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LATITUDE MEDIA COVERING THE NEW FRONTIERS OF THE ENERGY TRANSITION The hottest debate on the internet isn't over AI safety or midterm polling. It's over an athlete pooping herself in the middle of competition. Did you guys see this? I did not see this, but I feel really bad. She went viral after accidentally diarrhea-ing all over herself during this High Rocks Beijing event. And there was videos that went viral. It was all over my feed of poop streaming down her legs as she finished the event. Did she win? She did win. Okay, then this is like, okay, you know what? You also poop when you give birth, too. You do great feats of athletic strength, and you shout yourself, and I think it's fine. But the debate wasn't about her accident, which I think anyone who has done endurance sports or pushed them hard can relate to. It was over the fact that she continued and used shared equipment. And so the people behind her had to use the equipment she used. And people were very mad. That's legit. Was she not supposed to use shared equipment? No, the whole competition is about using shared equipment. And so, like, athletes rotate in. That feels like a flaw in the race, then, not a flaw in the. They should have, you know, shat yourself special equipment. You're right. With plastic bags over it or something. Or just like a wipe-down boy. You know, just someone that comes down, sterile wipe-down. But this is like a Rorschach test for America. Are you team green? Grit at all costs or team hygiene and basic decency? Oh, grit at all costs. Yeah, the point of the event is grit at all costs. It's not like they were going to some gala or something like that. You know, the point is grit. Well, if one of you has an accident while we're recording, I am not stopping. That's why we record from the waist up. The waist up, Stephen. This is already planned for, Stephen. From Latitude Media, this is Open Source. I'm Stephen Smith. I'm a reporter for Open Source. Open Source is brought to you by EnergyHub, the flexibility platform for the modern grid. More than 230 utilities trust EnergyHub to build and operate virtual power plants, delivering 3.6 gigawatts of flexible capacity. As the resources grow, okay, this is really great. This is an amazing resource. I can use it. It's really valuable. But here's what I really need to do to make it as good as or better than my existing conventional capacity. Paul Heinz is the chief scientist at EnergyHub, where his team develops the algorithms that turn millions of DERs into flexible capacity utilities can stake their grid planning on. My team is working on the algorithms that allow us to meet the utilities' goals for shaping these virtual power plants. Machine learning keeps raising the ceiling on what VPPs can deliver. EnergyHub's platform is trained on years of data from millions of devices, optimized for utility needs across every season and every grid condition. We're working with utilities not to just enable that capacity, but also make it more flexible so that utilities can use it, you know, more times per year for longer events in ways that are valuable to both customer and utility. Later in the show, Paul explains how EnergyHub's platform helps utilities scale VPPs for their unique needs as grid demands evolve. Learn more at energyhub.com. Open Circuit is supported by Everyday Electric. You might know them by their former name, Renew Home. We are at a pivotal moment. Energy demand is growing faster than the grid was designed for. Everyday Electric believes we need to start at home with savings before jumping to new expensive infrastructure. They already run the country's largest residential VPP, coordinating over 6 gigawatts of capacity. And now they're expanding partnerships with energy providers and OEMs so that products like thermostats, EVs, and batteries can help households save money and support the grid. That's home energy as it should be. Learn more at everydayelectric.com. What if you gave your climate donations the same due diligence you gave your investments? That's what Giving Green does. Giving Green researches the strategies and non-profits best positioned to unlock the next big climate breakthrough and sends 100% of every dollar donated to the Giving Green Fund directly to them. Maximize your impact per dollar. No cuts or guesswork. Make your first gift before the new year and it will be matched up to $500. Go to givinggreen.earth/circuit. Thank you for watching. See you next time. Bye. Steven Lacy: Welcome to the show. I'm Steven Lacy. I'm the executive editor at Latitude Media and one of the three legs of the stool. Caroline Golan is the chief growth and policy officer at NRG. How are you? Caroline Golan: Great. I'm great. Thank you. Steven Lacy: Excellent. How's your garden these days? Caroline Golan: We don't have time for the garden stories, but I will tell you I have a redemption cucumber plant story that maybe I'll use in another episode. But I'm still getting cucumbers, like three cucumbers a week right now in September. Steven Lacy: This is the time of year, sort of late summer when you have too much stuff coming out of the garden. Caroline Golan: Not in the south. Steven Lacy: Generally you're overloaded. Caroline Golan: In the south everything's burnt out by now. Steven Lacy: Okay. Caroline Golan: Right? So you live in an area of the country where it's abundant. I live in the area of the country where it's just mosquito hell. So no, not really. Steven Lacy: Jigar Shah is the co-managing partner at Multiplier. He also hosts the Energy Empire podcast along with the Open Circuit podcast. How are you, sir? Jigar Shah: I'm so good. I'm so glad I don't have any cucumbers or zucchinis or anything else that I don't like to eat coming in. I don't understand- Steven Lacy: Just frozen vegetables for you? Jigar Shah: I just don't understand vegetables that take more calories to consume than they provide to you. It's just eating water. Steven Lacy: The water vegetables? Jigar Shah: Yeah. Yeah. I don't like it. Caroline Golan: Vitamins and minerals and all those other things your body needs. Jigar Shah: I mean, vitamins, nothing. Steven Lacy: It's the crunch, man. You got to have the crunch. Jigar Shah: When I go to a hotel and they're just soaking cucumbers in water and then they want me to drink cucumber water, I get offended. Jigar Shah: No way. It's so good. Steven Lacy: No. I don't want them on my eyes. Jigar Shah: Give me infused water any day of the week. Steven Lacy: I don't want them in my water. Caroline Golan: You need to put some basil in that cucumber water. Jigar Shah: Yes. Caroline Golan: And then you'll be trying. Jigar Shah: Basil's fantastic, but basil actually is a leaf. Caroline Golan: You're so discriminatory. Jigar Shah: I am. Steven Lacy: Well, let's start with a new set of contradictions coming out of the White House, a deregulatory push and a re-regulatory push both around coal. On the deregulatory side, the Environmental Protection Agency is repealing a 2024 carbon rule for power plants. The Biden era standard required existing coal plants to capture nearly all their emissions by 2039 or shut down, and it sets limits for new gas plants. The EPA is also moving to rescind the underlying endangerment finding, this legal finding that gives the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants at all. And if that holds up, no future administration can just write a new rule. Meanwhile, the administration is taking extraordinary market interventions in the opposite direction. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued more than 20 emergency orders under this depression era statute, this tool designed for wartime blackout prevention, and he's used it to force eight power plants to run past their scheduled retirement dates, often over the objection of utilities, the state regulators who approve their closures, and in some cases, the grid operators themselves. So. This is not cheap. By one estimate, ratepayers are already on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs, and it's rising by tens of millions more every month. But that strategy hit a wall in Michigan when a federal court ruled DOE overstepped its authority, which now opens a pathway for more legal challenges. So is Trump winning or losing in his bid to keep coal alive? How much of this really matters for the trajectory of clean power? Jigar, when you create your mental list of everything that is important for clean power, cleaning up the power sector, where do you put these clean power rules? Well, we have a long record of where I put these clean power rules. I think you and I have been talking about it since the Obama administration, and I've hated it ever since. So I'm sort of against all of it anyway, and I think when you think about how much we've accomplished, we have far surpassed what the Clean Power Plan actually thought they were going to accomplish when they published it in 2015. So I always thought it was performative, and I always thought the 111D thing was going to be a stretch anyway. So I think the bigger issue that I have is that it is very clear that Trump doesn't care about any of this stuff. And I don't understand why we take it seriously, right? What he cares about is a culture war, and it's for 20% of the population that follows him. So for him, this is a flex. This has nothing to do with emissions. It has nothing to do with coal. It has nothing to do with anything but how it looks like on TV, right? But we treat it like it's real policy, like it's a real thought-through strategy of some sort. It is not. He doesn't care. Well, strategy aside, it has real-world implications. I mean, rescinding this rule means that we will cut our emissions reductions in half by 2035, according to the Rhodium Group. And this will have a material impact, whatever the strategy or lack of strategy is. Sorry, what will have a material impact? I mean, these coal plants are at the end of life, right? So it doesn't matter how many 202c rules that they do. Like, they are going to physically just seize up and die. Right? Right. Within the next five years. Like, unless they spend a billion dollars investing in these coal plants to refurbish them, which the Trump administration cannot force them to spend a billion dollars. They can just force them to run uneconomically, right? Fine. But they're going to shut down because they're at the end of life. Separately, the EPA rule is like basically what? Like, basically what the Biden administration said was you can't build a natural gas plant unless you build carbon sequestration storage with it. Right? Is I think is what they passed. Nobody was ever going to build carbon sequestration and storage because it makes literally no sense for carbon dioxide streams that are only like, you know, where it's only 20% carbon dioxide or less to concentrate it and put it under the ground is not cost effective with the 45Q where it's at. Right? So like, let's have a real conversation. I don't want to speak like a scientist with vibes-based policy. Caroline, what do you think? I mean, I love vibes-based policy. And that's entirely why I got into this industry. This whole podcast is vibes-based. No, I mean, I think it's going to be regionally. It's going to be a regional impact. So I think in areas, and you saw Duke Energy came out in mass agreement and applauding the administration. And I think, so I think in vertically integrated areas where they can pass those costs on to customers, I think the plants will be able to do that. The costs will extend. And, or I think they'll run more, right, than they're currently running. In markets where we're just doing, you know, cost per KWH, like Jigar's right. Like they're going to get priced out. I think, you know, what you see in ERCOT happening and what you see in PJM are wildly different scenarios. PJM, we have scarcity. ERCOT, we have abundance. But in neither scenario do I expect, that people are going to be reinvesting billions of dollars into their coal plants in the next eight years when they would be coming to their end of life. Because the market is just going to send the right signal, which is that these aren't going to be competitive long-term. And, you know, I'll say what Jigar was already going to say, which is like, there is no future where battery storage gets more expensive and coal gets cheaper. Like that, there's no future of that in the market. So I do think this will extend it in areas where, you know, utilities aren't subject to an external signal or battery signal. And then it's going to be a state play. So then you're going to be seeing state-by-state patchwork regulation around this is probably what will happen next. And what we've seen is states have generally been supportive of phasing out these plants. Would you say that's- Well, they're generally in favor of affordability, yes. They want cheaper electricity rates. But I think the affordability question has like an arc to it. Right? Because do you keep a coal plant on for two more years while you do the efficiency measures, while you do the grid enhancing technologies, while you do the distributed BPP that like we all want to see? Or do you pull it off and then knee-jerk invest in something else and new steel? Right? So I do think there could be a few areas of the country where there is that arc or being able to extend that for a year to give them the runway to do the other thing. Now the pressure on that is like, do you have regulators? Do you have- Do you have a community that's going to make that argument? Because if I think the environmental community goes in and it's just like, oh, this is the worst thing. You know, then you can't utilize this to actually get what you want, which is the investment in the other stuff. So run, I'm like pro, run the bad plants for two more years while you invest in the future grid, then miss that window and invest in stuff that's not really where you want to go in the next five to 10 years. No, but that's what we were going to do anyway, Caroline. I mean, this is the thing that bothers me the most. I think we were in the markets, Jigar, but I don't think in the vertically integrated spaces that's necessarily what was happening. But I do think in the markets. I think in general, they were not running the coal plants, but they were leaving them there as capacity so that in the case of, you know, a storm or whatever, they would run them, right? And what the Trump administration is saying is, no, run them more than that because we just think it's a flex against people we don't like. And that's costing hundreds of millions of dollars, right? To people who didn't want to see an economic dispatch, right? And a lot more pollution, obviously, locally, right? And that's causing a lot of people to remember why they hated coal plants because it puts mercury and arsenic and all sorts of stuff like into the air, right? It's not about the CO2. It's about all of the other pollution that coal plants put into the air, right? The natural gas plants don't necessarily put into the air. That's fair. And so, like, I don't think the Maha people are excited about, like, these coal plants running, right? Oh, no, they're not at all. No, and that's the interesting thing. The vibe space is like, which part of the, you know, tribe are we appeasing to? Because I don't even know that you're really appeasing to the AI tribe because, and you're certainly not appeasing to the rural part of America that says, that sees any action that the administration takes on energy as another bolster for more data centers. So, I don't really know who this is appeasing other than maybe a handful of utilities. One man in the White House? Okay, so just one last question on this. Again, strategy aside, Jigar, I think the political argument in favor of these regulations is that Congress is never going to act. It's an incredibly difficult political pathway. And so, we need the authority for EPA to do something and the Trump administration is trying to cut off that pathway in its entirety. Does that worry you at all? Or you just think that this particular regulatory approach is not the effective one? I just want to understand what it is that people want to accomplish, right? Because, basically, since 2008, coal has gone from 50% of the U.S. grid to 14-15% of the U.S. grid, right? That has largely been led by natural gas because solar was expensive in 2008, right? It's no longer expensive and so it's mostly solar that's going into the ground today. Now, there's a bunch of people who want to say, let's retire all the natural gas because that's the next villain, right? Fine. Now, what's happening is for those people who are keeping score at home, most of the CEOs of electric utility companies who lost their jobs lost their jobs sort of in the 2003 to 2006 time frame when natural gas prices, spiked and they were relying too much on natural gas power. So, for a lot of those utilities, they're going to do it again because they're idiots and they don't know how to run a history lesson, right? And now, we're going to be exporting 30 BCF of LNG from this country. That means we are not going to be able to maintain our production at $3 a million BTU for gas. So, gas is going to have to go up to $5 a million BTU and all of those fuel costs are going to be put onto rate payers, right? And so, a 66% increase in fuel costs, probably up to $5 a million BTU. Guess what? All of those CEOs are going to lose their jobs, right? So, like, I don't know that I care all that much. I'm trying to understand how the EPA regulations are the things that we're actually running how we made decisions on the investment side. I don't think it was, right? I think that the reason people were putting in clean energy was that it was actually a better financial product. Again, I'll go to the nuance. I think that a lot of the clean energy in this country over the past decade was deployed by two motivations. The first was meeting a state-level RPS standard. So, the governor stood up and said they want this, the state look like, or the legislature said this, the state look like. But the vast majority of the capital that went into renewables was backed by corporate goals and largely by the tech sector that is now, you know, the antichrist, AI, you know? They're still signing VPPAs. But they're still signing them. And that's the other thing. It's like, I think a lot of the, and we can just call it what it is, like, command and control regulation on what electron has moral authority over another electron was based in an era where there wasn't really a value signal, for clean electric. electricity, there is a value signal for that. And I know that we talk about, oh, they're building this and they're building that and they don't care what it is just to get online to power their data centers. But all of that is going to swing back. Like Amazon and Google and Microsoft, like they're not all going to get to 2030 and be like, well, we didn't miss our, we missed our sustainability goal, which they're all going to miss their sustainability goals. We missed our sustainability goal, but we just don't care about the climate anymore. That's not going to happen. They're not going to be like, oh, let's all go build coal plants. They've got a gun to their head and they're going to build whatever they can build right now. Largely that's natural gas. And that natural gas is a hell of a lot cleaner than it was 20 years ago. And there's a way to even, there's ways to make it more clean, but that's not going to go away. So the signals that are actually driving deployment are going to stay. And I think that the command and control, what it does is it just like confuses investors. And I think it confuses regulators on what they should be looking for and what they should be building their market structures for. And it's regressive and it's unfortunate, but I think that the main driver and what gets built in this country is going to be demand as it should. And I don't think that demand for clean energy is going to go away. And I do think that we have a lot to think through as an industry around clean energy. And I think that we have a lot to think through as an industry around clean energy. And I think that we have a lot to think through as an industry around natural gas and a lot to think through about what we should be holding this demand accountable for. But the concept that like, well, Trump's extending coal plants. So all of a sudden, all the big tech companies are going to go invest in coal, I think is beyond hyperbolic and largely untrue. So let's talk about something that has a very direct impact on rate payers, which is the DOE emergency authority to keep coal plants running. Again, it's under this Depression-era wartime statute. Michigan court rejected DOE's supposed authority. Does this ruling put the, I think there's six other coal plant emergency orders, Pennsylvania, Washington, Indiana, Colorado, I'm missing one, Florida, I think. Does this put all of those at risk in terms of what the administration is capable of doing to keep the coal plants open? I just don't see this being the issue that Trump is willing to die on for the midterm. Like, maybe, but I just think that there are such bigger issues at the state level. And I do think in the areas where it's like, hey, extend your coal plant for a year or two in a vertically integrated, space, if that's going to, if that's going to decrease cost to customers, prove it. If it's not, it's not. I just don't see it being the issue that the administration is willing to go to war with states on right now. There are so many other issues to go to war on. This one just doesn't seem like the one to go to war on. Yeah, but Trump himself and the administration has shown that they do not care about midterm election year politics. Like, they're going to war on all sorts of things. Yeah, but Congress does. And going to literal war. But Congress does. So he needs Congress to make this work. Sure, sure. But the administration's not listening to Congress. They're frustrated, and Trump doesn't care. So I think they're just going to do what they're going to do. They're going to do what they're going to do. But I just don't see it. I don't know. Tigger probably had a crystal ball that I don't have. The thing that I find so shocking about this moment is that there is a level of sophistication that is required to actually bring about a nuclear renaissance that is very, very complex, right? And I think that that level of sophistication is undermined by the 202c stuff and the core challenges. And so if you're Chris Wright, and you really care about figuring out how to bring about clean, firm technologies like geothermal or nuclear, et cetera, like, it's not easy to do that when people are laughing at you behind your back for being so dumb on these 202c's, right? So I don't know that I care all that much about it, but I think he should care about his reputation, because I don't see how he's going to go in and twist the arms of the utility companies that he's trying to twist to get them to rate-base these new nuclear plants that they're trying to do. Remember, LPO just put out that big framework agreement with Westinghouse, right, on, you know, doing the loans for the supply chain and that, you know, the utilities had to put up $500 million to unlock the loan, and they want five utilities to do this, right? So they're clearly going to all these utilities and twisting their arms to get this thing done. And then on this side, they're, like, just looking like a complete buffoon on the 202c's. Chika, are you saying that, like. You actually need levers, like 202c levers-ish, to do nuclear in this country? I am saying that you need a secretary of energy that is respected by the electrons marketplace. And right now, Chris Wright is really a molecules guy, and he has shown himself to not understand electricity in any way, shape, or form. But all of the things that DOE does, they're really more electricity-related, not really oil and gas-related, except for R&D. And when he does these 202c's, he just tells people, I don't understand electricity. And so then they're not going to listen to him when he tries to pressure them on signing a nuclear deal or a geothermal deal or whatever it is. I just think he wastes his, you know, whatever, like, you know, credits with people. Are you sure, though? Well, I think both sides of the aisle. He's really good at arm-twisting. I mean, my assumption is all the utilities that are standing up, plotting this rule, need something out of the administration. But do you think they're all going to agree to a new nuclear plant and rate-base it? Well, if that's what we get out of this, I don't know, Jager. Maybe. I would love for us to get that out of this, to be clear. But I'm saying that I think most utility CEOs that I worked with when I was serving were pushing back hard. Yeah, they were. Of course, they were. Like, they don't want the Southern Company experience. Of course, yeah. And so that requires a bit of finesse that I don't think this administration is showing, and the 202 stuff undermines that. It's an interesting consequence I hadn't really thought about. What about the broader political consequences? To your point, Caroline, about priorities in the midterms. Like, rate-payer impacts have already stretched into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Utilities are saying we have to pass on these costs. Are there political consequences? I mean, I don't think there are. Are there political consequences if these coal plants are forced to stay open and people are paying the cost? Yeah, of course there are. But I also think that most utility — so, again, it's not a monolith. There's two sides of this. There are utilities that wanted coal plants because they actually think it will suppress prices marginally. There's not enough coal, I think, to make a huge difference in these. There's no difference in the end-use-customers bill. There's that side. And then there's the other side where, you know, particularly in the competitive markets where you're being asked to keep a coal pile, but you can't run that plant because it doesn't — it's not competitive. And so that's a cost. Now, for the most part, in those competitive markets where it's a cost that's not being borne by the customers, that's being borne by the shareholders. So the shareholders are the ones that should have an opinion on that. However, this is just another pin in the hat of, I'm going to do everything to make sure rural America is not validated in their concerns over building new to-meet data centers. I will tell you that, like, the development community is coming to terms with the fact that it doesn't matter if you're a solar developer, if you're — I mean, no one's building a new coal plant unless you're trying to, but, like, if you're a natural gas developer, if you're a wind developer, if you are building new steel to power the grid, you are synonymous with AI. Because we don't need new steel in the grid unless we are powering AI. And that is sort of the political mindset that is very different than a year ago. That's the real risk. So, you know, I think any argument that says, oh, I'm doing this to lower carbon costs, but, like, you're doing it really so you can have more electrons on the grid to power AI. I think you're missing the way the electorate sees this, which is that they're opening their electricity bills and getting surprised every month. Oh, for sure. In a way that they weren't used to, right? And I don't think they're attributing it to the 202Cs from the coal plants or anything else. They're just saying in the totality of the chaos of the Trump administration, whether it's blocking new wind farms with the Department of Defense or whether it's blocking solar farms with this or whether it's, you know, eviscerating energy efficiency standards or whether it's whatever, they just know that the totality of the Trump administration is not pro-affordability. And you see that with the elections that have gotten nationalized for the Georgia Public Service Commission, for the Arizona Corporation Commission. I just think that in general, the Republican brand is being targeted with, we don't care about affordability, because it's not one issue. It's like all of these combined all look like they're just not coordinated in the right direction. So what is this? Is this a deregulatory agenda, a re-regulatory agenda? What do you guys make of. There's no agenda, Stephen. There's no agenda. Like, there's literally, I mean, there is no agenda. There is literally whack-a-mole going on all over the country. Vibes. So many vibes. I don't even think it's vibes. And it's getting rid of woke energy. I think it is whoever lobbied the hardest on the last thing. That is what it is. And to some extent, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's the same thing. To some degree, like, that has been the totality of the past couple of years. And I have to hold my former employer and all the industry that's driving demand accountable, because we didn't really do a great job of articulating what needed to happen in order for us to integrate tens of hundreds of gigawatts onto the system. Earlier, we met Paul Hines, Energy Hub's chief scientist. His team develops the machine learning that orchestrates 3.6 gigawatts of virtual power plants. When you see a utility using algorithms that we wrote on the whiteboard running 250 megawatt events, I think that's pretty amazing. Utilities need capacity they can deploy now, and they're finding it in virtual power plants, which are precise and configurable. I've got customers that have time of use rates. We need to make sure we respect that. I need to pre-cool during these hours. Maybe there's some hours that have a lot of solar power, so let's make sure that we soak up as much of that solar as we can. But I need to really manage my peak during this other period of time. And so figure out how do we take all those goals and then come up with schedules for all the resources, whether it's batteries, thermostats, electric vehicles. Energy Hub maps that evolution through a four-level maturity curve. Level one looks like traditional demand response. At levels three and four, a VPP is a real-time resource that can meet many different needs on the system. It's actually better than a power plant, because you're able to solve problems in the distribution network, which is where a lot of the cost is right now. You're able to solve problems in an automated way, whereas power plants actually are fairly slow to respond to issues. It's the future of how the grid operates, and we just need to connect them in the right ways, give them the right algorithms, and make that happen. Energy Hub's GridAware DERMS is the flexibility platform trusted by 230 utilities across North America. OpenCircuit is brought to you by Everyday Electric. After years proving the market was ready, they're delivering a new kind of VPP. So how does it work? Starting with features built into the products people already own and use. Things like smart thermostats, electric vehicles, and home batteries adjust automatically based on everyday routines, helping lower bills and add capacity. People can get meaningful savings and earn rewards from the grid, and this contributes to a reliable, resilient system that lowers costs for everyone across the grid. That is Everyday Electric's vision. It's the next great addition to your program portfolio. You can learn more at everydayelectric.com. 10 times more effective than a high-quality carbon offset. And the Giving Green Fund sends 100% of every dollar straight to them. Maximized impact per dollar, no cuts or guesswork. Make a first gift before the new year, and it will be matched up to $500. Go to givinggreen.earth.com to claim it. Well, let's switch gears and talk about framing now of these issues broadly. I think let's talk about how we talk about climate and clean energy. If you've been around this issue long enough, I think this conversation can get a little nauseating and redundant, but I think it matters right now because we're in an election year. There are big swings in sentiment politically, and we're also in this really intense national conversation about AI safety, and it kind of mirrors the conversation around climate. President Trump, of course, has one word for all of it, hoax. He's been on Truth Social tying AI safety concerns directly to climate concerns, and he's using the same word over and over again, doomer hoax. It's not just online, too. At a tech conference this week or last week, Jensen Huang, who put him on speakerphone in the room, Trump used the exact same phrase again. He called it a doomer hoax. And so if you repeat this line enough in enough rooms, you start to set the terms of the conversation. And that's why I was really interested in some of this new polling that came out, heat map and in bold research, release polling on how Americans actually think about climate and clean energy right now. And it turns out that the hoax framing isn't the only language problem in this conversation. Advocates making the opposite case have their own messaging problem, and it revolves around the word crisis. Their polling surfaced this really interesting finding on how people react to the idea of clean energy being the cheapest resource as well. So this is one I want to unpack. Caroline, the polling found calling climate a crisis or a catastrophe doesn't work on anyone. It demoralizes people who agree. It reads as manipulation to skeptics. How do you react to the use of crisis as a descriptor? I mean, when I think about crisis, I think about something that's acute and truncated, right? So you're in a crisis. You can get yourself out of this crisis in some temporal way. I think the reality is climate change is just our current state, and it will be our current state forever. Jigar, I think we had this conversation a long, long time ago. But there were people that were like, well, what do you do? Do you work really hard to pass the tipping point, which they've already hit, you know, in global temperature raises? Or do you start putting the policies and mechanisms in place to move people and to create resilience of the system? And I was always on the latter because I was like, as much as I have hope in people and what people can do in small communities together, at the broad level, we're kind of a mess. And so I think the climate community needs to be able to do that. I think the climate community needs to focus more on the reality of climate change and what do we need to do within the system, not to hit a temperature target, which we all know we're not going to hit, but to build a future that lives with this reality and has the accountability for this reality. I think calling it a crisis means that you can fix it with a technology that's or with a policy, and you can't. So you need to actually think about what is our current state and how do we build for a future where this is reality? This is reality. It has been 95 degrees in Atlanta for a month. That has never happened. I've lived here for 17 years. Never happened. It is mid-September, still in the 90s. Never. It's just the reality now. So what are we doing? How are we building for that reality? That's my sole purpose. I can send some progressive climate activists saying, Caroline's waving the white flag. White flag? It's like when your ship is wrecked on the side of the mountain. At this point, we have to just be honest with where we are. Jigar, what do you think about use of the word crisis and what should replace it? What works and why doesn't crisis work? I think this is another. I think this is another topic that you and I are on the record of talking about for a long time, Stephen. I mean, remember we had this conversation around David Wallace-Wells and all of the crisis stuff that he was writing, you know, like four years ago, right? Five years ago. And so it didn't work then. It certainly doesn't work now. This is why I was never wrapped up in the Greta Thunberg sunrise stuff either, right? I just think that to Caroline's point, I have so many thoughts. Let me say this. In general, the climate people are not the same as the clean tech people. No. And I feel like people are trying to combine them, but they're not the same, right? And they're diverging more and more. What the climate people need to focus on, but have a hard time focusing on, is not 1.5 degrees or 350 parts per million or whatever number that no one can process. But instead, it's the climate people. And I feel like people are trying to combine them, Instead, they should be focusing on walkable kids. communities, like the use of two-wheelers that are electric instead of electric hummers, right? Figuring out how we actually can live the lifestyle that we want to live within a different framework. And that's behavioral change, that's culture change, that's a lot of things that they're actually very good at. But scaremongering me into 350 parts per million makes no sense. And in this moment, where this week, gasoline and diesel prices skyrocketed in the Midwest, right? We are in a place where there's a lot of people who are open to a new point of view because they're paying $100 to fill up their tank right now, right? It sucks, right? And so, like, part of this, in my mind, has always been the same, which is that, why? There are houses today, 5,600 square feet, for three people to live in them. Like, why do we have zoning laws that, you know, don't allow money to take, you know, like, real estate that's close to transit and build up there, right? Like, all of these things are climate issues, but we have not framed them as climate issues. We've instead framed them as YIMBY and NIMBY issues. We've framed them as abundance issues. We've framed them as whatever it is. And so, I think that we just need an entirely different group of communicators to come forward and reimagine what this movement looks like. It's like, we've been so narrowed and, like, clean energy became the silver bullet, right? But if we're being honest, like, our topsoil is the biggest thing I'm worried about when we talk about climate change. You need to stop with the cucumbers. I need, no, I need to keep going with the cucumbers. Are you kidding me? More cucumbers for climate change. That's going to be our next slogan. But it's true. And I think the other thing is, is, like, in an age where you know what's going on globally, like, the person in Wisconsin's like, yeah, but China is building X, Y, and Z, and India is building X, Y, and Z. So you're telling me that my X, Y, and Z is going to make a difference? I just, I think the issue is climate is changing. It's going to get warmer or it's going to get wetter. Or if you're in the UK, it's going to get real cold, right? And, or it's going to get drier. Wherever you are, it's going to change. And, like, what is the quality of life within this? And what do you do so that the runaway train can slow, you know? Because I think we've created it as a binary issue and putting out these targets. Like, it's binary. You meet this temperature or you don't, right? But this isn't binary. This is a whole spectrum of accepting our own behavioral failures, our own impact against a world of change that our children and our grandchildren are going to be navigating. And I do think the generational issue is one that we deploy up enough in terms of quality of life. And I would like to see that more. And yes, more cucumbers. Everyone should have a garden. Start there. Let's start there. Well, there's another finding that I don't think is all that surprising, but I do think it's pretty interesting in this charge moment. Nearly three out of four voters from this heat map and bold poll said that the environment is extremely or very important to them. Even a third of those identified as climate skeptics said the environment matters to them greatly. Again, I think we all kind of knew this, either in explicit polling or just had a sense of this. But what do you guys make of that as a message that can move people? Is it that you just focus on local environmental impacts, you focus on public health, which we actually have seen in a lot of climate messaging, like people have made it about the local environment? I'm not sure it's moved the needle much, but it's pretty interesting that across the board people are very, very pro-environment. Of course. I mean, I don't think that I never thought that was surprising. I mean, you know, the state that was. One of the most, one of the easiest, I don't want to say easiest, but had the least political divide when it came to things like conservation, South Carolina. On the left, they cared about climate change. On the right, they cared about gaming and fishing and sunsets and marshes. Both are critical. I think that that's, that's where, that doesn't surprise me. And I don't think that the climate community has leaned in enough to what people's values are already. As opposed to imposing new values on them that they don't understand. I think this is when we go back to the EPA battles and the Clean Power Plan and all that stuff. I think part of the problem with the EPA right now is that their brand is one of constantly doing more esoteric things to manage CO2 as opposed to protecting the environment, right? Like, I don't think a lot of African-American communities in justice communities, who are testing their water locally, believe the EPA is responsive enough to when they find things that they don't like in their water, right? I don't think they believe that actions are being taken fast enough or the resources are there to respond to that, right? Or, you know, other folks, like, I think that this is where that Maha conversation that we had earlier, you know, ties in as well. I just think that in general, there is a broad feeling that the climate movement does, does not really care deeply about the environmental issues, even though I think they do, but they don't talk enough about them, and they talk too much about 1.5 degrees and 350 parts per million. Or people think that they're just going for social engineering, right? Sure. Sure. Yeah. What I think is interesting, Stephen, to tie this back to, like, your AI doomsday messaging or, and Trump making it a hoax. What I think is interesting is that many, if not all, environmental organizations in this country are just flat out opposing data centers. And I haven't worked it out in my head yet, but there's an interesting coalition emerging in rural America that cares about the environment. They moved to rural America because they want the sunsets. They want the rivers. They want the, you know, the forests and the open plains and the environmental community, which is now just decided. Which I don't, which I don't agree with, I will say, that they're not going to support data centers at any cost. But I think you're, but you're talking about something different, Caroline, which is, I think that. I know, but I think that there's bridges there. And I told you I have to. I think there's definitely bridges. I'm not saying there aren't bridges, but I just think that the environmental groups are plagued by the fact that 50% of their employees and their backers are de-growthers, right? And so. They're de-populationers. We can talk about that one day. Well, whatever it is. They're de-growthers, right? And so they don't know, they don't necessarily believe that GDP growth should go up. They don't necessarily believe that, you know, that AI and, you know, its impact on GDP growth or whatever is something that's a positive, right? And so, so, I mean, I think part of the problem with the environmental groups broadly is that they have this, this huge fight internally between people who want to use AI data centers and load growth as a way to get, you know, more clean energy, which is a lot of what I'm doing in demand flexibility. Flexibility and that kind of stuff. And the 50% that's like, no, we should just oppose it. We want to block it. We want to be against it. Right? And so, so I think as a result, a lot of them, I think, are neutral because they're just like, we don't have enough clear guidance from our members and our employees to, to take one direction or another. And I think this is where, again, where the clean tech sector, I think, is, is gone a different direction because clearly we have 20 years. 20 years of innovations sitting on the shelf that, you know, didn't actually take off. But now that we have all of this pressure around load growth, every one of them is being taken off the shelf and being repurposed for data center load growth. And so, you know, Bloom Energy is at $80 billion market cap and like all these other people, like, you know. Is that not the craziest thing? It's nuts. It is like, it is. We'll do another episode on fuel cells. No, I totally agree with you, Jigar. And we, we had some conversations about that with Jane Flagle over the summer as well. And I think that that's a real interesting point of tension and divergence between the environmental movement and climate clean tech. One last one. We have time for just one last trend. This is an interesting one. 57% of all voters and 78% of a self-identified skeptics think advocates are exaggerating how cheap wind and solar have become. This one took me by surprise. 57% of all voters. I have always assumed that economics were a winning argument. What do you guys make of this one? Well, I mean, look at ERCOT. I don't know what to say on that because like, I do think that there's a narrative out there and it has merit to it that wind and solar and storage are only cheap because they were subsidized. I think we all know, and we should just own it, that a lot of those subsidies just meant the margins of returns for some of the larger renewable companies got bigger checks. It didn't mean that those technologies didn't pencil. But if you look at. at ERCOT right now, peak is at 11 p.m. and peak is not really peak because batteries are pulling it down so much. The only place where it may not be cheaper is when you are looking for long-term baseload reliability. So you're in a major storm. You need to provide continuous power. That's going to be an issue. Like if you look at those sort of costs and the things that spike markets huge, yeah, it's probably not going to be competitive. But the day-to-day, I just don't see any market saying that it's not. That's my take. Jigar? Jigar, yeah. Jigar, what do you think? Also, just to add a twist to this, very few voters blame clean energy for rising prices, which is very interesting. So yeah, make sense of this dynamic, Jigar. So it is most certainly the case that when we were actively shutting down coal plants and we had all this excess interconnection capacity on the grid, adding solar and wind was really cheap. And we just, you know, put it on the grid in the same way that, you know, like we put data centers on the grid to use all this excess capacity that, you know, they should have paid more for. Now we are in a place where solar and wind have to integrate into the grid and actually, you know, be a good citizen on the grid, right? And that means you have to co-locate batteries, you have to do all these things that you have to curtail sometimes, you have to do like, and, you know, I think that means that we no longer need this. We're cheap framing because we're actually just the best solution for almost every situation. And so 90% of the time they choose us over other solutions. The thing that I think is fascinating in this moment is just how expensive the reference case has become. So it used to- That is insane. I agree with, like, it is nuts. What we were looking at 10 years ago, what is the price we have to beat? We had to beat 6 cents. Right. And, you know, like under PERPA, the whole point of it was that the utilities would sort of like say, here's the price to beat. And that was generally designed by the natural gas community, right? At 6 cents or 7 cents or whatever it was, right? Today, new natural gas is coming in at $140 a megawatt hour, right? It's not cheap. And so, like, so even with solar- Solar and wind coming in at $80 a megawatt hour, we're still cheap. The last thing I would say, though, is I think that folks at Ember are a little bit hyperbolic sometimes, but I think that this particular piece is true. You know, in India, they just did a really large coal RFP, and renewables were able to bid in this coal RFP as long as they could meet the baseload standards. Solar plus 12 hours of battery storage came in at 20% cheaper than new coal in India. So, I feel like, you know, like, even if you think the numbers are not quite there, like, I think that they will be. So, just to sum up on this thing, I think that we need to move away from all of the cute, kitschy framing that the renewable energy industry used to do when it was an upstart industry. And we need a whole new set of talking points now that we're dominant. Yeah. I think that's a good point. I think that's a great place to leave it. I totally agree with that sentiment. Caroline, I know you need to go off and get to a budgeting meeting. Good luck with that. Good to see you. Okay. Next week, I'm going to show you. Okay. I'm going to send you a picture of my cucumbers. They're amazing. Yeah. We can eat them. Yeah. Bring one to this episode. Jigar, I'll see you at Climate Week. And remember, if you're going to have an accident on stage, just keep going. That's exactly what I was thinking. Or wear a diaper. Exactly. At all costs, we've agreed to. Thanks for being here. Open Circuit is produced by Latitude Media. The show is edited by me, Sean Marquand, and Anne Bailey. You can find all of our audio episodes on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your shows. At LatitudeMedia.com, we've got transcripts. There are all of our episodes, our show notes. And of course, you can subscribe to our newsletter where we're covering all the topics that we discuss on this show. And of course, if you want to watch this show, go to YouTube, subscribe to Latitude Media. You can find Open Circuit. You can find Catalyst with Shail Khan, plus some bonus material from our conferences. So make sure to subscribe, like the show, and we really appreciate your being here with us. I'm Stephen Lacey. We'll catch you next week. ♪ ♪