Dr. Sally Benson and Dr. Lynn Orr - The Switch Interview

- GCEP is a fundamental scientific research program focused on finding clean energy technologies for the future. We sorta look in the 10 to 50 year timeframe, realizing that real innovation is going to be needed if we are really gonna transform our energy system in such a way that we provide power for billions, nine billion people but at the same time protect the planet. - We concluded that you need a portfolio that works across primary energy resources and ways that we convert those resources into services that we can use but at the same time offer some new options for reducing carbon emissions. - Right, who are some of the key investors and partners? - There are four companies that sponsor it, Exxon Mobile, Toyota, GE, and Slumber Shay. - We really rely on them for their knowledge about the current energy system. And we also rely on them for knowledge about what will be, for knowledge about what will be scalable. How can we, you know, manufacture enough widgets, enough, how we be, there be a sufficient energy supply to make this a worthwhile endeavor? We try to take the best of what industry has to offer and the best of what academia has to offer and pull that together and make wise decisions hopefully, about what to invest in. - Coal is abundant, in North America. China has a lot of coal, India has a lot of coal. These are developing nations. They're gonna use it right? - Well that's what they're doing today, you know? - [Host] Yeah, I mean they are. - That's what we're doing today too. - They're building new power plants with coal. They have a 40 year life, what can we do? - There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using fossil fuels, it's the emissions that are creating the concern and challenge today. Just like we've learned to scrub the other things, other pollutants out of smoke stacks, like sulpher and so forth, particulates, we could scrub the carbon dioxide out of the smoke stack of a power plant or any other industrial facility. And so, now we've prevented it from going into the atmosphere so then the question is is well, what on Earth do you do with this? Because there's a lot of it. The idea is that you can pump it deep underground, put it in a place where there's a really good seal, a rock seal, so that it stays trapped underground essentially permanently and if you have the right geology, yes it looks quite promising. But that right geology is not everywhere. - I think the biggest challenge is the scale. That if you think about how much CO2 we emit and how much volume that would, we would have to handle in order to this, that convinces me that this can't be the only thing we do. Part of it is choosing to charge ourselves the real cost of using various energy resources. So, we don't currently charge ourselves anything for the privilege of putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for example. - [Host] Right, right. - We need to recognize that that generates real costs and be willing to pay those ourselves. - [Host] Yeah, give us a feel for the timeframe and some of the things we can expect. - We will make a transition that involves more of the renewable resources, they could the sun, they could be wind, they could be geothermal, they could be biofuels. But the quantities are big enough that it takes lots of capital investment to do this so that will happen over time and then, virtually every energy technology has some set of problems that also have to be solved along the way. I think overall, the time scale for doing things is multiples of decades. - It's a long race but it is a race. You know, we can't afford to sit back just because it's going to take a long time. You know, it's like a marathon. - [Host] Right. - Just 'cause it takes a long time doesn't mean you don't start now as fast, as well as you can. Cars are great examples. You can buy a car that gets, you know, 15 miles of driving per gallon of gas or you can buy a car today that gets 50, so that's efficiency. You can go three times farther for that same gallon of gasoline. - [Host] Right. - And that's something you can really do. You can cut your emissions by a third. Another big one is just think about driving. Like, the amount of your emissions depends upon the vehicle miles traveled so you can make a decision. You know, maybe, you know combine trips to the grocery store and it all adds up. So, so it would certainly be possible to cut back your driving maybe by 10% and that right there, that's 10% less energy, it directly correlates. - Why does efficiency matter? - It seems to me that it's part of the portfolio of ways to attack this. This is a really big system of energy that we use now. We need lots of ways to modify it to be better. In the near term, reducing the amount of energy because we use it more efficiently, is one of the ways that we can make progress and save ourselves money in the process. - I think the first thing to realize is what we value in electricity. Number one, it's reliable, you know, we want electricity 24/7, we use it for almost everything in our life. I mean, I think we can't even imagine life without electricity so reliability is really important. The second thing is cost. Today we are really lucky in the United States particularly, to have relatively inexpensive electricity. And you know, we built a society around that so what we want is to create this same level of reliability and we also want it to be reasonably low cost. So yes there is wind power and solar power, which are very promising. They're really huge resources, we know how to convert them to electricity. But the question is, is how do we introduce them into the system that we have today that actually works pretty darn well? There's a really clever, new idea and that someone called demand side management that says, okay, well maybe if we can get people or people's you know, systems in their homes, their refrigerators or whatever, to help with that management so that, so if there's a little drop in power well, maybe we can say that well, let's not turn on our refrigerator right now or let's not run our washing machine. So that's gonna be one of the keys to managing this transition. So having better storage technology, electricity storage technology is gonna be really enabling but you know we're gonna need a lot more of that in the future if we're gonna deal with all this intermittency. So today, the way we store electricity, sounds kinda crazy, but we actually pump water up into a damn or a reservoir and then we can regenerate that electron so to speak, later on. That's-- - When the water flows down the hill-- - When it flows down hill-- - It turns a turbine. - Yeah. - So that's kind of one of our main energy storage systems now. In the long run, I mean, it's perfectly plausible to imagine an energy system that's really based primarily on renewable energy supplies and, you know, whether that's 100 years from now, whether that's, you know, 200, whether it's 80-- - Yeah. - Is really uncertain. - The biggest issue facing wind right now is the question of grid connection. If we want to use the wind resource that we have in, up in the mountains in California, you also need to be able to deliver that power to users. That is you have to have a grid that's capable of absorbing it and the wind doesn't, of course, always blow at exactly the right time. - [Host] Or when you need it. - Yeah, so you have to figure out how to deal with the intermittency. Now you can't do everything with wind. So it's, again, it's one element in the mix. - An important growing piece. - I think another important thing is the scale of the amount of energy we use is so enormous. - Yeah. - That if all of a sudden you said, let's meet a significant fraction. 50% of our electricity from wind. All of a sudden, you're talking about using a lot of land area. There are even, you know, potentially some meteorological changes local changes in winds and so forth or changes in sensitive habitat. So-- - 'Cause you're grabbin' that wind-- - Well you're grabbing that wind and you're extracting energy from it. - Yeah. - On a small scale, that might have no impact whatsoever but anything that you do on the scale of our e