off the chart. And that is why our methane levels in the atmosphere have gone from 750 to like 1950 parts per billion in a relatively short time, like 20 years. 30 years.
• 43:46
  Tim Montague: Not that much time you don't hear people talk about the parts per billion of of methane, you hear about ppm of co2, which has been going up about 1%. So we're now at 420.
• 43:57
  Tim Montague: Right? The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a UN organization was started in 1988. Yeah, right. And here we are 30 years later. And the problem is only getting worse.
• 44:15
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And here's the good news.
• 44:19
  Tim Montague: Okay, decarbonizing the economy is only 40 gigatons of co2 e.
• 44:25
  Tim Montague: Okay, it's a relatively small problem, there's a trillion tons of co2 in the atmosphere, sucking out out is a bigger problem, much, much, much bigger problem. It's 25 times bigger of a problem. Now there are some credible solutions, check out my show with Peter Fiekowsky.
• 44:41
  Tim Montague: Peterfiekowsky.com. He's written a book called Climate restoration. Showing that with if we augment some natural systems in the ocean, you can truly suck that carbon out. The question is, can you do that without completely disrupting the ecosphere or the ecosystems, and that's TBD, because it is messing with nature, so to speak, but we have to do something and we have to act fast, because runaway climate change is already taking place.
• 45:10
  Tim Montague: And, and you know, you fast forward 30 years, and it's really going to be scary for our children and children's children. And that's just one of the quote unquote, existential threats, right, there's many others that are coming down the pike here, AGI being one of them, artificial general intelligence, artificial biology, chemicals in the environment, etc, etc. Ocean acidification. I mean, there really, it's it's truly a a gnarly, gnarly scenario that that our future holds for us. So this this problem of decarbonizing the economy is actually the easy one. And we should just do that, right, we should just get it over the energy transition is going to happen. It's a question of how fast because the economics are on the, on the side of these newer technologies, wind, solar and energy storage batteries, but other things, too. So in our last minute or two together here, Nancy, I mean, I could talk to you all day, but we have to, we have to do other things besides just talk about PAC. So what should our listeners know?
• 46:15
  Tim Montague: What are some good resources for them? If they're trying to improve the situation in their state? Of course, they could contact you and hire you as a consultant, which would be a good idea probably. But what should our listeners know about how to how to improve the scenario with PCs and utilities?
• 46:36
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yeah, I would say we're looking at look where you're you are, what state are you in? Who is there It's doing the work. Here in North Carolina. We got lots of good advocates. There's always the national groups three fifty.or.
• 46:50
  Nancy LaPlaca: They're starting to look at Public Utilities Commission, Bill McKibben new group called third act. They are actively involved starting to get involved in Public Utility Commission reform, energy and Policy Institute digs up all the dirt. They dig up great dirt, unbelievable dirt, unbelievable corruption. So I would recommend to people that you get involved wherever you are, again, there's national groups Electrify America is a great group rewiring America. And you know what, we'll use my home here, we're finally putting solar up.
• 47:27
  Nancy LaPlaca: Finally, because those rules were so awful. We have two electric vehicles. We have heat pumps. And once we get our solar, and it hopefully runs us about maybe, let's say 60% of our electricity use, we will have decarbonize at least a substantial portion. And so, you know, start to look at who's doing what, and how can we help the people that are trying to decarbonize our society?
• 47:58
  Tim Montague: Have you been able to disrupt that? No net metering rule, though, or no retail net metering rule in your in your home community?
• 48:06
  Nancy LaPlaca: Yes, yes. So finally, what they did, Tim was they finally submitted a proposal for net metering, but it's a $6 per kilowatt per month charge. So if you add that up, that's $7,200 a year extra fee after 720 a year, sorry, 720 a year, you have 10 kW. So what over the 30 year life of the system? That's $22,000?
• 48:31
  Tim Montague: Well, yeah, I mean, the average savings from a solar system are only on the order of $1,000 a year.
• 48:36
  Nancy LaPlaca: Right. And so basically, they just killed the incentive. So what I argued before the North Carolina Utilities Commission and app voices, is that if they allow my utility to add a $6 per kilowatt per month charge, it's going to base we're going to continue to have no solar and Boone, despite the fact that 90% of the people want it. And that even New River Light and Power, which has done everything they could to kill solar, kill efficiency, no low income programs, no rebates, nothing, nothing. That you know, that that we need this even New River lighting power admitted that distributed solar is worth about 17 cents a kilowatt hour 17 cents a kilowatt hour, when the retail cost of electricity is going to be 15. So basically, we're doing them a favor by helping to produce electricity, when it's going to be needed the most. I mean, I look at my street. And I see that hardly anyone on my street has air conditioning, maybe 20% of us do. If we have a heatwave like Portland did. We're gonna have people over at our house, because we'll have solar. Yeah.
• 49:49
  Nancy LaPlaca: And this is what we are going to see going forward. The sad thing is, it's going to happen instead, Tim, in a nice managed way, it's going to be chaotic, because the utilities are not doing what they need to do. And the regulator's won't make them.
• 50:12
  Tim Montague: Wow. Well, I was hoping you would have some more good news for me today. But you know, so we just it I think one of my takeaways here is that we have to be very wary of natural gas and what utility say about natural gas, that's very eye opening about the parts per billion increase in the atmosphere of methane. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. And, and that is one of the topics that Peter for kowski tackles. It's called accelerated oxidation of methane, or enhanced methane oxidation. Amo, because methane is going to come out of, for example, the tundra, when the when the tundra melts because of climate change, right? And it's just spontaneously bubbling out with because when you have decomposition in anoxic environments, one of the byproducts is methane. So well, we're gonna leave it there. I want to thank Nancy LaPlaca. for coming on the show. Check out all of our content, cleanpowerhour.com is the place where you can find all of our content, you can click on the YouTube icon there, find our YouTube channel, please subscribe to the channel, hit that bell and reach out to me. I love hearing from my listeners, you can contact me on the website, you can contact me on LinkedIn, and book a book a meeting, I love to book meetings with my listeners and learn what you're up to. I am a consultant to the clean energy industry. I work with installers, developers, and OEMs and helping them go faster further. So if you're a clean energy company, looking for As a consultant to help you with sales, marketing and growth consulting, I'm your man. I want to thank Nancy Lee placa for coming on the show today. How can our listeners find you, Nancy?
• 51:53
  Nancy LaPlaca: Well, they can Google me find me on LinkedIn is probably the best because I don't have a website, but just find me on LinkedIn. My name is unusual. So I'm very easy to find. And thanks so much, Tim.
• 52:02
  Nancy LaPlaca: And please say hi to your dad.
• 52:08
  Tim Montague: Absolutely, we'll do. Well, I'm Tim Montague.
• 52:11
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage.
• 52:11
  Tim Montague: Take care dancy. All right, thanks
• 52:14
  Nancy LaPlaca: so much. Bye.
• 52:15
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• 52:46
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• 52:52
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• 53:24
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• 53:43
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• 53:43
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• 53:48
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• 54:23
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