Volts – Détails, épisodes et analyse

There has been an epic battle over the past 20 years between two types of lithium-ion batteries: nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) and lithium iron phosphate (LFP). While NMC still boasts better energy density, LFP is making a major comeback thanks to its safer, more accessible materials and improving performance. However, China still dominates the LFP supply chain. In this episode, CEO Vivas Kumar of startup Mitra Chem weighs in on why America needs domestic production of LFP materials.

The Environmental Voter Project has a unique approach: rather than convincing people to care about climate change, it identifies people who already do, but don't consistently vote, and works to get them to the polls. In this episode, EVP founder Nathaniel Stinnett discusses how to find these voters, keep them engaged, and measure their impact.

In this episode, Beverly Craig of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center discusses what passive house building principles entail, the benefits they generate for building occupants and the grid, and what it would take to persuade more US builders and policymakers to adopt them.

In this episode, Emily Morris of startup Emrgy discusses the promise of small-scale hydropower and the opportunities it could provide for both power infrastructure and water management.

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David Roberts

Hello Volts listeners! I thought I would start this episode with what I suppose is a disclaimer of sorts. I suspect most of you already understand what I’m about to say, but I think it’s worthwhile being clear.

Every so often on this show, like today, I interview a representative from a particular company, often a startup operating in a dynamic, emerging market. It should go without saying that my choice of an interviewee does not amount to an endorsement of their company, a prediction of its future success, or, God forbid, investment advice. If you are coming to me for investment advice, you have serious problems. I make no predictions, provide no warranties.

The fact is, in dynamic emerging markets, failure is the norm, not the exception. My entire career is littered with the corpses of startups that I thought had clever, promising products — many of whom I interviewed and enthused about! Business is hard. In most of these markets, a few big winners will emerge, but it will take time, and in the process most promising startups will die. Such is the creative destruction of capitalism. I'm not dumb enough to try to predict any of it.

More broadly, I am not a business reporter. I do not have much interest in funding rounds, the new VP, or the latest earnings report. (Please, PR people, quit pitching me business stories.) I do not know or particularly care exactly which companies will end up on top. I am interested in clever ideas and innovations and the smart, driven individuals trying to drag them into the real world. I am interested in people trying to solve problems, not business as such.

Anyway, enough about that.

Today I bring you one of those clever ideas, in the form of a company called Emrgy, which plops small hydropower generators down into canals.

Now I can hear you saying, Dave, plopping generators into canals does not seem all that clever or exciting, but there’s a lot more to the idea than appears at first blush. For one thing, there are lots more canals than you probably think there are, and they are a lot closer to electrical loads than you think.

So I’m geeked to talk to Emily Morris, founder and CEO of Emrgy, about the promise of small-scale hydropower, the economics of distributed energy, the ways that small-scale hydro can replicate the modularity and scalability of solar PV, and ways that smart power infrastructure can help enable smarter water management.

Alright, then, with no further ado, Emily Morris of Emrgy. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Emily Morris

Thank you for having me. It's exciting to be here.

David Roberts

You know, I did a pod a couple of weeks ago about hydro and sort of the state of hydro in the world these days. And one of the things we sort of touched on briefly in that pod is kind of small-scale, distributed hydro, but we didn't have time to really get into it. And I'm really fascinated by that subject in general. So it was fortuitous a mere week or two later to sort of run across you and your company and what you're doing. Your sort of model answers a lot of the questions I had about small-scale hydro.

Some of the problems I saw in small-scale hydro, just because it just seems to me so at once small, but also kind of bespoke and fiddly. And your model sort of squarely gets at that. So anyway, all of which is just to say I'm excited to talk to you about a model of small-scale hydro that makes sense to me and some of the ins and outs of it.

Emily Morris

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to tell you more about our model. And I love that you called small-scale hydro bespoke because I was talking with one of the larger IOUs a few weeks back and they referred to hydro as artisanal energy. And I got such a kick out of that because it is in so many ways, hydro can often be a homeowner's pet project that has a ranch or something like that. And bringing hydro into a world in which solar panels are taking over distributed generation and utility scale, and doing it in such a standardized, modular, repeatable format, bringing that architecture into water, is something that hasn't yet really been done successfully. And what we're trying to do here at Emrgy.

David Roberts

it is kind of like a lot of this echoes solar. It's sort of an attempt to sort of replicate a lot of what's going on with solar. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start the business model is, to put it as simply as possible, is you make generators and you plop them down into canals. So let's start then with canals, because I suspect I am not alone in saying that I've gone almost all my life without thinking twice about canals. I know almost nothing about them. Like, what are they? Where are they? How many are there?

This water infrastructure kind of surrounds us is almost invisible. So just talk about canals a little bit. What are they used for and where are they and how many are there? What's the sort of potential out there?

Emily Morris

Yes, canals are almost invisible, but my goal is that after this podcast, you'll never look at a canal the same way you'll look at it, as a source of energy. That, man, we should be tapping that energy and using it. Canals are our main target market. They're really our only target market right now. We get asked all the time, well, couldn't you do this in a river? And couldn't you do this in tides? And the answer is yes. If you're focused on the engineering but as a commercial founder at Emrgy, I'm focused on the market and where can we install projects today that can be immediately delivering economic benefit and environmental benefit.

And so canals are that market. A canal is an open channel of water conveyance that's moving water from one place to another for a specific purpose. That purpose might be because it's raw water that's being delivered into the city to be treated for drinking water. It could be that it's an agricultural channel taking water from a river out to farmland. It could be an industrial flow of water that's coming from a large brewery or a large factory and delivering that into either a river or another piece of water conveyance. But canals are seemingly invisible. I'll be honest, when I started Emrgy, I thought that the technology would first thrive in a water treatment environment.

There's 30,000 water treatment plants in the US. And many tens of thousands all around the world. And that water is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. And man, the ability to take something modular that looks and feels like solar in terms of its ability to seamlessly integrate into the surrounding infrastructure, but deliver power in a baseload format was something that immediately, I thought, water treatment. Yet when I was really early in my entrepreneurial journey, we did our first pilot at the city of atlanta's largest water treatment plant. And I went out to Los Angeles and gave a white paper on it at LADWP.

And when I was there, the city of Denver had two representatives there. And they came up to me after my presentation, and they said, we think you're thinking about this all wrong. You got to come to denver and see what we've got in terms of water infrastructure. And when I went out to Denver that next couple of weeks, I spent three days touring probably 500 or 600 miles all around the Denver metro area of canals that are transporting water. You may not know that the water you drink in denver actually comes from the other side of the continental divide, and they bring it into the city of denver through a series of canals and storage reservoirs that allow for the appropriate amount of treated and stored water for the city.

And so when I was there, I thought about, okay, as a business model, being able to deliver one to ten of these modules at 30,000 water treatment plants sounds like I need a big sales force. And then looking at the Denver infrastructure and seeing hundreds of miles of uniform canal that's transporting water where thousands or tens of thousands of these generators could be deployed with one partner just made a ton of sense. And so then I started peeling back the curtain on that.

David Roberts

You say one partner. So are most of these two of the sort of features of canals? That came as somewhat of a surprise to me, and I'm sure you're familiar with this response is, first, when I thought of canals, the first thing I thought of was agriculture. I assumed they were mostly out in farmland. But what you have discovered is that they are laced throughout urban infrastructure, they are in cities.

Emily Morris

Oh, absolutely. It's both. It's certainly both. Our project we have a project with the city of Denver that overlooks the Denver skyline right there near the city. And if you overlay a map of Phoenix roadways with map of Phoenix waterways, you can see two highly sophisticated transport systems all throughout the metropolitan area. Not just Phoenix, think of Houston 22 canals and bayou's flow all throughout the urban metro area that are both a source of water or even an attraction for the city, but also have an inherent energy, sometimes too much energy during hurricane season and whatnot to be able to harvest and hopefully deliver value from as well.

David Roberts

Yeah, and so the other feature is they're not privately owned for the most part. Most of these canals are operated by a city municipal water district.

Is that sort of the standard?

Emily Morris

Yeah, that's correct. Typically there is an organization that manages the water infrastructure, the canal infrastructure. It is often public. It can be a political subdivision, like a municipality or a local not for profit organization or co-op. It also can be a private canal company, although those typically remain nonprofits. They're typically a public service for the good of the recipients of the water.

David Roberts

But the point is, you are not having to track down a bunch of individual owners of individual canals. You can get at a bunch of canals through one partner.

Emily Morris

That's absolutely the case. And it's all public record the managers of water infrastructure and their contact information. You're not going and knocking on someone's home asking if you can put something in the backyard or something like that. This is an operated and often, from their contractual perspective, they're typically buying water from an entity and selling water to a series of entities, buying water from the US Government and selling it to farmers, something like that. And so the reporting aspects about that water that flows through, they tend to be detailed. They tend to be long running. And so as you think about developing a resource assessment of how much energy is inherent in that water that you can produce electricity from, it's not necessarily like needing to go build a MET station and understand exactly what resources there.

They're typically well organized, well operated, and well documented.

David Roberts

A well characterized resource.

Emily Morris

Absolutely.

David Roberts

Okay, so you go to these canals. You make a deal with the owners of these canals, and then you go plop down energy generators into the canals. Let's talk about the generators, try to give the listeners kind of a sense of how big one of these things is and kind of what it looks like. What are you plopping down into the canal?

Emily Morris

In terms of physical size. Our generators are an eight foot cube, and they have their own precast concrete structure that holds them together. So you can think of sort of half of a precast concrete culvert, if you are familiar with the construction world, that is an eight foot cube. We do that strategically, they are easy to lift and handle.

They're easy to transport by trucking or other means. You can even containerize them if you need to. And we place those into the channels without doing any construction, any modification, any impounding of the channels, which is a really important part of the canals, because, as I mentioned before, that water is going to a destination for a purpose. And so going in and saying, yeah, we're just going to build a dam right here in the middle of your canal doesn't seem to resonate so well. And so being able to bring something in that's fully self supported can be placed into the channel and held there by its own weight.

And it only weighs about seven tons, so it's not a super heavy lift, but it's hydrostatically, designed to not shift or slide or overturn once the water hits it. And inside of that culvert or the concrete structure, there is a vertical axis turbine that looks probably very similar to vertical axis wind turbines that many of the listeners will be familiar with. And so they take advantage of the kinetic energy in the flow using the swept area of the turbine and the speed of the water, and generate torque and speed around the shaft up to the power takeoff and the generator. And so physically, they're eight foot cubes.

But from a power perspective, our smallest turbine that we sell is a 5 kilowatt turbine. And it's the same physical footprint that the 8 by 8 cube, but it can generate mechanically and electrically up to 25 kilowatts per turbine based on the depth and the speed of the water.

David Roberts

I was going to ask whether the sizes vary. So the generator, the eight foot cube is standard. All the generators come in these eight foot cubes, but the generators themselves vary in size based on the water flow.

Emily Morris

Yeah, that's exactly right. We do have a deeper water platform that goes up to about 18ft of water, and then we're working on an even deeper platform in conjunction with the DOE. But right now, our main platform is the eight foot cube. And the beauty of water is that the power is exponential by the speed of the water. And so we can place a turbine in and it can generate 5 kilowatts at say a shallower, slower speed. Or that very same equipment can put out five times the power output if placed in a different location. And so as we think about coming down the cost curve, growing to scale, we can immediately find higher density resources that make sense today, even as a young company that hasn't quite gotten fully to the quantities that other adjacent industries like solar and wind have.

David Roberts

Right. So I have a bunch of questions about that. But just this question about size brings up the question about canal size. If you have a standard sized module, I'm assuming that canals themselves are relatively standardized in size. With this eight foot cube, can you confidently say, we can go to more or less any canal and it'll work? Or do canals also vary?

Emily Morris

Canals vary, but not substantially. There are standard sizes, and our eight foot cube does cover a wide envelope of canals in the US. And abroad. We do see, though, that this is the array planning and array specification, which is how we deploy these. We never deploy them as single turbines, but really as arrays, just like solar and wind, that with the arrays. It's a very similar planning method to solar is you look at your total square footage across the canal, you look at the gradient of fall along the canal, and you plan out the optimized number of turbine modules that make sense for that canal.

So sometimes if you have a canal that's 18 feet wide, rather than build two 9 foot cubes, all of a sudden, you do two 8 foot cubes, right. And you standardize and you optimize for cost even if you're not squeezing every single ounce of power out of that flow. And I think that's one big thing that differentiates energy and distributed hydro from traditional sort of small-scale hydro is we're optimizing for cost and scale rather than for utmost efficiency, which is typically where hydro really focuses.

David Roberts

Right. And Volts listeners are very well educated on the fact that the modularity, the small-scale and modularity of solar panels are a huge piece of why they have proven so adaptable and grown so fast. Like the advantages you get from standardization and modularity vastly outweigh whatever sort of marginal gains you could get on either side in a particular canal.

Emily Morris

Absolutely. We're big believers in that, our smallest module is an order of magnitude larger than a solar module. But you should think of it absolutely in that same way. We do have people, especially the folks that are really focused in hydro, they say to us, "Oh, your modules are so small, 5 kilowatts or 25 kilowatts, that's so small." And I say to them, "No one ever goes to the solar field and say, 'Hey, your panels are so small.'" It's a totally different mindset that you have to be thinking of the module as the panel, as the individual generator that ultimately goes into the array. And yes, our arrays will likely continue to be on the distribution scale rather than on the utility scale or the large transmission scale. But no question the aggregation of modules is how power grows, this generation of renewables.

David Roberts

Well, let's try to get a sense of just how big they are power wise. So, 5 kilowatts to 25 kilowatts, what's a typical array, and then what's the output of a typical array, and then maybe just to help the listeners kind of get their head around it, how does that sort of compare to an array of solar panels? Like, if I'm the owner of a canal or a network of canals, and I'm trying to decide, do I want to put a bunch of these in there or do I want to say cover the canals with solar panels? What's the scale comparison there?

Emily Morris

Well, if you're asking me which one you should do, I would absolutely say both. The answer is both. One does not preclude the other, because this is a great real estate segment to be able to convert to renewables of all types. But when you think about our systems at 25 module, let's say that's 40 turbines to be a megawatt. And some canals are on the smaller side that we look at maybe enough for two or three modules across, some of them maybe ten modules across, just depending on the width of the canal. And so you could place 40 modules as close as, say, half a mile away across those four rows of ten, or it could be spread a much longer distance, it could be a mile or 2 miles for that.

And really we're optimizing for spacing. Obviously, you don't want to run cable to the point of interconnect any further than you have to. We're optimizing for hydraulics. You want the energy to recover after being taken out by our turbines as it flows downhill. And then ultimately, we want to co-locate these with the offtake and whether that's directly into the grid or behind the meter with a particular industrial or municipal client. Those are typically how we think about this. But when you think about covering a canal in solar panels, I don't have the specific statistics on how many linear feet equates to a megawatt or things like that, necessarily, but you're going to see, most importantly, that you need three times the power output or potentially more to overcome the differences in capacity factors. So with our system, they're typically operating 24 hours a day.

David Roberts

So in these canals that water flows through, water is constantly going through there 24 hours a day. I would think some of it at least would be sort of like scheduled or go in one direction and then another direction. Are they all steady 24 hours flows?

Emily Morris

Not everything is consistent, of course, but I would say that in the water space, the capacity factor is determined by seasonality and or maintenance schedules, but less by intermittency. It's actually pretty bad for a canal to be turned on, turned off, turned on, turned off, because you end up having other maintenance challenges, things that break issues in the canal.

David Roberts

So they want to run them?

Emily Morris

They want to run them continuously. Yes. And so depending on what the water is being used for, whether it's a certain area of cropland and therefore there's a seasonality to the flow that's fairly common, or if it's municipal, it may be a year round flow. Or depending on your region in the arid Southwest, you'll see perennial flows a lot more frequently than you will, let's say in Montana or Idaho, where there's obviously quite harsh winters.

And so in our case, we target canals that can be the most predictable in their flow and the most continuous. Yet if you have a site that is only running six months out of the year, getting to that 40% to 50% capacity factor because let's say it runs constantly through that six months of the year can still lead to an incredibly exciting impactful project overall with good returns, even though it's not on every day. Right? It's a different mindset.

David Roberts

Right.

Emily Morris

I have definitely had water districts say. "Well, what do I do in November, December, January if we're not flowing water?" And I said, "You may not think about it, but every night when you go to sleep, your solar panels also aren't working." It's just a different mindset of something not working every day for 90 days rather than not producing every night. And so doing that educational piece to where projects in terms of their output and their economic value can be highly competitive even at the shorter seasons with canals.

David Roberts

Right. So the basic point here is that while these generators may not crank out as much power as a solar panel while they're generating, they are generating much more often. They're generating around the clock. And so you have to have kind of three times the power output from a solar panel to end up matching the total power output.

Emily Morris

That's right.

David Roberts

They have the advantage of being base-loady, basically.

Emily Morris

Exactly. That's typically what we see is that for canals that are running the majority of the time, you'll ultimately need if you want the equivalent amount of annual energy, you'll need a power capacity on your solar that would be about three times larger than what you would need on the hydro side.

David Roberts

Interesting. Okay, so you go to a water district, you say, "Hey, we want to generate some power from your canals." You do an analysis of the sort of optimal kind of spacing and placing and then what, a truck comes in or a crane comes in and just sort of like drops these things one by one in the canal. It sounds like installation would be pretty straightforward and pretty low footprint, is that true?

Emily Morris

That's absolutely true. It sounds too simple to say in some ways, but yet simply lifting the turbines and placing them into the channel, making sure that they're level, making sure they're not sitting on top of debris, or boulders or something like that, that may have fallen in the canal is important. But placing them in the canal correctly is the most important aspect of the installation. That's unique to Emrgy.

David Roberts

So they're not connected in any way it's just the weight of the thing holding it in place. It's not literally not connected to anything. There's no screwing or attaching or bracketing.

Emily Morris

That's correct. There is nothing that is physically attaching it to the canal.

David Roberts

So easy to take out.

Emily Morris

Owners love this. Yes. Because they can take it out if they needed to ...

David Roberts

Or move it

Emily Morris

... often. Because these are operated channels they often will, once every five years or on some periodic schedule, drive up and down the canal or drive a bulldozer down and make sure that all the debris is out or something like that. So they love the flexibility. We tend to see that canal owners like the flexibility of being able to take them out. Now onshore each turbine, or each cross section, I should say, has a power conversion system that has both the control system as well as the power conditioning. And that is something we deliver as well. And it sits on a concrete pad on the side of the channel. But then as you connect those together electrically and then connect them to the grid, there's no innovation from Emrgy there. It's just optimization based on the appropriate electrical balance of system design.

And so as we think about partnerships with other types of developers, other renewable developers, there isn't a special skill set that installers would need to have to be able to install our system. The balance of system is essentially exactly the same as distributed solar. And all you would need to do is be able to place the turbines in the canals correctly.

David Roberts

Interesting. Yeah, I like simple and dumb. That's resilient and that's what can spread fast.

Emily Morris

And maybe I'll just mention that when I first started this business, I thought it was too simple. I assumed that somebody had already done this before, that it seemed pretty obvious. And as I looked deeper into it, I learned really the two things that I believe have held this space back that now are no longer barriers. One of them is regulatory. And that gets a little bit back to why we focus on canals in general, is that up until 2015, I believe it was all water in the US was permitted for power in the same way. So to place our system in a canal would have been permitted and regulated the same way it would in a river. And in 2015, FERC enacted the qualifying conduit exemption which stated that electric projects within water conduits or conveyance systems were exempt from FERC licensing up to 40 megawatts per project.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Emily Morris

And so now our projects are fully exempt from FERC licensing. And it's a 30-day notice of intent to FERC requesting that exemption, which is lightning fast compared to other projects.

David Roberts

Yes. So you're not dealing with permitting issues, NIMBY issues, all the sort of like land issues, all the stuff that's bedevilling wind and solar right now you're sort of doing an end run around that stuff.

Emily Morris

We'd like to think so. I mean, projects are always controversial to some extent, and every neighbor may have an idea of what they'd like to see in the canals. But in terms of general regulatory approvals and project buy in, we tend to see this being much lower barriers than many of the other types of land based systems. The other thing that was a major barrier that has since been lifted is the growing ability to use solar designed or solar inspired smart inverters for technologies and generators other than solar.

David Roberts

Let's talk about that first. Maybe, I don't want to assume first, maybe just tell listeners what does an inverter do and what does it mean for it to be smart? And maybe tell us about how those were developed in solar.

Emily Morris

Sure. So the generation of the power from the water or from the sun typically has been done over many decades and even centuries in terms of hydro, very successfully. The physics of getting energy out of a resource is something that is fairly straightforward. Now, the modern scalability of being able to replicate that in thousands of locations all around the world, conveniently into our modern electricity grid, is something that I would say has been hugely influenced through the development, industrialization and scalability of the smart inverter. And what I mean by that is actually readying the power, conditioning the power, making it grid compliant and ready for delivery into the grid, has received billions of dollars of industrial development in the solar industry to take it down in size and form factor as well as in efficiency.

And if that was not available to us, and Emrgy had to build out an industry much like solar to drive industrial development of power conversion and power delivery, to be able to install it globally, we would be on a 20- to 30-year timeline. We would need billions of dollars and or it would just be really slow. If we had to do all custom power equipment, then every utility would have to come in and do a full engineering review of what we were building, whether it would cause problems to the grid. And what we have been able to take amazing advantage of is the ability to utilize a smart inverter that was originally designed for solar and largely used in solar, and be able to use that to control our hydro-generator without invalidating its utility certifications.

You have to know quite a bit about power systems, perhaps, to know that controlling the power curve in a hydro-turbine and controlling the power curve in a solar panel is very different, a lot trickier than one might think. And being able to manage the torque and speed, to be able to manage and optimize a power point along the curve is tricky when you're trying to use a device that was made for a different industry. And so one of the biggest areas of Emrgy's technology, development and innovation is not necessarily in the. Physics in the water of how we're getting energy out of the water.

It's really how are we delivering that electricity now to the grid in the most cost effective, high efficiency and streamlined way. And being able to use the same inverters that the solar industry is using helps put us on a much closer playing field to be able to deploy these projects in an apples to apples way. And even, as you mentioned, do you do solar or hydro and canals? It's great to do both and potentially even put them right into the same inverter. And that's the beauty of where distributed generation, I believe, is going, is to a flexible environment where you can have that base load, have your peaking load, have your energy storage and share as much of the cost along the system as you can.

David Roberts

So you can just use smart inverters that are designed for solar off the shelf. There's no engineering or tweaking or fiddling you have to do.

Emily Morris

So we're prohibited from doing a ton of tweaking inside the inverter because obviously they go through quite a level of utility compliance and we can't necessarily change that. However, what we have is a power controls unit. It's a NEMA panel that looks like a standard electrical panel that sits right next to the inverter and that contains all of our fairly sophisticated controls and mechanisms to allow us to control our system and have it communicate with the solar inverter in a language that the solar inverter understands most of our innovation. And IP in that area sits in that power controls unit rather than in the inverter itself.

David Roberts

Got it. And so what do we mean when we say smart inverter? I've always kind of wondered, do people just say that because it's like sophisticated? Or is there a clear distinction between a dumb inverter and a smart inverter?

Emily Morris

I'm probably not best equipped to handle that question, but I can say that from our perspective, using the inverters that we do use enables us to have both the smart capabilities as it relates to grid following, ensuring the grid islanding or other types of issues are matched. But also for us, having the data aspect of what's collected in that inverter and the amount of information that we can pull off of it is very helpful for us. I mean, we collect data in a number of ways and using the solar inverter or the smart inverter helps us to triangulate and calibrate that data to ensure its accuracy. So, for example, the inverter will give us power output, real time data in that regard, while we also have sensors off board the system in the water that reads flow information, speed information.

And so we know if there's a change in power, is that related to a change in flow and we can calibrate that via the sensors, or is it related to an issue in the system? And using both the data off the inverter as well as off of our other data collection systems, helps us to diagnose and monitor device health as well as to especially as we continue to innovate, predict and alert water infrastructure owners of decisions they may need to make.

David Roberts

The obvious service you're providing to a water district is we're going to give you some power, some economical power. But I'm wondering about, if you're collecting so much information about water flow, is that information helpful to the canal owners? In other words, are you able to improve the actual operation of the water infrastructure itself?

Emily Morris

We are, and I believe that this will continue to evolve as the industry continues to evolve as well. But right now the water management, especially out in the field, is managed by an aging population. I think the last figure I saw that the average what they call a ditch tender or ditch rider, someone that is monitoring the health of the water conveyance system, the average age of that title is 56 years old.

David Roberts

A familiar story in so many of these areas.

Emily Morris

Yeah. So recruiting young talent, recruiting the right type of personnel is tough and so being able to provide data that can integrate back into a SCADA system or otherwise be able to inform those that are not in the field things that may be happening in the canal is definitely valuable. Now over time as well. The canals have been operated for mainly one purpose for many decades now, which is to deliver water and earn revenues off of delivering that water. They're selling the water now as they will be running water and earning revenues from generating power along the way.

Working with water districts to optimize their irrigation schedules or their deliveries, to be able to take advantage ...

David Roberts

So they could change the way they do things to optimize power delivery too?

Emily Morris

Yes, I mean, this is one of the very few generation types, particularly on the distribution grid, that is a controllable feedstock. And so to the extent that a water district can generate double the revenue by flowing water during specific times, there are incentives to do so.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Emily Morris

And we can provide those. And so aligning incentives between the water district Emrgy and the farmers that they serve to be able to really bring a powerful force of renewable energy onto the grid at the right times of day or the right times of year is something that we believe distributed hydro has a unique ability to do.

David Roberts

So I'm guessing that this is in early days, this idea of a water district sort of co-optimizing water usage and power output. I would guess that there's a lot of running room there to find efficiencies and find better ways of doing things.

Emily Morris

That's right there is it's early days. I mean, we are working one of our municipal clients, the canal that we're installed within, its only job is to manage water levels between two reservoirs. So there is a ton of operational flexibility within that section and being able to work with them on optimization of the water flows to drive power is something very straightforward. Now, there are other districts that have been doing things the same way for 50 years. And perhaps they're going to be more of the districts where you have to put the incentive out there first, let them start to see how it changes their income with a change in flow and guide them on that, and we'll see it over time.

But this is one thing that we talk about a lot at Emrgy, is how to adequately predict future behaviors with water as a function of how this partnership can work together and provide them both the data, the revenues and other services that are helpful.

David Roberts

You could even imagine water districts with an array of these turbines installed maybe playing a role in demand response type things. In other words, they might have the ability to sort of turn it up and down on demand as a source of value.

Emily Morris

Absolutely, and they can do it both on the water side as well as somewhat on the power side as well. If you're familiar with the energy water nexus, the concept that it takes quite a bit of electricity to move water, move and treat water, a lot of these water districts are huge electricity consumers. And so one thing we often talk about with districts is what are their highest consumers of electricity? Is it a particular groundwater well? Is it a particular pumping plant? Is it a particular water treatment facility? How can we both utilize the water to drive demand response and to drive smart operation of water and therefore power?

As well as should we cluster these systems around some of those highest consumers even in some ways behind the meter or along with energy storage to where they're able to keep that demand down into a whole different echelon from what they've been operating at?

David Roberts

Right. Well, this raises the question of in your installations so far, who's buying this power? Who's the modal kind of consumer? Is it the water districts themselves? I mean, they're big electricity consumers. You can see this as kind of a self contained loop kind of thing where they're sort of generating the power that they're using or are you selling it into the grid? Are you selling it to particular off takers or is there a standard model yet?

Emily Morris

There's not a standard model yet. I would say the most common models are power purchase agreements directly with the water district so buying power from us rather than from the grid. And in many cases, if we're in states that have advantageous net metering, which I know are becoming fewer and fewer each year, but able to use that type of arrangement where essentially they're receiving a bill credit and then remitting those savings onto Emrgy

David Roberts

And net metering works the same here as it does for solar panels?

Emily Morris

Yeah, exactly the same. Exactly the same. Down to the same form you fill out from the utility, all the same. And then there are certain states that have advantageous hydro avoided cost contracts where we can just pull directly on a standard offer from the IOU in the area that can allow for a bit of a streamlined contract negotiation. Then when you're meeting with the district, you're only talking about how much we're going to be paying the district to host the system and share those revenues with the IOU rather than contracting with them on power purchase directly.

David Roberts

Right. A little easier for them. And that sort of raised my next question, which is, is the business model that you go to a water district and sell it these turbines and then it operates these turbines, or is this a power as a service type of arrangement where you own the turbines and operate them and just sell the power to the districts?

Emily Morris

Yeah, Emrgy has always been organized with a goal toward power as a service. We're currently doing that, although in our first reference projects, we needed to sell the turbines just to get equipment out there, get people familiar with it, which we were successful in doing. Now we're focused primarily on a power as a service model. Although water does tend to be an industry with a high value on ownership. And so many of the districts we work with, they're either interested in being a part owner, they're interested in a future buyout option or transfer of ownership option, just because it's quite common that the manager of the water district grew up at the water district, had maybe a father or grandfather that worked there.

And so they focus on generational outcomes. They want to see long lasting systems. They don't want to see us come in, plop something in and then blaze off. They want to know that we're going to be there for the long haul, which with water power that is one of the other benefits is that this is an electromechanical system that if properly maintained, will last for many decades. It doesn't have that inherent chemical degradation.

David Roberts

Right, solar panels are I think the official is 20 years, or in practice they last a little longer than but I think they're like generally certified for 20 years of operation. What's one of your turbines? Is there a specific fixed time period that you guarantee or how long will these last?

Emily Morris

Yeah, well, we market 30 years. We seek out 30-year contracting arrangements on both site hosting and power production and sales. But truly there's nothing that drives that 30 years aside from that's what our clients are used to seeing from solar or wind or other types. For us, if these systems continue to be maintained, well, we do do an overhaul every 15 years and make sure that all the equipment is well maintained. But ultimately I was just in Idaho, a few weeks ago and there was a hydro-plant there that had similar materials, similar bearings, similar turbine blades, generators.

It was 113 years old. And I won't live long enough to know if one of our turbines can last that long, but there isn't anything inherent of the system that just breaks down and ultimately causes it not to function.

David Roberts

Right. So another question is which these days I find myself asking every guest, which is what is IRA doing for you? Is the Inflation Reduction Act helping you in some specific way either in manufacturing these things and by the way, they're manufactured here in the US?

Emily Morris

They are.

David Roberts

So that's domestic content, what's your relationship with the IRA?

Emily Morris

While we are still early in how the IRA is being implemented and transacted against within our projects, the understanding of how the IRA will provide advantage to the projects is massive for us. You're spot on. Our systems qualify for both the production tax credit and the investment tax credit. And by both, I mean either we can use either one. We meet the requirements for the domestic content requirement, and many of our projects that we're seeking are in energy communities as well.

David Roberts

Oh, right.

Emily Morris

And so the opportunity for quite a substantial tax benefit as a function of these projects. And I'll say, in addition, some of the other major IRA programs or BIL programs that funded both the Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, OCED, or the USDA's Rural Energy for America program, the REAP program, are also incredibly advantageous to our projects. A substantial amount of our project pipeline right now is in USDA REAP eligible census tracts, which means that they qualify for either loan guarantees, which provides for commercial lenders to be able to offer lower interest lending to the project, or grant programs for renewable energy systems up to a million dollars each. And so these can provide, especially given that these are not exclusive, so we can bring in both REAP loan guarantees as well as the IRA tax benefits into the same project, making them incredibly attractive even in an earlier stage of a company where we haven't yet optimized cost and whatnot.

David Roberts

Interesting, so you're already in a position where you can go to a water district and offer them a pretty sweet deal, very low upfront costs, a new revenue stream, fairly minimal maintenance. A couple of final questions. First off, you talk about sort of scale and reducing costs. These are pretty simple, as I said before, as one of the benefits. Sort of simple. You have a concrete bracket, there's a vertical turbine, there's some wires and some power control stuff. Where is the room here for technological advancement or is there room for a lot of tech advancement or are you going to get more cost reductions out of scale?

Or are you, do you think, pretty close already to this being as cheap as it can get?

Emily Morris

Yeah, I mean, in terms of tech advancement. I often describe our systems as sort of like when you drive past a wind farm and you can just tell that it was built in wind 1.0 all the turbines are sort of facing the same direction and they're sort of spaced in a finite manner. And then you drive by a newer wind facility and you can tell they're taking advantage of all of the wake of all the different turbines and they're all oriented differently and they're spaced differently. I call our system still a bit of like that 1.0 feel right?

We're designing systems and optimizing them for the canals, but there's things that we just can't simulate in any fluid dynamic software until we've got hundreds or thousands of these turbines out there operating.

David Roberts

So learning some learning by doing here.

Emily Morris

Oh, absolutely. I mean, there are times we've seen in practice where the turbines are all generating and then let's say the water district starts to they lower their flow and the turbines are no longer fully submerged in the water. And we found that if you ease off of one of the turbines in terms of its electrical loading and it starts to spin faster in freewheel, then it can ultimately push water levels up and the turbines upstream push into their optimal generating capacity. And that gets a little technical. Maybe folks listening want to call me a nerd out about that sometime, I'd love to ...

David Roberts

About hydraulics.

Emily Morris

But nonetheless, we are definitely at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding all the different wake effects and how to create an array that is more than the sum of its parts. So I'd say that's a big area for tech advancement. We are currently funded by ARPA-E in advancing that what we call the term we use is called dynamic tuning, tuning the systems as things dynamically change around them. Another area for advancement is certainly around hybrids and micro grids. So you made the comment earlier about solar or this and we really believe that to really become carbon free at the distribution level, it's going to be many different technologies, not one silver bullet.

And so there's no reason why you shouldn't combine either floating solar or ground mounted or spanning solar together with our system, share as much of the balance of system as possible, drive LCOE down and have a hybrid. Adding in energy storage or even adding in renewable fuels production is absolutely something that you could use our system with. And we're actually, we're funded with DOE on another one of these projects looking at micro-grids for resiliency, because a lot of times that resiliency piece in a micro-grid is diesel, right? When all else fails, you have your diesel.

And so how can we create something where hydro can be that resiliency piece as something that we're currently working on as well for tech advancement?

David Roberts

Interesting.

Emily Morris

And I think you'll see a lot of we see Emrgy as sort of the base platform, the distributed hydro as the base platform. But ultimately we're interested in pursuing how water infrastructure, which spans, as we already talked about, both rural and urban environments, can ultimately become a key facilitator of the energy transition, not just something that's invisible.

David Roberts

Would you Emrgy get into designing and installing hybrid systems or would this be like a partnership with a solar company? Or is it too early to know?

Emily Morris

We already are into designing and specifying hybrid systems and really more so on creating, for lack of a better term, sort of the universal plug right, where you could plug our system and solar and other things into our overall power architecture. And so we're not necessarily out there innovating on the solar side or on the energy storage side, but creating a way that whether it's with a codevelopment partnership or whether it's something that we can source from a manufacturer, the same way that other developers do, with a very flexible and universal application for combining generation and storage types.

David Roberts

Yeah, because if there are efficiencies available in optimizing one of your systems, I can just imagine once you get into optimizing systems that are small hydro turbines and solar panels and batteries, the more pieces you have, the more sort of room for optimization and efficiency you have, and the more sort of runway there is to bring down costs for the total system.

Emily Morris

And the more controllability you can add, then the more ultimately this becomes meaningful. At the distribution scale, I think we need more controllability and dispatchability at the distributed scale and providing that baseload resource is one of the key pieces to getting there. And so we don't claim to be experts in microgrid controls or anything like that and definitely seek partnerships in that regard. But I definitely see this as an important piece to the puzzle in how we get to be a more resilient set of carbon-free communities.

David Roberts

Maybe just say a word or two about why you think, because there's a long running argument in the clean energy world where you see this, especially in solar, where people say, well, the industrial size, utility scale solar, you get cheaper per kilowatt hour output, which I don't think is controversial. Like if you're just measuring on a per kilowatt hour basis, you're going to get cheaper power out of giant fields of solar than by scattered multiple installations. So what do you see as kind of the advantage of doing all this work in a distributed way rather than just say, like adding some big new dam or some big turbine to some big river somewhere? What do you see as sort of the advantages of power generation being distributed through urban and rural areas in water infrastructure like this?

Emily Morris

I wouldn't call myself an expert on the math, but while I think you're right that at the field the cost per kilowatt hour of a large solar farm is less. Although I don't know that that math holds. If it's the cost of that kilowatt hour to your home, and if you calculated the per kilowatt hour cost to your home for utility or transmission level solar versus local distributed energy, whether that's solar or Emrgy or anything else, I think the number is probably a lot closer and maybe surprising. I'm sure people have done the math. I personally don't know it, but I believe that as we start looking and staring down the barrel, truly, of what it's going to cost our grid, our transmission grid, to maintain modernization and resiliency, if all we do is keep building large utility scale solar farms, the price of delivery to the house is no question going to become higher and higher.

And if we can successfully generate local energy, then it should be lower cost because you're not going to have those massive grid upgrades. It should be more resilient so that if there's a wildfire halfway across the state, it doesn't affect you.

David Roberts

The micro-gridding and ability to island is huge, especially if you imagine it sort of multiplied out to every place with a series of canals, which is more or less every city of any size.

Emily Morris

No question. And so we're big believers in the distributed scale, but again, large hydro and large solar provides such a huge benefit. I think we often take strong stances without realizing all the benefits we enjoy from all the various types of assets that are on the grid. And so I think there's a need for all of it. But I absolutely think that there is a better way to becoming net zero than just covering all of our remote fields in solar and all the batteries that are needed to get there. So being able to bring that more locally in a more continuous format is one solution of, I think, all the many that we'll need to truly become net zero.

David Roberts

So, final question is a question that, as you say, you get asked a lot. Do you have an eye on other kinds of distributed water infrastructure or is this like a canal play more or less exclusively? Or are there other like, I didn't even really know about canals, so are there other hidden water infrastructure that I don't know about hiding around? Or can you imagine something this simple and modular and low footprint working in natural water features, streams or rivers or something? What's the sort of next step beyond this?

Emily Morris

Yeah, I mean, we get asked for all sorts of applications that would probably not be on your radar. Whether we can hang these off of oil rigs out in the Gulf, or can we take advantage of the intercoastal waterways on the barrier islands in Florida, or could we use these in tidal environments in Australia or in LNG plants in Singapore? I mean, you name it, we definitely get asked about anytime someone either is driving in their car, looks out the window and sees a flow of water, and they think, "Oh, we should be able to tap into that energy."

David Roberts

Right, there's energy in all of it.

Emily Morris

They're absolutely right from a physics perspective, but Emrgy is super focused on what we can do and bring value today. Because for me, a clean kilowatt hour generated today is far more valuable than a clean kilowatt hour that I have to plan for and engineer for and design for that can be generated in 2028. And so we're focused on what are near real term opportunities. I would say that we're coming full circle back around to some of the water treatment applications.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to ask, what if there's stuff in the water? I meant to ask this much earlier. Are most of these canals carrying clean water? And if it's not clean, if there's stuff in it, does that muck with your turbines?

Emily Morris

Certainly. If there's undesirables in the water, it's going right through our turbines. We design the turbines to avoid as much as that as possible with some fluid mechanic designs, but we have an operating mode that essentially will flush the turbines if needed. If they're stuck, if there's debris or algae or something on there, that's a very similar mechanism to what you find in a pump to flush it and get rid of any alien items. But nonetheless, I would say that in terms of water treatment, we'd be focused on effluent channels of already treated water that's returning out to a different water source.

As I mentioned before, we are doing some R&D work related to riverine and tidal resources. When I started Emrgy, I said, "Hey, we're going to pick a market that we can really master. And if we can master the product and master the base platform that can scale, amending it for a specific environment is much easier than trying to create a product in lots of different environments at the same time." So over time, perhaps you'll see us in rivers or you'll see us in tides. I don't think it'll be anytime soon. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that there's 2 million linear miles of surface water infrastructure in the world over the globe.

And so we'll be pretty busy in the canal market for a long time. And I think building a really impactful technology for this space along the way. But certainly we'd be open to collaborations or exploring other markets as those become, I believe, more accessible and developable.

David Roberts

It's exciting to me because this is sort of, as we said, modular and repeatable in the way that solar was, but at the very, very beginning of that journey that we've seen solar go through, which is scale expands, it gets cheaper. You find your ways into new niches. You find your way into applications you didn't even know you were going to get near. Just sort of like it's a self reinforcing cycle of sort of scale and cheapness and then spreading to new applications. That's been fascinating to watch in solar, and it's sort of just at the outset here in small-hydro.

Emily Morris

Absolutely. We hope we can leapfrog some of that, having learned from all the things that they've done and being able to actually adopt many of their innovations like the inverters and whatnot. But no question, this is an emerging asset class. There's still tons to learn. And as we scale, I'll like to look back on this podcast a few years from now and see how many of my predictions help.

David Roberts

Yeah, we'll have to have you back on. Alright, Emily Morris of Emrgy, thanks so much for coming on this really intriguing and exciting new area here, so I appreciate you sharing with us.

Emily Morris

This was great, thanks for having me.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

In this episode, environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck discusses the critique of emissions-focused climate policy that she laid out in her book Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.

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David Roberts

Over the course of the 2010s, the term “net-zero carbon emissions” migrated from climate science to climate modeling to climate politics. Today, it is ubiquitous in the climate world — hundreds upon hundreds of nations, cities, institutions, businesses, and individuals have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. No one ever formally decided to make net zero the common target of global climate efforts — it just happened.

The term has become so common that we barely hear it anymore, which is a shame, because there are lots of buried assumptions and value judgments in the net-zero narrative that we are, perhaps unwittingly, accepting when we adopt it.

Holly Jean Buck has a lot to say about that. An environmental social scientist who teaches at the University at Buffalo, Buck has spent years exploring the nuances and limitations of the net-zero framework, leading to a 2021 book — Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough — and more recently some new research in Nature Climate Change on residual emissions.

Buck is a perceptive commentator on the social dynamics of climate change and a sharp critic of emissions-focused climate policy, so I'm eager to talk to her about the limitations of net zero, what we know and don't know about how to get there, and what a more satisfying climate narrative might include.

So with no further ado, Holly Jean Buck. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Holly Jean Buck

Thanks so much for having me.

David Roberts

It's funny. Reading your book really brought it home to me how much net zero had kind of gone from nowhere to worming its way completely into my sort of thinking and dialogue without the middle step of me ever really thinking about it that hard or ever really sort of like exploring it. So let's start with a definition. First of all, a technical definition of what net zero means. And then maybe a little history. Like, where did this come from? It came from nowhere and became ubiquitous, it seemed like, almost overnight. So maybe a little capsule history would be helpful.

Holly Jean Buck

Well, most simply, net zero is a balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere. So we're all living in a giant accounting problem, which is what we always dreamed of, right? So how did we get there? I think that there's been a few more recent moments. The Paris agreement obviously one of them, because the Paris agreement talks about a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks. So that's kind of part of the moment that it had. The other thing was the Special Report on 1.5 degrees by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which further showed that this target is only feasible with some negative emissions.

And so I think that was another driver. But the idea of balancing sources and sinks goes back away towards the Kyoto Protocol, towards the inclusion of carbon sinks, and thinking about that sink capacity.

David Roberts

So you say, and we're going to get into the kind of the details of your critique in a minute. But the broad thing you say about net zero is that it's not working. We're not on track for it. And I guess intuitively, people might think, well, you set an ambitious target and if you don't meet that target, it's not the target's fault, right. It's not the target's reason you're failing. So what do you mean exactly when you say net zero is not working?

Holly Jean Buck

Well, I think that people might understandably say, "Hey, we've just started on this journey. It's a mid-century target, let's give it some time, right?" But I do think there's some reasons why it's not going to work. Several reasons. I mean, we have this idea of balancing sources and sinks, but we're not really doing much to specify what those sources are. Are they truly hard to abate or not? We're not pushing the scale up of carbon removal to enhance those sinks, and we don't have a way of matching these emissions and removals yet. Credibly all we have really is the voluntary carbon market.

But I think the main problem here is the frame doesn't specify whether or not we're going to phase out fossil fuels. I think that that's the biggest drawback to this frame.

David Roberts

Well, let's go through those. Let's go through those one at a time, because I think all of those have some interesting nuances and ins and outs. So when we talk about balancing sources and sinks, the way this translates, or I think is supposed to translate the idea, is a country tallies up all of the emissions that it is able to remove and then adds them all up. And then what remains? This kind of stuff, it either can't reduce or is prohibitively expensive to reduce the so called difficult to abate or hard to abate emissions. Those are called its residual emissions, the emissions that it doesn't think it can eliminate.

And the theory here is then you come in with negative emissions, carbon reduction, and you compensate for those residual emissions. So to begin with, the first problem you identify is that it's not super clear what those residual emissions are or where they're coming from, and they're not very well measured. So maybe just explain sort of like, what would you like to see people or countries doing on residual emissions and what are they doing, what's a state of knowledge and measurement of these things?

Holly Jean Buck

So the state right now is extremely fuzzy. And so I'll just back up and say that my colleagues and I looked at these long term strategies that are submitted to the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement. Basically, each country is invited to submit what its long term strategy is for reaching its climate goals. And so we've read 50 of those.

David Roberts

Goodness.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, lots of fun. And they don't have a standard definition of what these residual emissions are, although they refer to them implicitly in many cases. You can see the residual emissions on these graphs that are in these reports.

But we don't have a really clear understanding in most cases where these residual emissions are coming from, how the country is thinking about defining them, what their understanding of what's truly hard to abate is. And I emphasize with this being a challenge, because what's hard to abate changes over time because new technologies come online. So it's hard to say what's going to be hard to abate in 10 or 20 years.

David Roberts

Right.

Holly Jean Buck

But we could get a lot better at specifying this.

David Roberts

And this would just tell us basically without a good sense of residual emissions across the range of countries, we don't have a good sense of how much carbon removal we need. So is there something easy to say about how we could make this better? Is there a standardized framework that you would recommend? I mean, are any countries doing it well and precisely sort of identifying where those emissions are and explaining why and how they came to that conclusion?

Holly Jean Buck

So there's 14 countries that do break down residual emissions by sector, which is like the first, most obvious place to start.

David Roberts

Right.

Holly Jean Buck

So, number one, everybody should be doing that and understanding what assumptions there are about what sectors. And generally a lot of this is non-CO2 emissions and emissions from agriculture. There's some emissions left over from industry, too, but having clarity in that is the most obvious thing. And then I think that we do need a consistent definition as well as processes that are going to standardize our expectations around this. That's something that's going to evolve kind of, I think, from the climate advocacy community, hopefully, and a norm will evolve about what's actually hard to abate versus what's just expensive to abate

David Roberts

Kind of a small sample size. But of the 14 countries that actually do this, are there trends that emerge? Like, what do these 14 countries currently believe will be the most difficult emissions to eliminate? Is there agreement among those 14 countries?

Holly Jean Buck

Well, it's pretty consistent that agriculture is number one, followed by industry, and that in many cases, transport, at least short transport, light duty transport is considered to be fully electrified. In many cases, the power sector is imagined to be zero carbon. But I will also say that the United Kingdom is the only one that even included international aviation and shipping in its projection. So a long way to go there.

David Roberts

And this is not really our subject here. But just out of curiosity, what is the simple explanation for why agriculture is such a mystery? What are these emissions in agriculture that no one can think of a way to abate?

Holly Jean Buck

I mean, I think it varies by country, but a lot of it is nitrous oxide. A lot of it has to do with fertilizer and fertilizer production, fertilizer over application and I think obviously some of it is methane too from the land sector, from cows. So I think maybe that is considered a more challenging policy problem than industry.

David Roberts

Yeah, this is always something that's puzzled me about this entire framework and this entire debate is you look at a problem like that and you think, well, if we put our minds to it, could we solve that in the next 30 years? I mean, probably. You know what I mean? It doesn't seem versus standing up this giant carbon dioxide removal industry which is just a gargantuan undertaking. This has never been clear to me why people are so confident that carbon dioxide removal is going to be easier than just solving these allegedly difficult to solve problems over the next several decades.

I've never really understood that calculation.

Holly Jean Buck

I think it just hasn't been thought through all the way yet. But I expect in the next five years most people will realize that we need a much smaller carbon removal infrastructure than is indicated in many of the integrated assessment models.

David Roberts

Yeah, thank you for saying that. This is my intuition, but I just don't feel sort of like technically briefed or technically adept enough to make a good argument for it. But I look at this and I'm like which of these problems are going to be easier to solve? Finding some non-polluting fertilizer or building a carbon dioxide removal industry three times the size of the oil industry? It's crazy to view the latter as like, oh, we got to do that because we can't do the first thing. It just seems crazy. Okay, so for the first problem here with net zero is we don't have a clear sense of what these residual emissions are, where they come from, exactly how we define them, et cetera.

So without that, we don't have a clear sense of the needed size of the carbon dioxide removal industry. That said, problem number two here is that even based on what we are currently expecting CDR to do, there doesn't appear to be a coordinated push to make it happen. Like we're just sort of like waving our hands at massive amounts of CDR but you're not seeing around you the kinds of mobilization that would be necessary to get there. Is that roughly accurate?

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, and I think it follows from the residual emissions analysis because unless a country has really looked at that, they probably don't realize the scale of CDR that they're implicitly relying on.

David Roberts

Right, so they're implicitly relying on CDR for a couple of things you list in your presentation I saw and residual emissions is only one of those things we're expecting CDR to do.

Holly Jean Buck

There's the idea that CDR will also be compensating for legacy emissions or helping to draw down greenhouse gas concentrations after an overshoot. I don't think anybody is saying that exactly because we're not at that point yet, but it's kind of floating around on the horizon as another use case for carbon removal.

David Roberts

Yeah. So it does seem like even the amount of CDR that we are currently expecting, even if most countries haven't thought it through, just the amount that's already on paper that we're expecting it to do, we're not seeing the kind of investment that you would want to get there. What does that tell you? What should we learn from that weird disjunct?

Holly Jean Buck

For me, it tells me that all the climate professionals are not really doing their jobs. Maybe that sounds mean, but we have so many people that are devoted to climate action professionally and so it's very weird to not see more thinking about this. But maybe the more nice way to think about it is saying oh well, people are really focused on mitigation. They're really focused on scaling up clean energy which is where they should be focused. Maybe that's reasonable.

David Roberts

Yeah, maybe this is cynical, but some part of me thinks, like if people and countries really believed that we need the amount of CDR they're saying we're going to need, that the models show we're going to need, by mid century they would be losing their minds and flipping out and pouring billions of dollars into this. And the fact that they're not to me sort of like I guess it feels like no one's really taking this seriously. Like everyone still somewhat sees it as an artifact of the models.

Holly Jean Buck

I don't know, I think the tech sector is acting on it, which is interesting. I mean, you've seen people like Frontier mobilize all these different tech companies together to do these advanced market commitments. I think they're trying to incubate a CDR ecosystem. And so why does interest come there versus other places? Not exactly sure. I have some theories but I do wonder about the governments because in our analysis we looked at the most ambitious projections offered in these long term strategies and the average amount of residual emissions was around 18% of current emissions. So all these countries have put forward these strategies where they're seeing these levels of residual emissions.

Why are they not acting on it more in policy? I think maybe it's just the short termism problem of governments not being accountable for things that happen in 30 years.

David Roberts

Yeah, this is a truly strange phenomenon to me and I don't even know that I do have any theories about it, but it's like of all the areas of climate policy there are tons and tons of areas where business could get involved and eventually build self-sustaining profitable industries out of them. But CDR is not that there will never be a self-sustaining profitable CDR industry. It's insofar as it exists, it's going to exist based on government subsidies. So it's just bizarre for business to be moving first in that space and for government to be trailing.

It just seems upside down world. I can't totally figure out government's motivations for not doing more and I can't totally figure out businesses motivations for doing so much.

Holly Jean Buck

Well, I think businesses acting in this R&D space to try to kind of claim some of the tech breakthroughs in the assumption that if we're serious about climate action we're going to have a price on carbon. We're going to have much more stringent climate policy in a decade or two. And when that happens, the price of carbon will be essentially set by the price of removing carbon. And so if they have the innovation that magically removes the most carbon, they're going to be really well set up for an extremely lucrative industry. This is all of course hinging on the idea that we're going to be willing to pay to clean up emissions just like we're willing to pay for trash service or wastewater disposal or these other kind of pollution removal services.

Which is still an open question, but I sure hope we will be.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's totally open. And this is another area where this weird disjunct between this sort of expansive talk and no walk. It's almost politically impossible to send money to this greenhouse gas international fund that's supposed to help developing countries decarbonize, right? Like even that it's very difficult for us to drag enough tax money out of taxpayers hands to fund that and we're going to be sending like a gazillion times more than that on something that has no visible short term benefit for taxpayers. We're all just assuming we're going to do that someday. It seems like a crazy assumption.

And if you're a business and you're looking to make money, it just seems like even if you're just looking to make money on clean energy, it seems like there's a million faster, easier ways than this sort of like multidecade bank shot effort. I feel like I don't have my head wrapped around all those dynamics. So the first problem is residual emissions. They're opaque to us, we don't totally get them. Second problem is there's no evident push remotely to scale of the kind of CDR we claim we're going to need. And then the third you mentioned is there's no regime for matching emissions and removals.

Explain that a little bit. What sort of architecture would be required for that kind of regime?

Holly Jean Buck

Well, you can think of this as a market or as a platform, basically as a system for connecting emissions and removals. And obviously this has been like a dream of technocratic climate policy for a long time, but I think it's frustrated by our knowledge capabilities and maybe that'll change in the future if we really do get better models, better remote sensing capacities. Obviously, both of those have been improving dramatically and machine learning accelerates it. But it assumes that you really have good knowledge of the emissions, good knowledge of the removals, that it's credible. And I think for some of the carbon removal technologies we're looking at this what's called MRV: monitoring, reporting, and verification.

Is really challenging, especially with open systems like enhanced rock weathering or some of the ocean carbon removal ideas. So we need some improvement there. And then once you've made this into a measurable commodity, you need to be able to exchange it. That's been really frustrated because of all the problems that you've probably talked about on this podcast with carbon markets, and scams, bad actors. It's all of these problems and the expense of having people in the middle that are taking a cut off of the transactions.

David Roberts

Yeah. So you have to match your residual emissions with removals in a way that is verifiable, in a way that, you know, the removals are additional. Right. You get back to all these carbon market problems and as I talked with Danny Cullenword and David Victor about on the pod long ago, in carbon offset markets, basically everyone has incentive to keep prices low and to make things look easy and tidy. And virtually no one, except maybe the lonely regulators has the incentive to make sure that it's all legit right there's just like there's overwhelming incentive to goof around and cheat and almost no one with the incentive to make sure it's valid.

And all those problems that face the carbon offset market just seem to me like ten times as difficult. When you're talking about global difficult to measure residual emissions coupled with global difficult to measure carbon dioxide removals in a way where there's no double counting and there's no shenanigans. Like, is that even a gleam in our eye yet? Do we even have proposals for something like that on the table?

Holly Jean Buck

I mean, there's been a lot of best principles and practices and obviously a lot of the conversation around Article Six and the Paris agreement and those negotiations are towards working out better markets. I think a lot of people are focused on this, but there's definitely reason to be skeptical of our ability to execute it in the timescales that we need.

David Roberts

Yeah, I mean, if you're offsetting residual emissions that you can't reduce, you need that pretty quick. Like, this is supposed to be massively scaling up in the next 30 years and I don't see the institutional efforts that would be required to build something like this, especially making something like this bulletproof. So we don't have a good sense of residual emissions. We're not pushing very hard to scale CDR up even to what we think we need. And we don't have the sort of institutional architecture that would be required to formally match removals with residual emissions. These are all kind of, I guess, what you'd call technical problems.

Like, even if you accepted the goal of doing this or this framework, these are just technical problems that we're not solving yet. The fourth problem, as you say, is the bigger one, perhaps the biggest one, which is net zero says nothing about fossil fuels. Basically. It says nothing about the socioeconomics of fossil fuels or the social dynamics of fossil fuels. It says nothing about the presence of fossil fuels in a net-zero world, how big that might be, et cetera. So what do you mean when you say it's silent on fossil fuels?

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, so this was a desirable design feature of net zero because it has this constructive ambiguity around whether there's just like a little bit of residual emissions and you've almost phased out fossil fuels, or if there's still a pretty significant role for the fossil fuel industry in a net-zero world. And that's what a lot of fossil fuel producers and companies are debating.

David Roberts

Yes, I've been thinking about this recently in the context of the struggle to get Joe Manchin to sign decent legislation. Like, if you hear Joe Manchin when he goes on rambling on about climate change, it's very clear that he views carbon dioxide removal as basically technological license for fossil fuels to just keep on keeping on. Like, in his mind, that's what CDR means. Whereas if you hear like, someone from NRDC talking about it, it's much more like we eliminated almost everything. And here's like, the paper towel that we're going to use to wipe up these last little stains.

And that's a wide gulf.

Holly Jean Buck

I don't want to seem like the biggest net-zero hater in the world. I understand why it came up as a goal. I think it was a lot more simple and intuitive than talking about 80% of emissions reduction over 2005 levels or like the kind of things that it replaced. But ultimately, this is a killer aspect to the whole idea, is not being clear about the phase out of fossil fuels.

David Roberts

And you say you can envision very different worlds fitting under net zero. What do you mean by that?

Holly Jean Buck

Well, I mean, one axis is the temporality of it. So is net zero, like, just one moment on the road to something else? Is it a temporary state or is it a permanent state where we're continuing to produce some fossil fuels and we're just living in that net zero without any dedicated phase out? I think that right now there's ambiguity where you could see either one.

David Roberts

That is a good question. In your research on this, have you found an answer to that question of how people view it? Like, I'd love to see a poll or something. I mean, this is a tiny subset of people who even know what we're talking about here. But among the people who talk about net zero, do you have any sense of whether they view it as like a mile marker on the way to zero-zero or as sort of like the desired endstate?

Holly Jean Buck

You know, it's funny because I haven't done a real poll, but I've done when I'm giving a talk at a conference of scientists and climate experts twice I've asked this question, do you think it's temporary or do you think it's like a permanent desired state? And it's split half and half each time, which I find really interesting. Like, within these climate expert communities, we don't have a clear idea ourselves.

David Roberts

And that's such a huge difference. And if you're going to have CDR do this accounting for past emissions, for your past emissions debt, if you're going to do that, you have to go negative, right. You can't stay at net zero, you have to go net negative. So it would be odd to view net zero as the end state. And yet that seems like, what's giving fossil fuel companies permission to be involved in all this.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah. No, we do need to go net negative. And I think one challenge with the residual emissions is that carbon removal capacity is going to be finite. It's going to be limited by geography, carbon sequestration capacity, ecosystems and renewable energy, all of these things. And so if you understand it as finite, then carbon removal to compensate for residual emissions is going to be in competition with carbon removal to draw down greenhouse gas concentrations. And so we never get to this really net negative state if we have these large residual emissions, because all that capacity is using to compensate rather than to get net negative, if that makes sense.

David Roberts

Yeah. Given how sort of fundamental those questions are and how fundamental those differences are, it's a little this is what I mean when I sort of the revelation of reading your book. Like, those are very, very different visions. If you work backwards from those different visions, you get a very, very different dynamic around fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies and the social and political valence of fossil fuels, just very fundamentally different. It's weird that it's gone on this long with that ambiguity, which, I guess, as you say, it was fruitful to begin with, but you kind of think it's time to de-ambiguize this.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah. Because there's huge implications for the infrastructure planning that we do right now.

David Roberts

Right.

Holly Jean Buck

It's going to be a massive transformation to phase out fossil fuels. There's a million different planning tasks that need to have started yesterday and should start today.

David Roberts

Yeah. And I guess also, and this is a complaint, maybe we'll touch on more later, but there's long been, I think, from some quarters of the environmental movement, a criticism of climate people in their sort of emissions or carbon greenhouse gas emissions obsession. And when you contemplate fossil fuels, it's not just greenhouse gases. There's like all these proximate harms air pollution and water pollution, et cetera, et cetera, geopolitical stuff. And I think the idea behind net zero was, let's just isolate greenhouse gas emissions and not get into those fights. But I wonder, as you say, we have to make decisions now, which in some sense hinge on which we were going to go on that question.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, I mean, it was a huge trick to get us to focus on what happens after the point of combustion rather than the extraction itself.

David Roberts

Yeah, it says nothing about extraction, too. So your final critique of net zero fifth and final critique is that it is not particularly compelling to ordinary people, which I think is kind of obvious. Like, I really doubt that the average Joe or Jane off the street would even know what you mean by net zero or would particularly know what you mean by negative carbon emissions and if you could explain it to them, would be particularly moved by that story. So what do you mean by the meta narrative? Like, why do you think this falls short?

Holly Jean Buck

I mean, accounting is fundamentally kind of boring. I think a lot of us avoid it, right? And so if I try to talk to my students about this, it's really work to keep them engaged and to see that actually all this stuff around net zero impacts life and death for a lot of people. But we don't feel that when we just look at the math or we look at the curve and we talk about bending the curve and this and that, we have this governance by curve mode. It's just not working in terms of inspiring people to change anything about their lives.

David Roberts

Yeah, bending the curve didn't seem to work great during the pandemic either. This gets back to something you said before about what used to be a desirable design feature when you are thinking about other things that you might want to bring into a meta narrative about climate change. Most of what people talk about and what people think about is sort of social and political stuff. Like, we need to talk about who's going to win and who's going to lose, and the substantial social changes and changes in our culture and practices that we need. We need to bring all these things in.

But then the other counterargument is those are what produce resistance and those are what produce backlash. And so as far as you can get on an accounting framework, like if the accounting framework can sort of trick various and sundry participants and institutions into thinking they're in a value neutral technical discussion, if you can make progress that way, why not do it? Because any richer meta narrative is destined to be more controversial and more produce more political backlash. What do you think about that?

Holly Jean Buck

No, I think that the problem is we haven't invested at all in figuring out how to create desire and demand for lower carbon things. I mean, maybe the car industry has tried a little bit with some of the electric trucks or that kind of thing, but we have all this philanthropy, government focus, all the stuff on both the tech and on the carbon accounting pieces of it. We don't have very much funding going out and talking to people. About why are you nervous about transitioning to gas in your home? What would make you feel more comfortable about that?

Those sorts of relational things, the conversations, the engagement has been gendered, frankly. Lots of times it falls to women to do this kind of relational work and hasn't been invested in. So I think there's a whole piece we could be doing about understanding what would create demand for these new infrastructures, new practices, not just consumer goods but really adoption of lifestyle changes because you need that demand to translate to votes to the real supportive policies that will really make a difference in this problem.

David Roberts

Yeah, I very much doubt if you go to talk to people about those things they're going to say, well, I want to get the appliance that's most closely going to zero out my positive conditions. You're not going to run into a lot of accounting if you ask people about their concerns about these things. So these are the problems. We're not measuring it well. We're not doing what we need to do to remove the amount of CDR we say we need. We don't have the architecture or the institutional structures to create some sort of system where we're matching residual emissions and removals.

And as a narrative it's fatally ambiguous about the role of fossil fuels in the future and plus ordinary people don't seem to give much of a s**t about it. So in this presentation you sort of raise the prospect that the whole thing could collapse, that the net-zero thing could collapse. What do you mean by that and how could that happen?

Holly Jean Buck

So I think this looks more like quiet quitting than anything else because I do think it is too big to fail in terms of official policy. There's been a lot of political capital spent.

David Roberts

Yeah, a lot of institutions now have that on paper, like are saying on paper that they want to hit net zero. So it seems to me like it would take a big backlash to get rid of it.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah. So I don't think some companies may back away from targets. There'll be more reports of targets not being on track. And I think what happens is that it becomes something like the Sustainable Development Goals or dealing with the US national debt where everybody kind of knows you're not really going to get there, but you can still talk about it aspirationally but without confidence. Because it did feel like at least a few years ago that people were really trying to get to net zero. And I think that sensation will shift and it'll become empty like a lot of other things, unfortunately.

But I think that creates an opportunity for something new to come in and be the mainframe for climate policy.

David Roberts

Net zero just seems like a species of a larger thing that happens. I don't know if it happens in other domains, but in climate and clean energy it happens a lot, which is just sort of like a technical term from the expert dialogue, worms its way over into popular usage and is just awful and doesn't mean anything to anyone. I think about net metering and all these kind of terminological disputes. So it doesn't really I'm not sure who's in charge of metanarratives, but it doesn't seem like they're very thoughtfully constructed. So let's talk a little bit about what characteristics you think a better metanarrative about climate change would include.

Holly Jean Buck

First, I think it is important that we are measuring progress towards a goal for accountability reasons. But I think there needs to be more than just the metric. I think we have an obsession with metrics in our society that sometimes becomes unhealthy or distracts us from the real focus. But I do think there should be some amount of measuring specific progress towards a goal. I think that the broader story also has to have some affect or emotional language. There has to be some kind of emotional connection. I also think we have to get beyond carbon to talk about what's going on with ecosystems more broadly and how to maintain them and have an intact habitable planet and then just pragmatically.

This has to be a narrative that enables broad political coalitions. It can't be just for one camp and it has to work on different scales. I mean, part of the genius of net zero is that it is this multi-scalar planetary, but also national, also municipal, corporate, even individual does all of that. So those are some of the most important qualities that a new frame or a new narrative would have to have.

David Roberts

That sounds easier said than done. I can imagine measuring other things you mentioned in your book several sort of submeasurements other than just this one overarching metric. You could measure how fast fossil fuels are going away. You could measure how fast clean energy is scaling up. There are adaptation you can measure to some extent. So I definitely can see the benefit in having a wider array of goals, if only just because some of those just get buried under net zero and are never really visible at all. That makes sense to me. But the minute you start talking about a metanarrative with affect, with emotion, the way to get that is to appeal to people's values and things that they cherish and feel strongly about.

But then we're back to the problem we talked about earlier, which is it seems like especially in the US these days, we're just living in a country with two separate tribes that have very, very different values. And so the minute you step beyond the sort of technocratic metric, which in a sense is like clean and clinical and value free and start evoking values, trying to create emotion, you get greater investment and passion in some faction and alienate some other faction. Do you just think that that's like unavoidable and you have to deal with that or how do you think about that dilemma?

Holly Jean Buck

I actually think people do have the same values, but they're manipulated by a media ecosystem that profits from dividing them, which makes it impossible for them to see that they do have aligned values. And I base that just on my experience, like as a rural sociologist and geographer talking to people in rural America. People are upset about the same exact things that the leftists in the cities I visit are upset about too. They really do value justice. They think it's unfair that big companies are taking advantage of them. There are some registers of agreement about fairness, about caring for nature, about having equal opportunities to a good and healthy life that I think we could build on if we weren't so divided by this predatory media ecology.

David Roberts

I don't suppose you have a solution for that, in your back pocket?

Holly Jean Buck

I have a chapter on this in a forthcoming book which you might be interested. It's edited by David Orr. It's about democracy in hotter times, looking at the democratic crisis and the climate crisis at the same time. And so I've thought a little bit about media reform, but it's definitely not my expertise. We should have somebody on your podcast to talk about that too.

David Roberts

Well, let me tell you, as someone who's been obsessed with that subject for years and has looked and looked and looked around, I don't know that there is such thing as an expert. I've yet to encounter anyone who has a solution to that problem that sounds remotely feasible to me, including the alleged experts. And it kind of does seem like every problem runs aground on that, right? Like it would be nice if people had a different story to tell about climate change that had these features you identify that brought people in with values and drew on a broader sense of balance with the earth and ecosystems.

But even if they did, you have to have the mechanics of media to get that message out to tell that story. You know what I mean? And so you got one whole side of the media working against you and one at best begrudgingly working with you. It just doesn't seem possible. So I don't know why I'm talking to you about this problem. No one knows a solution to this problem. But it just seems like this is the -er problem that every other problem depends on.

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, I mean, we should talk about it because it's the central obstacle in climate action, from my point of view, is this broken media ecosystem and if we could unlock that or revise it, we could make a lot of progress on other stuff.

David Roberts

Yes, on poverty, you name it. Almost anything that seems like the main problem you talk about. The narrative must be able to enable broad political coalitions, but you are working against ... I guess I'd like to hear a little bit about what role you think fossil fuels are playing in this? It seems to me pretty obvious that fossil fuels do not want any such broad political coalition about anything more specific than net zero in 2050, right. Which, as you point out, leaves room for vastly different worlds, specifically regarding fossil fuels. It seems like they don't want that and they're working against that and they have power.

So who are the agents of this new narrative? Like, who should be telling it and who has the power to tell it?

Holly Jean Buck

So I think sometimes in the climate movement we grant too much power to the fossil fuel industry. It's obviously powerful in this country and in many others, but we have a lot of other industries that are also relevant and powerful too. So you can picture agriculture and the tech industry and insurance and some of these other forms of capital standing up to the fossil fuel industry because they have a lot to lose as renewables continue to become cheaper. We should have energy companies that will also have capital and power. So I do think that we need to think about those other coalitions.

Obviously, I don't think it needs to be all grounded in forms of capital. I think there's a lot of work to be done in just democratic political power from civil society too. What I'd love to see is philanthropy, spending more money on building up that social infrastructure alongside funding some of this tech stuff.

David Roberts

Yeah, I've talked to a lot of funders about that and what I often hear is like, "Yeah, I'd love that too, but what exactly be specific, David, what do you want me to spend money on?" And I'm always like, "Well, you know, stuff, social infrastructure, media, something." I get very hand wavy very quick because I'm not clear on exactly what it would be. So final subject, which I found really interesting at the tail end, I think it's fair to say your sympathies are with phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible. And there's this critique you hear from the left-left about climate change that just goes, this is just capitalism, this is what capitalism does.

This is the inevitable result of capitalism. And if you want a real solution to climate change on a mass scale, you have to be talking about getting past capitalism or destroying capitalism or alternatives to capitalism, something like that. Maybe I'm reading between the lines, but I feel like you have some sympathy with that. But also then we're back to narratives that can build a broad political coalition, right? Narratives that can include everyone. So how do you think about the tension between kind of the radical rethinking of economics and social arrangements versus the proximate need to keep everybody on board?

How is a metanarrative supposed to dance that line?

Holly Jean Buck

Yeah, unfortunately, I think in this media ecosystem we can't lead with smashing capitalism or with socialism. It's just not going to work, unfortunately. So then what do you do? I think you have to work on things that would make an opening for that. Having more political power, more power grounded in local communities. It's not going to be easy.

David Roberts

Even if you let the anti-capitalist cat out of the bag at all, you have a bunch of enemies that would love to seize on that, to use it to divide. So I don't know, what does that mean? Openings, just reforms of capitalism at the local level? I mean, I'm asking you to solve these giant global problems. I don't know why, but how do you solve capitalism? What's your solution to capitalism? What does that mean, to leave an opening for post-capitalism without directly taking on capitalism? I guess I'd just like to hear a little bit more about that.

Holly Jean Buck

So I think that there's a lot of things that seem unconnected to climate at first, like making sure we have the integrity of our elections, dealing with redistricting and gerrymandering and those sorts of things that are one part of it. Reforming the media system is another part of it. Just having that basic civil society infrastructure, I think, will enable different ideas to form and grow.

David Roberts

Do you have any predictions about the future of net zero? Sort of as a concept, as a guiding light, as a goal? Because you identify these kind of ambiguities and tensions within it that seem like it doesn't seem like it can go on forever without resolving some of those. But as you also say, it's become so ubiquitous and now plays such a central role in the dialogue and in the Paris plans and et cetera, et cetera. It's also difficult to see it going away. So it's like can't go on forever, but it can't go away. So do you have any predictions how it evolves over the coming decade?

Holly Jean Buck

Well, it could just become one of these zombie concepts and so that really is an opportunity for people to get together and think about what other thing they would like to see. Is it going to be measuring phase out of fossil fuels and having a dashboard where we can track the interconnection queue and hold people accountable for improving that? Are we going to be measuring adaptation and focusing on that? Are we going to be thinking more about the resources that are going to countries to plan and direct a transition and trying to stand up agencies that are really focused on energy transition or land use transition?

I mean, we could start making those demands now and we could also be evolving these broader languages to talk about and understand the motion. So we have some concepts that have been floated and already sort of lost some amount of credibility, like sustainability, arguably just transition. We have Green New Deal. Will that be the frame? Is that already lost? What new stuff could we come up with? Is it regeneration or universal basic energy. I think there's a lot of languages to explore and so I would be thrilled to see the Climate Movement work with other movements in society, with antiracist movements, with labor movements and more to explore the languages and the specific things we could measure and then take advantage of the slipperiness of net zero to get in there and talk about something else we might want to see.

David Roberts

Okay, that sounds like a great note to wrap up on. Thank you for coming. Thank you for the super fascinating book and for all your work, Holly Jean Buck. Thanks so much.

Holly Jean Buck

Thank you.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.

States don’t (yet) have the administrative capacity to smoothly implement the ambitious policies in the IRA; in this episode, policy strategist Sam Ricketts of Evergreen Action discusses how federal programs can help them get there.

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(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

States are central to climate and energy policy. After the failure of the Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2010, states carried the torch of climate policy during the long decade that Democrats were locked out of majority power in Washington, DC. Now that Dems have actually passed some federal policy — and they are unlikely to pass any more anytime soon — states are once again in the spotlight, tasked with implementing that legislation to maximize its effect.

This raises the obvious question of whether states have the administrative capacity — the people, institutions, time, and money — necessary to implement ambitious federal legislation competently.

They do not, says Sam Ricketts, but they could, and there are federal programs that can help them get there.

Nobody is better positioned than Ricketts to address the issue of state readiness. He played a key role in Jay Inslee's pathbreaking presidential campaign, which was built off of successful policies in Washington and other states. Then, as senior strategist for Evergreen Action, a nonprofit he founded with other Inslee veterans, he helped shape the ambitious trio of bills the Democrats have passed in the last year and a half: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (or as advocates fondly refer to them, Uncles Bill, Chip, and Ira). Now he’s working with Evergreen and the Center for American Progress to educate and prepare state and local lawmakers for the post-IRA world.

I've known Ricketts for years, and there's nobody who better balances detailed knowledge of policy with a practical head for advocacy and activism. I'm excited to talk to him about the crucial role states will play in coming years, the kind of administrative capacity they will need, and the types of federal programs that can fund their capacity building.

So, enough of that. With no further ado, Sam Ricketts, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Sam Ricketts

Thanks for having me, David. Pleasure to be with you.

David Roberts

I'm so excited to talk about administrative capacity, the sexiest of all podcast topics loyal listeners know this is an ongoing obsession of mine.

Sam Ricketts

They've come for the good stuff.

David Roberts

Yes, exactly. So get ready to jump in. So I want to talk about state and local governments and whether they're up for this. But first, let's just briefly talk a little bit about just how central states and local governments have already been in climate policy in the US. So after you and I, well remember all too well the humiliating defeat of the Waxman-Markey Bill back in 2009, 2010. And after that, the sort of national scene was dead for ten years and everyone was off in the wilderness. And the only thing that was going on was states passing good legislation.

So maybe let's start by just talking about those states being kind of the laboratories for democracy as it were and how the states sort of pioneered stuff and learned stuff that then went into informing the federal legislation that was just passed.

Sam Ricketts

Indeed. So the first thing to your point, you mentioned that states and local governments have long been sort of the nation's leaders in developing and implementing climate and clean energy policy. And we're going to talk about what they need to do next in terms of implementation. But an important point, as you allude to here, is the progress that's just been given to us from Washington DC. The passage of Uncle Bill, Uncle Ira, Uncle Chip, the three climate uncles, so to speak. And the other initiatives that the Biden administration is advancing are really drawn from, inspired by, informed by the progress that states and local governments have made throughout the country.

And this progress, as you mentioned, really jump started over the course of the last decade and sort of in the interregnum period between the last attempt at climate legislation and this ultimately very successful one. But it goes back further, right. States began passing clean energy laws decades ago. Years ago. I mean, the first renewable portfolio standard to require utilities to start utilizing clean renewable electricity was actually passed in Iowa 40 years ago. That activity last went through states red, blue and purple alike through the 1990s. In the early 2000s, you really saw an uptick in states beginning to target greenhouse gas climate pollution directly with laws that like Massachusetts' Global Warming Solutions Act, notably, of course, the AB 32 law passed in California in 2006, sort of set economy-wide programs and sectoral programs advancing climate action.

And then in the 2000s, after the last failed attempt at federal climate legislation, you really saw this uptick. And states really carried the ball in a number of different ways and in ways that directly inspired the breakthroughs here. I mean, just a few of the items. In 2015, Hawaii became the first state in the country to pass a 100% clean electricity standard requiring utilities to get to all carbon-free electricity on their grid. And now over 20 states have that commitment in some form. About 15 have passed that requirement into law. And I would argue that that underlies President Biden's most important climate commitment that he's made and is trying to advance through both legislative and executive means towards 100% clean electricity by 2035.

A couple of the other things that were passed by states and indirectly informed things in IRA in particular were tax credits tied to labor standards. So to ensure that we're building not just clean energy and not just jobs, but clean energy supporting good family wage, high quality jobs. And notably that was inspired by things like the Clean Energy Transformation Act passed in Washington state and signed by my former boss, Governor Jay Inslee in 2019. You also see in IRA and throughout the Biden administration's initiatives a prioritized investment in disadvantaged communities to advance environmental and economic justice and things like President Biden's Justice40 initiative, which was itself directly inspired by the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that had that Justice40 commitment for New York that was also passed in 2019.

So there's this rush of legislative and policy making in the second half of the last decade in particular, but really throughout the course of it just one more item because it's a favorite that really directly informs what we're seeing implemented now. And IRA is connecticut in 2011 was the first state in the country to establish a green bank. It's now been created in 23 state and local governments, I believe. And that directly, of course, inspired the creation of a greenhouse gas reduction fund, a $27 billion program in IRA that again is going to be now a critical tool for states and local governments to leverage to build the clean energy economy flowing out of IRA implementation.

So the first thing here is this progress that we now have so much of. It builds on the foundation established by states and local governments throughout the country. And now it's of course going to be a critical thing for them to turn to, really being drivers in implementation of these bills.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to say I wrote a piece for Vox a few years ago, I talked to you for it about the sort of general turn in policy thinking among climate people away from this sort of monomaniacal obsession with carbon pricing to what I called Standards Investments and Justice. SIJ never did quite get that term to catch on. But it wasn't just an intellectual turn. It wasn't just a sort of theoretical turn. It was very much states demonstrating that this is the politics that works, right. You can bang your head on that top-down carbon pricing wall over and over again.

It is the sector-by-sector standards and investments that work to get political buy in. So this wasn't just an idle exercise. This was very much showing the federal government what's possible and what works.

Sam Ricketts

Totally. Can I just say, you wrote eloquently about standards, investments, and justice. And really to your point, it's directly informed by what's really borne out in practical terms, particularly on state policy leadership, right? Both the politics and the policy conspired here to show a better and a different path that you're seeing inform the entirety of the Biden administration's climate agenda. They have advanced robust investments that are going to leverage even greater private sector investments to catalyze this clean energy transition. They are now utilizing federal administrative authorities to go after sector by sector rules to ensure they're holding automakers utilities, others accountable for following this clean energy trajectory that's now available to them, especially with robust public and private sector investment.

And then they've got this central commitment for the first time at the federal level to justice this confluence of factors that again is directly borne out and directly inspired by the leadership of state and local governments throughout the country. Which leads us to where I guess we've got to go next.

David Roberts

Let's go there then. So the federal government passed all this stuff and I feel like everybody kind of gets on a general level that it's states and localities that are going to have to implement all this stuff but I think most people understand that in a very vague way. So maybe let's flesh that picture out a little bit. What are the kinds of things that federal legislation does that the states and localities are going to be directly responsible for administering?

Sam Ricketts

The first thing is the Biden administration. We hear a lot of talk these days about Bidenomics and there were sort of a return at long last of industrial policy at the federal level. Targeted investments, economic strategies to really seize on the country's strengths, develop and maintain the industries we're going to need for a thriving and just and healthy economy.

David Roberts

Volts listeners or everyone else should go back and listen to my podcast with Brian Deese a month or two ago all about that subject.

Sam Ricketts

Totally. That was a great one and it really informs what's happening now in Washington DC. But also at the same time seeing industrial policy through in the country arguably has long been a larger part of the role of states and local governments, right, who implement federal dollars. I mean so many of the federal programs we know and love, the federal funding programs we know and love, be they Medicaid or education, energy and climate are dollars that the federal government or federal agencies pass down to states and to local governments and sometimes communities or individual consumers. But so much of it flows through state and local governments and then even the programs that don't directly flow through those governments they need to be the ones to take advantage of to help their companies and their consumers and their communities take advantage of clear hurdles, plan for, and execute on.

So there's three different types of investments I point to here in these bills that are all going to be part of what states and cities need to be administering or being attentive to as they do so. And all of them are direct opportunities and some of them are massive like untold opportunities. So there are direct grant programs, there are financing programs and then there are tax incentives and all of which state governments, local governments need to be attentive to all three of these. So just give a few examples. Direct grant programs. There's a few different programs or actually a number of different programs of course in these bills that are provided to state governments or to local governments that they can then turn and leverage for climate, for equity, for public health, for good jobs.

One is the Department of Energy has much discussed building energy rebate programs. Two different programs, one supporting energy, Home Energy Retrofits, another supporting electric appliances. Those programs are actually being run by the Department of Energy, but they're actually going to be dollars. The Department of Energy first provides to all state energy offices for those state energy offices to turn around and operationalize, working with contractors, working with local governments and providing consumers directly with rebates. Another program is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which I mentioned is a program that combines a couple of different elements, but there's an element of it that provides money directly to states and local governments for them to deploy or to set up programs to deploy solar and storage technologies in disadvantaged communities.

A third example of this direct grant program that I think we're going to talk about a little bit more is the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants, which is an investment program directly for state and local governments basically only, and tribal and territorial governments to be able to plan and then execute on programs and policies and measures to decrease climate pollution and build their own clean energy and industrial strategies that suit their needs.

David Roberts

Yeah, we're going to come back to that one.

Sam Ricketts

Then the second category is financing programs, programs the federal government has or is newly established where they provide financing tools, loan, loan guarantees, other financial mechanisms that individual companies and projects can use to leverage more private capital, to deploy zero emission technologies or build new manufacturing facilities. And there's a few different ones of these. One is again the new GGRF for Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund which is a new program being stood up at the EPA. Another is the USDA Rural Utilities Service has about $10 billion for rural electric cooperatives to be able to leverage to securitize and retire their coal plants and instead build clean and renewable energy for sort of a next generation rural electrification agenda for the country.

And then a third, the DOE Loan Guarantee program has got hundreds of billions of dollars of financing authority that states can help work with their local companies and projects to leverage to deploy much greater private sector capital. And this DOE one I'm particularly excited about because of its intersection with states, there's actually reforms made to the program in the infrastructure law. In Bill, Uncle Bill, the state gets a chance to work with the Department of Energy loan guarantee program to waive the technology requirement requiring this project to utilize a quote, unquote, innovative technology, one that hasn't been used before and if the state is a co-investor in the project, can leverage much greater private sector financing into deploying that project. So really a reform, a tweak to the DOE Loan Guarantee program that allows it to be more accessible and more usable, particularly state clean energy financing institutions.

And then finally — let me come to the big one — because the majority of the investments flowing through IRA are actually tax credits. Sort of automatic spending in reverse for the federal government, which are resources that an individual project owner, company, or under IRA. Actual public sector entities like public utilities, nonprofit institutions can take and leverage greater private sector or co investment in speeding much more investment into clean energy, into renewable energy, into individual consumers purchasing of electric vehicles or heat pumps, clean manufacturing facilities. The tax credits make up the majority of the funding in the bill and notably so state and local governments need to be aware of them so that they can help their companies and their consumers and their communities take advantage of those incentives.

And notably those tax incentives I mentioned have this new reform called direct pay where they are now eligible for use by those who don't have tax liability, including public institutions, including local governments who are operating with the, let's say municipal utility or even nonprofit institutions. And this amount of money notably is uncapped. So it can be as much money as we can all spend.

David Roberts

A theme Volts returns to frequently there's no upper limit to the amount that these tax credits could get sent out. There's no upper limit to the amount that could be spent on them. So as I pound the table and say over and over again the size of this bill, the size of IRA is not a fixed thing. It will be as big as there are people applying for the tax credits. So anyone out there who can organize and educate people and have more people apply for those tax credits, that's going to be a bigger bill. So states and localities here really have their hands on the lever of not only how to implement the bill, but literally how big the bill is.

Sam Ricketts

Absolutely. There's much talk about how this is a $370 billion or $380 billion investment. I mean the reality is there's a fixed number of grant programs or financing programs that Congress and President Biden have invested in. And then there are these tax incentives that are uncapped and that can range much greater. They are literally only tied to the amount of money that can be spent on projects that they can then benefit from those incentives.

David Roberts

Yeah, Goldman Sachs I think, estimates $1.2 trillion rather than $3.7 billion, which is an enormous spread. All of which has to do with how many projects are going to qualify for these tax credits. And that is something that people can have control over.

Sam Ricketts

That's right. And the Treasury Department writes the rules of these things and they'll be the ones to dole out an individual cash payment as a direct pay grant or to send the tax refund to the company that takes advantage of the tax credit. But they're not out there searching out projects, working to ensure permitting works. They're not out there making sure communities are aware of these things. They're not there working hand-in-glove with companies on economic development projects. That is what states do. That is what counties do. That is what cities do. That's what individual community groups do.

But there is this massive opportunity for companies, for communities, for individual consumers to take advantage of these incentives and the rest of these investments and whether or not they do that well is going to be a thing that state and local leadership is going to play a key role in seeing through.

David Roberts

Exactly. You can have as much economic development as you can muster. Right? There's no upper limit. Like you can have all the economic development you want if you're willing to put in the work, organizing and pursuing it.

Sam Ricketts

That's right. And as we know we need to move urgently and build as much of this as we can because we are under some very tight climate math, right?

David Roberts

So we've established then that states have been an inspiration to the federal government and now we've established that the new federal legislation that has been passed in these past couple of years very importantly requires states and local governments to implement it. And indeed how big and how efficacious the bills are is more or less up to states and local governments, how well they organize and get it done. So then this brings us to the inevitable next question which is are they ready for this? Do they have economic development offices that are aware of the tax credits and understand the procedures and understand where to direct them and understand how to attract companies around them?

Do local governments have the offices to do outreach to local communities to clue them in on these tax credits? Do they have the sort of like manpower to do the research and just create the programs that can spend all this grant money? Are states and cities ready for the tsunami of money that is heading their way? Do they have the administrative capacity they need?

Sam Ricketts

Well, look, there's a gap. I like to think of it as an urgent opportunity.

David Roberts

It's an opportunity.

Sam Ricketts

It's an opportunity. An urgent one. Look, there's a definitive gap that exists across states and local governments and also tribal governments here too. I should probably mention that state and local and tribal governments are all sort of implicated as part of this sub-national government space of entities that are going to be helping to deploy dollars and are going to be dispositive about the success of these bills. They're all different. People regularly bunch them together. And here we're spending most time talking about state governments, a little bit about local governments and I'm going to continue to zero in on states because it's where I've worked before and it's what I'm particularly focused on in this moment.

But they're all going to be really important in this work and they all lack capacity, certainly to varying degrees. But I'll say state governments even just sticking with states often lack capacity. The state agencies, even the ones who have been sort of leading the most on climate and sometimes in many respects do lack capacity. And this is simply people in seats doing the work. They can lack capacity because of budgets regularly. That's the biggest reason. And then there is kind of like how the tax credits in the bill can be spent up to the level of funding that we put into them.

They'll get out what we put in. The same thing here with governmental capacity at the subnational level, there is an opportunity to do more because state agencies are regularly, red, blue and purple states alike, lacking in manpower to be able to take maximum advantage of these dollars.

David Roberts

Do you think it's fair to say that because industrial policy has been out of vogue and we've been living under this sort of well, I'll just use the word neoliberalism for the last 30 or 40 years with this sort of notion that markets are going to accomplish everything. Do you think that is part of the explanation for why some of this state capacity is lacking or has atrophied a little bit?

Sam Ricketts

Absolutely. I mean, the last 40 years of public sector disinvestment absolutely plays a role here. In particular, the public sector got hit hard after the Great Recession in particular.

David Roberts

Right.

Sam Ricketts

And budgets have only recently kind of gotten back even to those levels. They got hit again, obviously, recently during the COVID hit. And there has been investment from the federal level. Think of their COVID recovery dollars, some of the stuff that's implicated in debates right now in Congress about what can be clawed back, these are vital. Just like public sector capacity building investments, state and local budgets have regained relative health kind of quickly after COVID recovery.

But there still gaps. And there are gaps in particular in these areas where with state environmental, clean energy, industrial development that we've not invested as a society into sufficiently. And that's what leaves us with a gap.

David Roberts

And if you go look at part of the COVID money was grants to states arguably too much. But if you go look at what those states spent those grants on, it's not necessarily building their long-term administrative capacity. Sadly, obviously if you lack manpower, you lack manpower, and that's a problem. But maybe try to give us a little better sense of what are the concrete dangers here, what are the opportunities that states and cities are going to miss or botch lacking capacity? Like, one thing I worry about, and maybe this is silly, we can talk about the politics of this separately, but Obama and his stimulus money went overboard, bent over backward to make sure that none of it was misappropriated, that there was no fraud or graft.

He put so much energy into that for all the good it did him. But one of the things I worry about is states and cities that lack administrative capacity also seems to open more room for shenanigans and graft and just petty local politics kind of stuff. So flesh out a little bit the danger of lacking administrative capacity.

Sam Ricketts

A few different things, first of all, it's opportunity cost. These are all we talk often in climate policy in terms of carrots and sticks. And these are all carrots. And to the point here about being able to spend as much as we can spend. Well, carrots only deliver the nutritional value if people are eating the carrots. Right? Don't get me wrong, most people like carrots. Carrots are delicious. I like carrots. But in order to eat that carrot, people need to know that it's there. They need to know how to access it, how to ...

David Roberts

Right, somebody's got to go dig it up.

Sam Ricketts

Yes, right.

David Roberts

I don't know how far we can push this metaphor.

Sam Ricketts

We could take this metaphor, but that's an opportunity cost. And if there's people who companies don't know or can't access them, if the infrastructure is not built, if the community isn't aware, consumers aren't aware, that's going to result in less money being spent here.

David Roberts

Carrots going uneaten.

Sam Ricketts

Yes, carrots going uneaten. Thank you for grabbing that metaphor. Another thing here, and this is less of an administrative capacity challenge as it is more of wrong priorities or leadership challenges. Money being spent on the wrong thing, which is also, I mean, having administrative capacity and having it focused on the right things is critically important here. There has been some discussion about the infrastructure law, which is the bipartisan infrastructure bill and it's transportation infrastructure spending and how there is an opportunity and this is really an opportunity that exists under law with state governments and local governments, not the federal government, to use those dollars flexibly for low carbon transportation projects, not simply widening freeways and investing in more roads.

That is a challenge. It's a challenge we're not always seeing fare out in the right direction.

David Roberts

I was just reading this morning a story in E&E about some of that infrastructure money being used for a giant kajillion dollar highway widening project outside of Houston that would wipe out huge swaths of low income community just like classic old school d*****s highway mistakes, but now paid for with our new infrastructure money. So yeah, can you stop that? Is there anything that can be done about that? Like states are going to do what they're going to do? Well, I guess advocates can pay attention.

Sam Ricketts

Yeah. No, the first thing to do is to be attentive to the issue and then to develop the strategies to address it. Sometimes the states who are investing in those projects are the same ones who have made ambitious climate commitments. And it sure would be helpful for people to point out that maybe how the incongruence of those things. But the final area where things I don't want to say could go wrong. But the final area that really calls forth the need for state leadership is that states need to lead here again and the next generation of clean energy leadership, right?

Not only do they need to maximize the uptake of dollars for the job creation, for the equitable economic opportunity, for the emissions reductions that can be catalyzed by those dollars, but they also need to hold utility companies and automakers and building developers and the heavy industry accountable for using those dollars and push forward the next generation of policies that are going to cut emissions and drive the clean energy transformation. And people talk about states versus federal climate leadership and people talk about like states taking the baton now that the federal government's passed it. And I totally reject the premise.

As someone who's worked before at the state level in a governor's office, think of it much more as like a band where the state and local governments are the rhythm section, the drums and the bass, if you will. Keeping time and just always keeping a level of climate and clean energy progress going even while the federal government fits and starts. Like a lead guitarist will riff on stage and then disappear. We'll see that happen here. Even the last couple of years while President Biden and Congress have been hard at work passing these bills and taking executive action, states have been leading too.

Right, you've seen the next breakthroughs in state climate and clean energy policy continue to occur, whether that's New Jersey's groundbreaking cumulative impacts, environmental justice law, that's Washington State's Climate Commitment Act, that's Illinois's Clean Energy Jobs Act, et cetera, et cetera. And so the states need to take the next step and especially now that Congress is going to be divided and in that way states will have to take the baton because the lead guitarist is off the stage again.

David Roberts

Yeah, exactly. He's backstage smoking a joint.

Sam Ricketts

It's not entirely fair because President Biden is of course advancing things through administrative action. But especially for the time being, while we don't see major congressional action again on the horizon, states are going to have that central role in driving forward the nation's energy progress again.

David Roberts

I feel like this is a little bit underemphasized aspect of all this is that one thing states can do with all this tsunami of money that's coming down on is just use it to boost their own legislation. Like this is going to change the financial and social and political landscape in a way that is going to make more ambitious policy easier. And especially if states are smart about how they do that, right? Like a smart state can use all this money to soften the ground, to go further, to get more ambitious on climate.

Sam Ricketts

And just on that point, a few places to point to. For one, it's not all legislative. I mean public utility commissions who oversee utilities need to know that the electricity market, the system is entirely changed for the country now and the integrated resource plans that the utilities had provided them before IRA passed are not really worth the paper they were printed. On anymore because the economics of energy generation throughout the country has fundamentally changed. You add in federal rules coming down governing criteria or carbon pollution from power plants, another knock that utility commissions need to be aware of as they're engaging with utilities that they are regulating.

And the utilities are saying we need this rate increase or this deadline extension or this thing or that thing. That work. That is capacity and that is the decision at that state level by utility commissioners, appointed by the governors or sometimes elected by voters.

David Roberts

Wait. Just before you move on from that, I just want to pound the table on it a little bit, because when I think about I spend a lot of time thinking about sort of like, what are the potential impediments to this legislation doing as good as it could do. I think about workforce and NIMBY-ism, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things I come back to is sort of utility intransigence or ignorance or intransigence or some mix thereof. I can imagine if utilities took the amount of money that's being dumped on clean energy seriously, as you say, it would completely transform all their plans, right?

Every utility in the country, now that this bill is passed, should be back at the drawing board, completely rethinking what they're doing. But of course many of them for various incentive reasons, don't want to do that and don't see a way to make as much money doing that or just are stuck in their ways or have relationships, old boy network relationships that they don't want to upset, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The way to handle that impediment is with beefed up well informed utility commissions, which, as you say, is 100% a state capacity issue. It just means spending the money, getting the staff in place, getting the research done, really preparing them to force utilities to toe the line.

Sam Ricketts

Totally.

David Roberts

Anyway, I just wanted to emphasize that because I think it's a hugely under discussed and important piece.

Sam Ricketts

Well, not just a few other areas where states have been stepping forward and taking advantage already of that point to Minnesota, which just earlier this year, at the very beginning of the year, passed 100% clean electricity standard, taking advantage of these new investments. I mean, the leadership of State Representative Jamie Long and Governor Tim Walls and others in the state to really bring that over the finish line had been a long time coming and they've been fighting against legislative inertia, but Minnesota did that. But they've also passed a bill to explicitly tasking the administration to maximize the flow of federal funds.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Sam Ricketts

And Minnesota is one of a few states, also looking at Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, a few others who are in the process of establishing nonprofit financial institutions, particularly to take advantage of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds green finance program. Some states are passing incentives to sort of layer on what the federal government is providing and in some places to go beyond what the federal government has passed. Colorado just passed a robust suite of incentives and policies to go further.

David Roberts

Yes, including for EVs, because a lot of EVs are not going to be available for credits for quite a while. There's this huge national controversy over this. Colorado just stepped in and be like, well, we're going to loosen the criteria and subsidize all those EVs that are falling out of the federal subsidies, which is like, well done, Colorado.

Sam Ricketts

Well done. Exactly. Many states have established infrastructure coordinators housed by their governor or one of their agencies to coordinate across their state and with their city and county governments and stakeholders to maximize investment flows. Some of those have worked well and some of them haven't, state by state. But a key thing is there are states who are deploying different strategies to build capacity and coordinate a strategy around how to do this. Another interesting thing about it is it's happening in blue and red and purple states alike. Some of the major investments you're seeing, some of the big job creators, the battery manufacturing facilities, the big new projects are actually being announced or sighted and invested in red states or purple states.

David Roberts

Most, as I understand it, a rather large preponderance, is going to red states. Yeah, if I'm a state legislator or say I work in a state agency, I'm listening to this and I'm nodding and I'm saying, "Yes, I would love to have more effing capacity." Like, tell me something I don't know. I'm starving for capacity. I'd love to be able to do all this stuff." But state budgets are state budgets. Unlike the federal government, the state can't just print more money. So it's dependent on sort of business cycle year to year, dependent on booms and busts, and often have a lot of trouble finding stable funding for capacity.

So let's talk about where states can go to get some money and help building capacity. As it happens, Uncle Ira also contains some of that. So tell me about the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, CPRG. What is it and what's it for?

Sam Ricketts

So the CPRG, the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Program in IRA, is, I think, one of the most exciting provisions in the law. It is a new $5 billion grant program housed at the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, that can provide the opportunity to invest in state and local and tribal government capacity and to give states and tribal governments who want to lead additional resources, to empower them to do so, to lead in the clean energy and the industrial strategies that suit their unique needs and strengths and that will challenge them to compete amongst each other for the best plans most deserving of federal investment. To help them go further.

David Roberts

Right. So there's two basic buckets here, both of which are interesting, but talk first about the money for planning.

Sam Ricketts

So this is based on a program President Biden first proposed in his American Jobs Plan, State Clean Energy Challenge Grants, which was at the very beginning of a very long and arduous legislative process. We don't need to recap in detail now, but is worth its own story. The program contains three different parts: $250 million for planning grants that are in the process of being executed right now to all states, to all territories, about 70 to 80 of the nation's largest municipal statistical areas, MSAs, and then to a number of tribal nations. There is going to be later on this year, Part B, the $4.6 billion Implementation Grant round, which is like where the big money comes in.

David Roberts

Help to implement the aforementioned plans.

Sam Ricketts

Exactly. With federal money to implement some of perhaps the best of the aforementioned plans. And then there is also, as an aside, because it's important, because it's about capacity building, $140 million in federal administrative costs that the Federal Government can use for its own cost of administering this program and can use to better support state and local governments and tribal governments with technical assistance. So, worth keeping an eye on that third bucket as well. But, obviously, the $250 million out to states and local governments and tribes right now, providing capacity as we speak and then providing opportunity for more money down the line.

David Roberts

So that first bucket is for anybody who submits a plan.

Sam Ricketts

Yes. And this is a great innovation. This is capacity building. Really excited to see how EPA is carrying out the Planning Grant round of this. It's some of the first money that's going to go out grant wise under IRA, every state, provided they submit a notice of intent to participate that was due at the end of March. And then, provided they submit a work plan and application that was due at the end of April, has an opportunity to receive a $3 million grant that they put in the agency of their choosing, whether that's the Governor's Office or the Energy Office or the Department of Environmental Protection or otherwise.

Every MSA gets a million dollars as well. Tribes also get investment, as I mentioned, as do territories. But these investments directly build capacity. They can use them to hire staff, hire consultants, build high quality tools they need, like greenhouse gas inventories, or cover other administrative costs of not just applying for the Implementation Grant in the future, but to take advantage of the rest of the money passed in IRA.

David Roberts

Right. When you invest and build the capacity, the capacity is there. Once you use it for this plan, it's still there, and you can use it for other things, like these investments in administrative capacity, pay back richly over time.

Sam Ricketts

That's right.

David Roberts

And so then the Implementation Grants, this is not going to be a give money to everybody who applies thing. This is going to be more of a competition type of thing.

Sam Ricketts

Yes. So the Planning Grant round is intended by congress to be spread widely. And I'm pleased to see how EPA has done that and done that quickly to make sure dollars are flowing in everywhere. Again, to address both like, hey, you can use this money to apply for an implementation grant in the future, but hey, you can also use this money to build yourself some capacity inside of your agencies because of all the other things that are flowing. But yes, then later this year, we're expecting an implementation grant announcement. EPA says it would come late summer, maybe it's the fall.

We're hoping, the royal we all of us hoping together, they move these dollars quickly in order to get the dollars out the door quickly, certainly as early as they can in 2024. But these would really be grants that would bolster capacity and could reward those states and local governments who come forward with the plans that show they're going to lead to the greatest catalytic change. And what I'm hoping to see what I and others are hoping to see from them with this is really investing in the state driven, local driven strategies that fit their unique needs and that reduce the maximum amount of climate pollution and achieve those breakthroughs in places that are additional to that which may occur otherwise without these grants or that which may be possible otherwise, given these states unique policy environments.

David Roberts

And this is not a new format here the idea that states are competing for federal money, the whole Race to the Top idea, this is not the first time this has been tried with federal grants.

Sam Ricketts

Indeed, it's not. Actually, a very similar amount of money was invested in a program called the Race to the Top Challenge Grants that the Obama administration executed about a decade ago, about $4 million that was spread around. I think twelve states were awarded grants that ranged in size from $75 million to $700 million or something, and those grants went to those states to pass or implement innovative leading edge education policies. But the fascinating thing about the program that I think should inform how the EPA thinks about this program is it wasn't only the states that got grants that executed their policies.

Everyone got to work writing a plan. And the majority of states, even those who didn't get a grant, would later go on to implement at least some of those policies.

David Roberts

Yes, this is what I always used to say about the Clean Power Plan, too, right? I mean, one of the that Obama tried and failed to pass, one of the great benefits of it is that it would have made every utility at least think about this stuff. And it's just a fact that once you start thinking about it, once you start planning, once you start doing the numbers, you realize, like, oh, these are good things to do regardless whether you get the federal money or not, right? So just catalyzing the planning itself does so much to generate future action.

Sam Ricketts

The Clean Power Plan is a great example of this, right? Because notably, utilities met targets much faster than they would have even if the plan had ...

David Roberts

Actually catalyzed it without even passing it all. Look at the ...

Sam Ricketts

And it catalyzed planning ... Actually that's a good example for this particular topic as well because having been in a state government at that time and been part of some of those conversations, it catalyzed planning not only by the utilities in the industry, but it actually catalyzed planning at the state government level. For the first time in many places you actually had environmental regulators who were going to be charged with implementing the Clean Power Plan, working with the PUC that regulates the utilities, working with the State Energy Office that writes the State's energy strategy.

David Roberts

Right, which is a brand new thing. So let me ask you to editorialize a little bit. You got this $4.6 billion bucket of money that you can use to help states and localities and tribal governments implement the plans that they sent to you previously. Obviously there's a ton of latitude within that. There's a ton of approaches you could take that you could do bunches and bunches and bunches of little grants. You could make it your mission to sort of give at least a little bit of money to everybody who has a plan. Or you could try to sort of concentrate money on a couple of big plans that you think could be transformative or could serve as an example to other states or some mix.

So how would you like to see EPA approach handing this money out?

Sam Ricketts

It's a great question. EPA has wide latitude as to how they design and execute this Implementation Grant Program round. And I mentioned it's $4.6 billion. I mean, recall that we were talking just a bit ago about they have an opportunity here to do a couple of different things. One is build capacity in states and local governments basically across the board, right? Because everyone needs some version of help here in order to take advantage of all of the resources that are here. But then they also have an opportunity to reward those states and local governments who are going to take advantage of that next generation of clean energy industrial policy leadership who want to use the resources to go further.

David Roberts

Right. You can fund the laggards to get them up to the starting line or you could fund the leaders

Sam Ricketts

And you can do a little bit of both. Like you can cover that for one, using some of the money, a small chunk of the money to build additional capacity. Recall that capacity building investments already been made by EPA with the Planning Grant round. What happens if they did that with basically a second planning Grant round or maybe a second, twice of the size, Planning Grant round? And that would give some money across the board to continue building capacity which, as we've just talked about, is a ubiquitous problem regardless of the state's level of leadership on clean energy.

And then you could save the majority of the funding to slice up for a select number of grants that can range from eight to nine digits of major investments. That can help provide a locus of organization and momentum for that state and local government to execute on a truly ambitious clean energy industrial strategy, again unique to its own needs, and ensuring that especially EPA should be looking out for opportunities to invest in clean energy leadership where it wouldn't be otherwise occurring. So additionality is key here, I think the EPA should obviously also be looking at plans that are going to support disadvantaged communities.

David Roberts

I meant to ask about that specifically, actually, isn't the 40% rule that 40% of all these monies have to go to disadvantaged communities? Does that apply to this bucket as well?

Sam Ricketts

Indeed it does. Actually, there's two different ways that sort of equity applies to the requirements that the administration should set out for. One, to your point, this is one of the programs that falls under the Biden Administration's Justice40 Initiative, meaning that applicants should be showing how no less than 40% of the investment benefits from their plan are going to benefit disadvantaged communities. And there's actually a second one in the statute which Congress said EPA has got to require these plans to show how they're going to reduce climate pollution both overall and in disadvantaged and low income communities.

So a couple of different ways. EPA already also in the planning grant guidance has required states to work with their city governments in developing their plans or municipal governments, and they've encouraged them also to work with disadvantaged communities. And that's an opportunity here for EPA and the Implementation Grant round as well to task applicants to show how they're going to work with and benefit disadvantaged communities with their investments, how they're going to support good jobs with their strategies. EPA has latitude here as to how to design this program. I think also there's an opportunity here to encourage states and local governments to work together, whether that's in a region and are in multiple parts of the country.

This is a time for creative strategies and for calling forth sort of that unique next generation of state clean energy leadership that we're going to need to see now and throughout the coming decade.

David Roberts

Right, one more note about this program before we move on and wrap up, because I just personally found it so delightful and clever. Listeners will recall when Obama said, "Hey, states, how would you like to have billions and billions of dollars of free money to help have better health care for your poor people?" And red states just flat turned it down. They turned down free money, which is insane, but certainly something you can imagine happening here too. But there's actually a somewhat clever and innovative feature of this program meant to address that eventuality. So tell us about that.

Sam Ricketts

Indeed, this is a really innovative piece of what EPA has done with this program. I mentioned earlier that $3 million of planning grant money is available to all states. What they had to do was submit a notice of intent to participate and follow that on with an application and a work plan. Notably, if a state chose to decline that $3 million grant, the money wouldn't dry up or disappear. It would actually be available to the largest metropolitan statistical areas in that state, MSAs in that state and across the country. And so the dollars would go to somebody and it kind of provides a double incentive for the states to say yes.

And notably, they did. 46 out of 50 states submitted a notice of intent to participate and receive their $3 million.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's one thing to say no to money. It's another thing to say no to money when you know your nemeses in your blue cities are going to get the money you're turning down. That's such a clever twist.

Sam Ricketts

And we want some national governments tool one to say yes to this, right. Because if they take the money, they're going to go build a plan that's going to reduce emissions. It might be their unique flavor of that. It should be their unique flavor of that. But it gives them an opportunity to put people in seats and to start designing strategies that are going to reduce climate pollution and that are going to allow them to build the industrial strategy that's going to work for them in the 21st century clean energy economy. And we're going to need everyone doing that eventually at some point.

David Roberts

At every level, okay, by way of wrapping up then, could we touch on I mean, this is a big $5 billion and especially $5 billion is how big is money these days? Who can judge? But like $5 billion when you're talking about state budgets is quite a bit of money. You can move some needles with that. Are there other federal programs that states can draw on or states and cities specifically to help them build administrative capacity?

Sam Ricketts

Really good question. The first thing I want to say is these investments will allow states and cities and tribal governments and territories to take advantage of the rest of the funding flows in IRA and Bill and CHIPS in new and more ways like we're talking about because they're going to build the capacity that empowers them to do so. The second part is though, there's not a lot of capacity building types of investments in these bills. There are a couple. I think the other main one spend a lot of time thinking about is the state energy program of the Department of Energy, which is the program that Department of Energy uses to support state energy programs throughout the country.

Sometimes they provide, frankly, the only funding that underpins a state energy program in some states. So a vital program, not a lot of money. It's actually money that came through that program was reauthorized and funded through the Bipartisan infrastructure law, not through IRA. But there aren't a lot of dollars in capacity building. There are other capacity building programs and technical assistance programs. Federal government and EPA actually has just announced investments in a number of TICTACs. I'm forgetting what precisely that stands for other than a delicious breath mint, which are regional entities that are going to work to provide technical assistance for disadvantaged communities in particular to help them take advantage of and community based organizations.

So there's the thriving communities program. There's a suite of federal TA programs, but not a lot that go directly into juicing the capacity of states and local governments throughout the country.

David Roberts

Right. It does seem though, like if you're a state and you're given money to do X, it makes perfect sense to spend some portion of that money to build the capacity to do X, right? It seems like you could states could spend a lot of different buckets, at least a little bit on capacity because otherwise otherwise you can't really take advantage of the money.

Sam Ricketts

No, absolutely. And there's other piece of it. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund has some dollars that can be used for particular assistance. There are others, don't get me wrong. However, the flexibility provided to individual states to look across programs, some of them will get very tied into a grant associated with this particular strategy. And that's a little bit different than empowering the state or the city or the county to design its own strategy that works for it or to shift from one day to the next from one program or one project to the next, which is also a challenge.

David Roberts

Right. Okay, final question. We've been talking about governmental capacity, basically administrative capacity, which is great in rules. Is there anything that just ordinary people advocates or activists or maybe philanthropies, private philanthropies can do on this subject other than just like pay attention and cheerlead?

Sam Ricketts

Yeah, I mean, the first thing to know, as with most things, is that this is a challenge worthy of attention. That's sort of first things first. Lots of effort went in over many years to getting these bills passed for many people. Right. And there's a whole apparatus of advocacy that zeroed in on that for a very long time, as you and I know. And this is kind of a different line of work. Implementation is kind of a different line of work and it's the talk of the town now, but it's very much like attention to state and local governments is going to be dispositive in our success or failure with these bills and what we're trying to do with decarbonization and with building a just and thriving clean energy economy.

And that the attention that advocates need to provide, just like they've provided it at the halls of Congress, just like they provide it at President Biden and at his EPA and at his Interior Department, et cetera. They need to not be providing it with their City Council, with their state legislature, with their Governor's Office, with their Public Utility Commission. In some ways, it's not advocacy. In some ways, it's partnership with spreading the word to disadvantaged communities, to individual consumers that, hey, there's incentives available to you, there are investments available to you. Let's go take advantage of them and build some new, clean, better futures for our communities here.

David Roberts

Awesome. This has been excellent, Sam. And I bet if state and city people are listening to this, they are gratified to hear it wrapped up and get a little focus and direction. So thank you so much for all your work over the years. And also thanks for coming on.

Sam Ricketts

Thanks for having me, David. Real pleasure as ever.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volt subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

In this episode, Jessica Wilkinson and Nels Johnson of The Nature Conservancy discuss the pathway they see for a rapid, low-cost clean energy transition that minimizes impact on environmentally sensitive land.

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Text transcript:

David Roberts

A great deal of confused and misleading information is circulating about the land-use requirements of the energy transition. Everyone agrees that building the amount of clean energy necessary to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require an enormous amount of land.

But is there enough land? Will the transition require industrializing green fields and virgin forests and other environmentally or culturally sensitive lands? Can the energy transition be done big enough and fast enough while still remaining respectful of natural resources and other species? What mix of technologies will go most lightly on the environment?

To provide a definitive answer to these questions, The Nature Conservancy launched its Power of Place project — first in California, then for the greater American West, and now, this week, for the entire nation.

Using various metrics related to wildlife, ecosystems, cultural resources, and protected natural areas, the Power of Place project attempts to comprehensively map out sensitive land areas. It then tallies up the amount of clean energy required to reach net zero by 2050 and tries to match those needs to the available lands, to see if there is a pathway to net zero that protects them.

The good news is that, with some wise planning, the amount of environmentally sensitive land impacted by a business-as-usual clean-energy transition can be substantially reduced at relatively low cost.

To discuss this and other findings of the report, I contacted Jessica Wilkinson (Power of Place project manager) and Nels Johnson (the project’s science and technology lead) of The Nature Conservancy. We discussed the technology shifts that will enable a lighter footprint, the policies that could help encourage them, and the best ways to avoid community resistance.

Alright, then. Jessica Wilkinson and Nells Johnson. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jessica Wilkinson

Thank you for having us.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, thanks for having us, David.

David Roberts

Jessica, let's start with you. The subject of land-use and renewable energy, there's a lot of weird information and misinformation floating around about this, a lot of weird myths, a lot of sort of people with strong opinions who don't know what they're talking about. So what inspired this series of reports, the Power of Place reports? What inspired you to start undertaking this project?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah, this is precisely one of the reasons that we were inspired to do this project under sighting, as usual. Like the way that we're proceeding now with a renewable energy build-out, we are seeing an increase in local opposition, and we are seeing concerns about land-use issues. And land-use and environmental issues are indeed kind of one of the obstacles that's popping up in the way of us being able to meet our clean energy goals and meet our clean energy goals rapidly. So we really started this work in California, which was the first time we kind of developed this Power of Place methodology and that refurbished report came out in 2019.

We refined it and then released Power of Place West in 2022. And this is kind of the next iteration where we further refined it. And each time we've kind of added new kind of levels of detail and asked some slightly different questions. But the land-use issue is exactly one of the reasons we've done this. So really what we're trying to do is question the premise of whether or not we really need to make these huge trade offs between conservation and climate.

David Roberts

I think the conventional wisdom is that if we switch from fossil fuels to renewables there are a lot of advantages. But one of the disadvantages is you need a bunch of land and you're going to end up consuming a bunch of crop land or environmentally sensitive land or land that the locals don't want you on. All this kind of stuff. And so your take is that that stuff is exaggerated. So what is the power of place? What is it meant to convey?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah, it's not to say that it's exaggerated, it's real, it's happening. The question is how much of it is avoidable?

David Roberts

Right.

Jessica Wilkinson

So what we are seeking to do is ask that question do we need to make all these huge trade offs for nature and for people on the path to decarbonization? So we've asked in Power of Place, it's a modeling exercise and you can ask the model, okay, go achieve net zero emissions by 2050, economy-wide. And model please kind of exclude these environmental data layers and let's see if that changes, whether we can get there, the pace at which we get to that goal and what the cost differential is.

David Roberts

Right before we jump into what you found, how would you describe the status quo of land-use planning and energy?

Jessica Wilkinson

This is a relatively new land-use, right? I mean, this is not something a lot of communities have seen before. They're leasing it for the first time and they may be seeing it come at them really quickly. And so there is a response. Just like local governments adopt local land-use planning and zoning for industrial uses, for commercial uses, for residential uses, they are adopting ordinances to ensure that the renewable energy is going to places where that community would prefer to have it. So we are seeing a lot of local ordinances go up around the country.

There have been projections from NREL. That report they released recently said that there were 3,000 local governments that adopted ordinances. And I think it's important to keep in mind that just because this is happening, just because these ordinance are being adopted doesn't necessarily mean that they're being adopted to block wind and solar. In every case, some of them are again, just a natural reaction to land-use planning and a desire to direct it to places that the community feels is most appropriate. Certainly, and the NREL study from 2022 showed that some of them are overly restrictive and likely intended to be.

But I think it's important not to assume that just because there is an ordinance, it was intended to block renewables.

David Roberts

To what extent is this response and there is a very widespread backlash happening. To what extent is that a fair critique of the way renewable energy has been planned and cited thus far? And to what extent is it just sort of an inevitable reaction to social change?

Jessica Wilkinson

Right. We have looked at this and we do think that more or less about half of the renewable energy that is being deployed now is in areas that at least the Nature Conservancy might consider to be highly sensitive to wildlife inhabitant.

David Roberts

Yeah, that's a lot.

Nels Johnson

I'll just add one sort of thought here about where are we today in terms of planning for this major infrastructure build-out that's coming our way? So first of all, just the scale of it is really huge. It's something like on the order of the interstate highway system that we built between the, in terms of the land area, in terms of the investment, in terms of the pervasive effects, mostly for good. But if it's not done in the right places, it can cause adverse impacts to natural areas, to local communities. So one way of thinking of this is we plan a lot for transportation, for housing, for commercial and residential development.

And up until now, we really haven't done spatially explicit energy planning. And that's one of the things we're hoping to accomplish with this series of power place studies is encouraging at all levels. Utilities, state energy offices, the federal government, regional transmission organizations, all to get more explicit about where are the best places to put all this infrastructure, and engaging the public at the community level, variety of levels to provide input into that planning.

David Roberts

Well, it does seem like if you sort of measure the amount of backlash that has been produced by the amount of renewable energy so far, and then you multiply that by the amount of renewable energy we're going to try to build over the next decade or two, if you apply that same multiplier to the backlash, that's a very big backlash. Right. I guess part of the point here is that it's less, maybe less about poor planning than just no planning. There's just not a lot of coordinated planning around the renewable energy build-out yet.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, I think that's fair to say that right now there's very little planning that the public has an opportunity to engage in and that needs to change to promote wider acceptance of this build-out. People have to have a voice in what that energy future looks like for them and they need to be reassured that they're going to get benefits out of the development that's taking place and that the energy isn't just being produced in their backyard and sent hundreds of miles away to a different user.

David Roberts

I want to come back to this question of public participation because I have a few troubled thoughts about it. But first, so this report, this is a national report and you created several different scenarios for different kinds of pathways to zero carbon by 2050, which have varying impacts on sensitive lands. And sort of like you did these increments like here's, we can avoid 10% of these damages, 20% of these damages, all the way up to 90%. So one question I had about the scenarios up front was because I feel like this is another sort of mythology that's floating around is in any of these scenarios, did you run into an absolute shortage of good land?

In other words, did you at any point encounter like there's just not enough suitable places to build enough renewable energy to do what we're talking about doing? Did that come up at all?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah, I mean, you'll see that kind of our big take home message that we really lead with is that we can get to net zero emissions by 2050 while avoiding impacts to most natural and working lands. Not all, but most. And we recognize that there still are going to be trade offs. However, what this study did show is that we can reduce those trade offs significantly with some better planning. So there won't be none, there won't be zero trade offs. We think we can reduce those trade offs significantly and but by doing that, by reducing environmental and social trade offs, we really can accelerate the renewable energy build-out and avoid some of that conflict, which some of which is unnecessary.

Nels Johnson

We've found that there is enough land for all of those scenarios to get built. What's important to recognize is that wind is probably the most land intensive of these technologies. And so as you reduce impacts, you do start to constrain wind a little bit more. But even so, there's more than enough land for wind to be accommodated. So for example, in the Power Place West report, we found that there was three times the amount of land available for low impact wind sighting in the western United States. Even under the most protective approach to natural areas and agricultural lands, we would still have more than enough to accommodate wind.

David Roberts

Right. So whatever land issues we run into, not having enough land is not going to be one of them. Because I think people have in their head some very inflated ideas about because this stuff about land-use has been floating around so long. I think people have very inflated ideas about the amount of land required and just thought we should clear that up front. There's enough land.

Nels Johnson

Yeah. And with solar in particular, we have lots and lots of flexibility for where we put solar.

David Roberts

What the report shows is here's the energy mix for a 10% reduction in land impacts, 20%, 30%, 40%. And as you are moving up that scale and avoiding more and more of these impacts. What you see is that wind declines and solar grows. So insofar as you are taking land-use impacts into account, you are shifting somewhat from wind to solar, at least relative to sort of baseline projections. I just want to know why that is, because it's a little bit counterintuitive to me, because my impression is, and I think a lot of people's impression is that solar takes the most land, is the most sort of like sprawling per kilowatt.

So why is it that when you restrict land-use to more appropriate swathes of land, why do you shift from wind to solar? Just maybe explain that a little bit more.

Nels Johnson

Well, so the main reason, David, is that solar project actually are much more efficient in the use of land compared to wind. So, for example, a wind project that's 100 megawatts needs about 9,200 acres to accommodate those turbines. Those turbines have to be separated by a certain distance so they don't interfere with each other. And so you need a project area, about 9,200 acres. A solar project the same size 100 megawatts nameplate capacity needs about 430 acres. So it's significantly smaller. Now, within that wind project area, of course, not all the area is being impacted. In fact, only about 3% of it is.

You have the turbines and you have the road, and you have a power line that's connecting it all to the main grid, and those areas in between are available for agriculture. Right? So wind is really compatible with agriculture, but when it comes to species, when it comes to habitats, that's not always true. So when, for example, you clear a turbine pad, if it's in a forest, for example, you create what's called an edge effect, and that extends about 400 feet into the forest. And so that area is no longer good habitat for a variety of species, and it changes the kinds of plants that will grow there and other things.

David Roberts

But even so, if you're only impacting 3% of that 9,200 acres, I mean, even if you have little islands of impact around the turbines, it still seems like a relatively small area that you're impacting them.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, of course, it depends on the species. So when you take prairie chickens, lesser prairie chickens and greater prairie chickens, they're both very sensitive to tall structures in grassland environments because tall structures are associated with places that hawks and eagles can see. And so they have an aversion to being in areas near large tall objects, including wind turbines. So that area is larger than the separation distance from those turbines. I see. That's kind of the indirect or displacement effect we see for certain species. So bottom line is, wind is very compatible with agriculture. It's less compatible with some species, particularly birds and bats.

David Roberts

Speaking of compatibility with agriculture, let's talk a little bit about ... Jessica, one of the things the report does is focus on a couple of strategies, I guess, to build out renewable energy in such a way as to impact lesser use. One of those is colocation. One of those is agrovoltaics. Can you maybe just tell us real quick what those two are and why the report sort of singled those out?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah. So this Power Place National really, again, was an evolution from some previous work where we were trying to ask some novel questions. And this issue in particular land saving approaches, really is a novel approach to decarbonization scenario planning. And what we wanted to do is in addition to considering how the mix of technologies changes the footprint, we wanted to consider how land saving approaches and there's a lot of different land saving approaches out there. One could argue nuclear is a land saving approach, but we wanted to consider how some land saving approaches could again affect the overall footprint and therefore kind of maybe by reducing that footprint, reduce some conflict.

And the three kinds of land saving approaches that we're able to really kind of dig into because the data were there were agrovoltaics colocation of wind and solar and then fix tilt solar. So those are the three that we really kind of dove into deeply.

David Roberts

And was that because you thought that those were the three most potent or just three common ones? Or why those three?

Jessica Wilkinson

There was robust data that was robust enough for us to consider this. This is the first time folks have taken a stab at this. So it's pretty novel approach. And for the colocation of wind and solar there, we're looking at wind and solar on the same project area. And when we looked at this approach, it was really promising for agrovoltaics. It's again an apportment and promising strategy for producing food and generating solar energy on the same land. Not all crops are compatible.

David Roberts

Just so listeners know what we're talking about, agrivoltaics is just putting solar panels on agricultural land, on the same land where food is being grown.

Jessica Wilkinson

Exactly. And it's very popular conceptually. It's not like, at the moment, super scalable. But we wanted to ask how much more agrivoltaics could we do as a way to again get some of these co-benefits? And what we did find was that by using agrivoltaics we could grow the amount of agrovoltaics we currently are projected to have from 216 square miles to about 600 square miles. So that's a significant increase.

David Roberts

It's a significant increase. But is it a significant impact in the context of the overall land-use picture? Like, is this a big player in the final mix, do you think?

Nels Johnson

It's not currently a big player. And we don't project it to be under the assumptions we used. We do think it has the potential to grow with technological innovations and more incentives and more experience. So, for example, agrivoltaics that we looked at primarily are focused on fruit and vegetable crops there is some evidence that potatoes, wheat, cattle can benefit from agrivoltaics too, but there's just not enough data for us to be able to model the effects of agrivoltaics in those settings. But hopefully over the next few years we'll start to see more experience and that may expand the role that agrivoltaics can play in the future.

David Roberts

Why agrovoltaics and not aggri-wind, wind-agra, whatever the wind equivalent is? It seems like I mean, intuitively there's so much space between wind turbines, it seems almost more sensible to try to do agriculture amidst the wind. Is that not a thing?

Nels Johnson

It is a thing. And in fact, a fair amount of the wind that's being deployed now is in agricultural landscapes. And that's what we show as well. The area that we show being directly impacted in agriculture, that's cropland, that's a subset of the most productive, at least from a human food point of view, areas croplands, about 2% of them we project could be directly impacted by 2050. But that indirect impact or the area of agriculture that's in wind projects is going to be significantly larger than that. But that land benefits potentially from those wind turbines because the farmer or the rancher is getting an income stream not just from the agriculture they're doing between the wind turbines, but also the revenue they get for leasing land for that energy production.

David Roberts

People understand the land saving benefits of agrivoltaics are very sort of intuitively obvious. Similarly with colocation, like if you put the wind and solar in the same place, then you don't need two places. It seems straightforward enough. But what's the deal with this fixed tilt solar? Explain that a little bit. The land saving benefits, what's involved there?

Nels Johnson

The main land saving benefit from fixed versus tracking is that the fixed panels are able to be packed together in tighter rows than the tracking. The tracking needs more space between the rows of PV panels in order to do that tracking. So that makes those tracking panels have a higher capacity to convert sunlight into energy. You can actually squeeze more energy capacity into the same amount of land using fixed PV. So at least in areas where there's not that much difference in the capacity advantage for tracking over fixed, fixed can be one of your land saving approaches because it uses somewhat less land than the ...

David Roberts

Oh, interesting, that is not at all what I would have predicted. I would have predicted that tracking because it has higher capacity, because it produces more power, you just need less of it and thus would cover less land. But that turns out to be wrong.

Nels Johnson

Well, except as you go further south, then the advantage for the tracking really starts to pay off, including and exceeds what you can gain by packing more fixed into the same amount of area. Because that tracking differential, once you're further south in the southwest, places like Nevada or places like Georgia and Florida, there you're always going to have tracking is going to be the technology of choice. Fix probably doesn't make sense in those kinds of settings.

David Roberts

Interesting. Okay, so the report takes sort of a close look at these three land saving, let's say, technologies fixed versus tracking, agrivoltaics and colocation. But those are mostly just novel inquiries to figure them out. The bulk of the land saving that's done in these scenarios is by shifting the technology balance. Is that fair? Like that's the primary instrument in what is or is not saving some land.

Nels Johnson

So there are three steps that we kind of recommend. So one is use environmental and social data no matter what technologies you're using. Then look at those technologies you have available and figure out which combination makes sense for your region, for your landscape to achieve your climate goals, as well as your conservation and local community goals. And that may involve substituting solar for wind and maybe adding storage to the solar so you can better make up for the gap that the wind might leave behind.

And then the last is within those technologies that you have, say, solar. What are your options for saving land, for example, agrivoltaics. One thing I want to say about land saving approaches are two things that we didn't model as variables, but we assumed fairly high levels of implementation and that is efficiency and distributed or rooftop solar. So we made some pretty aggressive assumptions about how much rooftop solar will be built by 2050. We assume that about 35% of available rooftops would have solar 30 years from now, which is at the high end of projections that are out there. And so it's a decent chunk of the solar contribution, but it doesn't get us all the way to where we need to go.

It gets us something like about 10% of how far we need to go.

David Roberts

But a big piece of land saving via solar is by moving the solar onto rooftops.

Nels Johnson

It is an important piece and we should certainly support efforts that make economic sense to get solar on rooftops because it means there's somewhat less that has to go out in the landscape somewhere else.

Jessica Wilkinson

But I would say if you look at the main kind of figure that shows how total land-use impacts shift based on the different impact reduction scenarios we looked at and how the mix of technologies changes, I guess one way to look at it is we didn't challenge the model super hard on pushing the envelope on rooftop. We asked the model to kind of push the envelope as much as possible in considering how shifting technologies makes a difference, how agrovoltaics and colocation and switching from tracking to fixed makes a difference. There's a lot of opportunity, I think really to push the envelope more and challenge some of those assumptions about rooftop solar and policy policies that we can get in place really to kind of nudge us up as much as we possibly can because ultimately that and energy efficiency are some of the best land saving approaches.

David Roberts

Right. And energy efficiency, I guess, is obvious enough that don't have to spell it out too much, but just the less energy you use, the less you have to build, so the less land you use. Yeah, I meant to ask about efficiency in rooftop solar because I noticed that they were not highlighted, but those are the main things I generally hear from people when they talk about how to save lands. Another question, Jessica. You mentioned earlier that you could view nuclear power as a land saving technology. This is something you hear very frequently from nuclear fans, that it uses tons less land than wind and solar for the same amount of power.

So I was a little surprised. I mean, I guess I would have expected that as you move toward reducing these impacts, you're going to get lots and lots more nuclear out of the model. But that didn't happen. It was a big shift from wind to solar, but there wasn't really a huge shift in anything else. I guess sort of bioenergy kind of declines sharply once you get up to avoiding a bunch of impacts. But the main technology shift was from wind to solar. So what explains that? Why not more nuclear if you're trying to save land?

Jessica Wilkinson

I think it really comes down to cost.

David Roberts

Nuclear's old Achilles heel.

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah. And as part of this study, the modeling, we work very closely with Evolved Energy and Montara Mountain Energy and Grace Wu at UC Santa Barbara. And Evolved has the kind of energy capacity modeling expertise. And so what we're telling the model to do here is try and avoid natural and working lands as much as you can model and consider cost. And so as we're seeing cost play out in how the mix of technologies changes and it would select nuclear if it were competitive from a cost point of view to more wind and more solar.

David Roberts

So then a follow up question about that. Then you say rooftop solar can save X amount, but advances in technology or policy, we could and should push that higher in the name of saving land. Do you take that same basic approach with nuclear? Like, would you support reforms? Do you support reforms that make nuclear either technologically, these smaller, allegedly cheaper nuclear plants that are allegedly coming sometime soon, or just regulatory reform? Do you support pushing the envelope on nuclear as well in the name of land preservation?

Jessica Wilkinson

So the Nature Conservancy, kind of, has focused a lot on the process also being incredibly important, having the local communities have a very important role to play here. And this is one of those technologies that for sure that we need to be particularly sensitive about. But we do acknowledge that current nuclear production is really necessary component of reducing emissions in the short term and even possibly in the long term, provided there are improvements for people and wildlife in the cost, safety and environmental performance of nuclear technology and as well as waste storage and mining practices.

David Roberts

Nels, one thing that jumps out at me as a longtime fan of electrification is that the scenario that performs best in terms of land preservation, sensitive land preservation, is the high electrification scenario. Why is that?

Nels Johnson

Because it gives you more flexibility in how you get to net zero. So you have a range of technologies, some of which are more spatially efficient than others, and so that gives you the option. So nuclear, for example, is one of those very efficient options. And so as we reduce impacts, push really hard to reduce impacts, the model starts to choose some additional nuclear because it is so efficient.

David Roberts

So it does boost a little bit. Nuclear does get a little bit.

Nels Johnson

It about doubles the amount of nuclear that's online by 2050 when we really work hard to reduce impact. So it's not a lot, but it does increase somewhat. Keep in mind that the experience with the small modular nuclear plants isn't in the commercial space yet, so our data is very limited. And so the model just isn't able to really get enough good data to make it a cost effective option. Based on what we know now, that may change in the future. And I'll just say that's true of all technologies. So could be technology breakthroughs in lots of different places.

For example, I was listening to the show with Jamie Beard on geothermal not too long ago, and that's one of those technologies where there really could be a breakthrough that really makes it a much more attractive way of getting to net zero. But currently our data on geothermal is not exactly very promising in terms of cost effectiveness. But there's some really interesting innovations going on right now, really change that picture.

David Roberts

And it is notably light on land geothermal.

Nels Johnson

It is.

David Roberts

That is worth noting.

Nels Johnson

That isn't to say there aren't other issues, but generally it's more spatially efficient. You do have to look at aquifer effects and things like that and there can be things that are important to really avoid or mitigate with geothermal. But yeah, overall breakthroughs in geothermal could lead us to much more land efficient approaches to getting to net zero in 30 years.

David Roberts

Jessica, what are energy communities and what role do they play in this? One of the results is that if you move to this more land sensitive approach, these more land sensitive scenarios, you end up with more jobs in energy communities, which seems like a good thing, but A. what's an energy community? And B. why do you end up with more jobs in them?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah, so we didn't necessarily say anything about jobs, but when we were working on the modeling and building the assumptions, we had the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, so big deal. And so we wanted to consider. How that tax credit that is included in the Inflation Reduction Act would affect ... So IRA gives a 10% tax credit for clean energy deployment in energy communities and it has super wonky definition, as you would expect, it includes areas with historic fossil fuel production and processing.

David Roberts

Right. So these are communities that were embedded in the fossil fuel economy and we're worried about them because we're moving away from fossil fuels.

Jessica Wilkinson

Right. And energy communities, the definition also included brownfields. But treasury is still working out kind of the technical definitions for a lot of this.

David Roberts

Right.

Jessica Wilkinson

Which made it hard when we were building this model several months ago. But kind of the mapping that has been done around the fossil fuel production aspects of energy communities is a little bit clearer. So we looked only at those and we were able to model areas again, those areas associated with historic fossil fuel industries, as I mentioned, evolved models, the evolved energy energies, their models takes into account kind of price. And we weren't able to kind of build that 10% tax credit into the energy model just because the rules haven't been set quite yet. Instead, and we might get to this, we use this dynamic scoring approach in this study and we basically put a finger on the scale in favor of these communities.

We gave them a negative social impact score to just see whether or not if we're incentivizing them, we see more of the renewable energy build-out in these communities.

David Roberts

So kind of an attempt to simulate an incentive.

Jessica Wilkinson

Exactly. And what we did find was that when we do that, we do see an additional 10% of the clean energy deployment being directed to these communities. So about 32% of the total 2050 energy portfolio in our scenario is built in these energy communities. And under one of the scenarios we looked at most closely, the 70% impact reduction scenario, 23 million people in those communities — live in those communities that host clean energy projects compared to 21 million people in the setting as usual scenario. So we do see a larger percentage of the portfolio happening in these communities and more people live in those communities.

When we again put our thumb on the scale for those energy communities.

David Roberts

And are there land implications to that or is that just more about social impacts?

Jessica Wilkinson

Sure, there's land implications as well. Yeah, so there's going to be benefits to those communities and there'll be impacts as well.

Nels Johnson

One thing I'll just point out about the energy communities, one of the reasons why the modeling finds them very attractive for energy development is because it's likely they have the infrastructure and the energy capacity models out there looking for places that have certain characteristics. And these energy communities have the kinds of characteristics energy models looking for. So that makes them relatively attractive for new energy development. It's obviously a different kind of energy development, but it can take advantage of some of the same infrastructure. There are likely already existing transmission lines. There's road access, there's a worker force nearby.

So that's partly why we see such a large proportion of the build-out going to these communities.

David Roberts

And the land is sort of already affected.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, from a conservation point of view there's some benefit because these communities often have lands that have been previously developed for earlier forms of energy production.

David Roberts

Right. One other technical question is you're modeling finds as all modeling finds that building out renewable energy to hit the 2050 target is going to require an extraordinarily large amount of transmission infrastructure, new transmission infrastructure. But you find that an approach that is sensitive to these land and social impacts ends up using a lot more transmission, but a lot less more than in the baseline scenario. So why is that? What is it about being sensitive toward land that gets you less need for transmission?

Nels Johnson

The main story there, David, is that as we're reducing impacts to natural areas and to croplands, it's moving away from wind projects, for example, in the Great Plains that are quite distant from population centers where the energy demand is, to solar projects that are typically located closer to population centers and demand centers. So that is a big part of the explanation.

David Roberts

So the shift from wind to solar sort of carries a reduction in transmission.

Nels Johnson

And then that reduces the transmission need both in terms of interregional transmission movement because you don't have to move as much between, for example, the Great Plains in the Southeast, as one example, but also the gen-tie lines. These are the lines that connect the wind project or the solar project onto the grid. And so both of those transmission requirements goes down. It's still a massive increase in what we have today. So we need at least two and a half times, or three and a half times at the upper end to move energy between regions of the country to get to net zero.

So that is a massive expansion from where we are today. The last two decades we saw very little expansion in transmission and that's really going to have to change as we convert most of the transportation fleet to electric vehicles. That is just going to really require us to expand transmission to keep up with all that new demand.

David Roberts

And given how difficult it is, that does seem to serve as a recommendation for this sort of land sensitive approach since anything that can avoid the need for transmission is probably also going to avoid delays.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, and one thing we looked at more closely in the Power Place West report, we didn't have the time and the computing power to do it at the national level as much, but we looked at, well, what are the forms of transmission expansion that are available? And it's not just necessarily building a new line through a new right of way, but it can be things like colocating new wires on existing transmission towers. It can be reconductoring, that is, replacing the steel cable with carbon cables. It can be using what are called grid enhancing technologies that are software, for example, or new conductors and things like that, which enable the system that you already have to move more energy more efficiently.

And then, for example, two way energy flows in places where you only had one way energy flow. So all those things together we found in the west could account for half of the transmission capacity that we need to grow in the next 30 years. So that's a really good news story that we can invest in these approaches right here and now and make a big difference in that capacity while trying to figure out where are those big new lines going to go because we inevitably are going to need new transmission lines.

David Roberts

Right, but we can get a lot of just to sum that up, we can get a lot of new capacity without new lines or new land.

Nels Johnson

Yeah. So the idea here is to focus on those options as much as we can now, to make as much progress as we can while the longer term planning and investment for those new lines that inevitably are needed can take place.

David Roberts

Right. Jessica, let's get to the $6 billion question on everyone's mind, which is when you ramp up these strategies for being more sensitive toward land, avoiding environmentally sensitive land, avoiding adverse social impacts, how much is the additional cost over and above sort of the baseline status quo projections?

Jessica Wilkinson

Right. Well, at least the $1.87 trillion question. So existing studies have shown that as resighting today using sighting as usual scenario, the cost of meeting net zero emissions by 2050 is $1.87 trillion. So a significant price tag and that scenario where we use sighting as usual will also impact 250,000 sq mi of land. So that's an area larger than the state of Texas. So we looked at how under these kind of impact reduction scenarios from setting as usual, ramping it up to a 90% impact reduction scenario, how the cost change. And what we found was that half of the impacts to land can be reduced.

So under that 70% impact reduction scenario, half of those impacts can be reduced.

David Roberts

So that's half of wait, that's half of the amount of land is going to be impacted.

Jessica Wilkinson

Yes. Under that 70% impact reduction.

David Roberts

Half of the 250 what you ...

Jessica Wilkinson

Yes.

David Roberts

250,000. So the 70% reduction case gets you down to 125 ...

Jessica Wilkinson

About right, yes.

David Roberts

... thousand acres?

Jessica Wilkinson

You save an area the size of Arizona. Not too bad.

David Roberts

And how much does it cost to save an Arizona-sized amount of land from development?

Jessica Wilkinson

Right. So that comes at a 6.3% cost increase over the current trajectory.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Jessica Wilkinson

And that's not nothing, particularly for lower income communities and families. However, we really think that is kind of likely to be pretty high because those costs may be offset by lower cancellation rates, shorter permitting times, and lower monitoring and mitigation costs. So into the sighting as usual scenario, we expect a lot more conflict, and we see higher cancellation rates, we see longer permitting times. If there's a lot of both environmental and social kind of value in an area as that Q and A defines it, and we think that although it comes at a 6.3% cost increase, it really can be kind of offset by some of those lower cancellation rates.

David Roberts

To what extent does the model of the status quo incorporate those conflicts? I mean, you sort of can't can't you're just sort of guessing how big those impacts are going to be? But they're going to be there, right? I mean, does the model take them into account at all?

Jessica Wilkinson

It really can't. There's there have been a few studies that we've relied upon that show kind of how much these, you know, sighting in sensitive areas from an environmental perspective does drive up the costs. And the studies that do exist demonstrate that when projects are cited in the more environmental sensitive areas, they have a higher cancellation rate, they have longer permitting times, and as one would expect, more monitoring is required. And there may be other kinds of ways to minimize impacts that would be asked of the developer than if they were in an area that, for example, was a mine land or a landfill or other kind of degraded lands.

David Roberts

So you think 6.3% is what the model shows as additional cost, but we think maybe the status quo modeling is underestimating costs because it's not being able to predict all these conflicts over land-use. So maybe the costs are closer to comparable than at first blush. You think?

Nels Johnson

Yeah. David, those soft costs are just not really available for monitoring. As Jessica said, we have some specific places where we have pretty good evidence of what those costs are, but we just don't have nationwide data. The other thing that's important to notice is that we're also avoiding costs that are occurring when we convert natural habitats or croplands. And there's a cost of that, too, which isn't in the modeling.

David Roberts

Oh, you mean the cost of, like, lost nature?

Nels Johnson

Lost nature. If we could put a dollar price tag on that, if we could.

David Roberts

So those aren't in the model at all. They're priced at zero.

Nels Johnson

They're not. We're just modeling technology and land costs when it comes to these costs.

David Roberts

Right. So if you wanted to say that untouched land or unmolested land has some value that you would destroy if you developed it, that would change the final sort of cost balance outlook?

Nels Johnson

It could. We just wanted to take as narrow a view of costs as we had really good data for just so that we could have an apples to apples kind of comparison here. And that's why we limited ourselves to data that's really well vetted and reliable and that's the technology cost data and land cost.

David Roberts

Right, but I think it's fair to say that how you are going to view that 6.3% additional cost varies quite a bit based on how much you value land right. And how much you value untouched natural land.

Nels Johnson

Absolutely. And by the way, in terms of those soft costs that we talked about, project cancellation rates, permitting delays, there's really an important business case to be made here and we and others are working on that, but we just don't yet have the nationwide data.

David Roberts

Right. The business case just being it's more sensible to go to more appropriate land if for no other reason than to avoid the hassle and blowback and lawsuits and et cetera.

Nels Johnson

Yeah, the way I've heard some energy developers call it, it's kind of the land analytics. What is it about the place? You're thinking about the analytics, about a bunch of data related to that piece of land that relates to project success. There are lots of analytics that wind or solar developers look at.

David Roberts

Do we know that? Is that sophisticated yet? Like, do we have a good sense of the full characterization of land that ends up being economic to develop?

Nels Johnson

We don't have good enough data. Companies probably have better data than we're aware of because it's a business and that data can be proprietary. But we think there are a growing number of companies that actually are starting to pay attention to, as I say, this notion of land analytics.

David Roberts

Interesting. And Jessica, one of the ongoing discussions, let's say, areas of discourse in the clean energy world is about NIMBY-ism and about community feedback. And the sort of gathering conventional wisdom, I think, is that there's too much too many ways for communities to slow and halt things, too many ways for them to sue, too many laws and regulations that they can exploit. And thus that, like NIMBY-ism has all the power. And part of the solution is to move power out of local hands up higher on the chain, up to the.

David Roberts

State or federal government.

David Roberts

But you in this report at the end recommend more public process, more engagement with the public. So how do you square that? How does that not end up slowing things down?

Jessica Wilkinson

Right, I mean, we think there needs to be a balance. We need to make sure that the communities where this infrastructure is being developed have a voice, not only that, but that they're meaningfully engaged. And we also see a backlash when states try to go too far in taking away that local community role. And it can exacerbate, frankly, the backlash against renewable energy. This transition is not going to happen in the next five years. It's going to happen, we hope, as soon as possible, but it's going to take a few decades. And we really need to have these renewable energy developers have a long term social license to operate.

So we need to be finding ways not only to get that balance right between state control and local control, but we also need to make sure that we get the balance right in terms of how we share the benefits of this transition. And I think there's growing recognition about that as well. I think there's some encouraging signs there. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directed about $760,000,000 in grants to state and local governments for economic development activities and communities affected by transmission, actually. And I think New York State is a place where they were trying to find the balance of that in their 2019 legislation, where they created this one stop permit review process.

That is great. And then they also acknowledge that in order to be eligible for that, you needed to demonstrate that you've consulted, hopefully more than just consulted with the host community and that you have a community benefit agreement in place. We need to make sure that the local communities that may be seeing a lot of this development in their communities are sharing in the benefits as well.

David Roberts

Yeah, I feel like that's an underrepresented perspective in this debate, which is that maybe if you engage communities earlier and share more of the benefits with them, you could speed things up and then maybe part of the slowness is your standard capitalist rapaciousness trying to capture all the profit and not share any with the communities involved. Like maybe you could speed things up if you shared some of the money, basically.

Jessica Wilkinson

Absolutely.

Nels Johnson

We really want to emphasize that when developers do the right thing, they show how they've avoided impacts, they show how they are working with communities to deliver benefits that the community wants they should be rewarded. And we think one of the most effective ways to reward them is to get them at the head of the queue in terms of permit review, in terms of interconnection queues. Because if companies go beyond what some of their competitors are doing to do the right thing, they need to be rewarded for that.

David Roberts

Interesting. Well, that segues perfectly to my final question, which is sort of what policy recommendations fall out of this? One that seems very obvious is instead of not planning, let's plan. What are the others? Jessica, what are the main sort of policy recommendations that fall out of this for you?

Jessica Wilkinson

Yeah, so we really were thinking about our audience as being those that do energy planning, state governor's offices and energy offices. So we kind of thought about the recommendations in terms of those audiences. And for energy planners at all levels, local, state, regional, national, kind of our solution is that they use the methodology outlined in Power Place to make sure that as they're planning for a clean energy future, they're doing so in a way that maximizes benefits to climate, to nature and to people.

David Roberts

Are they just not doing that at all now? Is it land? Is this sort of like environmental sensitivity of land, is that playing any role at all in the planning right now?

Jessica Wilkinson

Only a little bit. I mean, to the extent that they do and there have been some states that have they maybe are taking off the table, like in the way that you are telling the model avoid this place if you can, if you can't, but take it into consideration. They will, for example, include those lands that are currently off the table, like national parks and wildlife refuges and that really are off the table, but they tend to not include those other lands that maybe aren't regulated in that same sense. They're not designated as high priority conservation areas but we know they're really important either because they're wetlands or they are endangered species habitat or are lands that are going to be important under the changing climate to ensure that we have resilient and connected land in the future.

David Roberts

So the first recommendation is just take this into account when planning.

Jessica Wilkinson

Take this into account, use the high resolution conservation, land-use and demographic data that we do have. And then for policymakers, what we show in some of the particularly in the regional snapshots we have in this report is that different geographies are going to need different incentives and we need to tailor those incentives to the particular geographies and the specific kind of conditions. Is it highly agricultural? Is it amenable to agrovoltaics? We're going to need to adopt incentives to encourage the right mix of technologies and land saving approaches that make the most sense in those geographies. And then as Nels alluded to for those projects that are well designed and have lower environmental, social and economic risk, we do think that it's appropriate for them to be able to jump the line, not cut the line, but get to the front line for interconnection consideration and for environmental and environmental review and permitting.

Nels Johnson

And it's really important to recognize that there are states where this is starting to happen. New York, California in particular have explicit approaches to avoiding and minimizing environmental and social impacts.

David Roberts

What are they using? Is it just like a financial incentive or is it a jump the queue kind of thing or what? Do we know what works?

Jessica Wilkinson

I think we're still learning. We're very much in the learning stage. There are states that incentivize provide incentives to solar developers, for example, that build on landfills and mine lands and brownfields. There's a lot of great examples of that. Does it solve the problem? No, probably not. But it certainly helps. And then New York was that example where they do have this one stop shopping for renewable energy permitting if you are consulting with the community and demonstrate that if you have a community benefit agreement. So we are seeing a lot of really interesting innovation and I think we're in an exciting time right now to try and get this right.

And now is the time we really need to get it right.

David Roberts

Yeah. Before we headlong into this stampede of growth, which just makes as someone who has become, over time sensitive to these possibilities for blowback, just the whole prospect of this giant wave coming, just the number of possible problems, it just makes me clench up.

Jessica Wilkinson

I think our findings are really encouraging. We we can avoid a lot of these impacts, we believe, but we need to get the planning and the policy incentives right, and we need to do it now.

David Roberts

Awesome. Okay, well, that's a perfect note to wrap up on. Jessica Wilkinson and Nels Johnson, thanks so much for coming, this fascinating report.

Nels Johnson

Thank you.

Jessica Wilkinson

Thanks so much for having us, David.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

In this episode, Washington State House Rep. Jessica Bateman talks about championing an ambitious and successful bill that aims to increase housing density in Washington, and the politics of housing in general.

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Text transcript:

David Roberts

After decades of effort by urbanists, which often felt like the work of Sisyphus, housing has arrived as a political issue. Big environmental groups have come around to the idea that dense housing is a crucial climate strategy, support is growing from unions worried that their members can’t afford to live where they work, and polls show that the public is increasingly convinced that there is a housing crisis.

Over the last five years, a wave of good housing legislation has been building on the West Coast, spreading from California to Oregon and now to Washington state. In this last legislative session, some 50 housing bills were put forward in the Washington legislature and more than a half dozen passed, any one of which would have been historic.

One of the most significant bills that passed this session — and one of the biggest surprises — was House Bill 1110, which legalized so-called “missing middle” housing statewide. Every lot in the state will now be permitted to build at least two units of housing, four units when located near transit, and up to six units if some portion are set aside for low-income homeowners.

And that's just one bill. Other bills would legalize accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on all lots in the state, require municipalities to integrate climate change into their growth plans, sharply restrict local design review, and ease permitting of multi-unit residential housing. It's a feast.

The lead sponsor of HB 1110 is Rep. Jessica Bateman, who represents the capital city of Olympia. She was elected in 2021 and quickly established herself as a champion of equitable housing and a tireless organizer. Through sheer force of will, she brought together a broad coalition that was able to push the bill over the finish line, defying predictions.

Like Washington state Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, who I interviewed for Volts back in 2021, Bateman is widely seen as a rising star in the legislature. I was excited to talk to her about her bill, the wave of other housing bills this session, and the broader politics of housing at the state level.

Alright, then. Representative Jessica Bateman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jessica Bateman

Thank you so much for having me.

David Roberts

I'm so excited to talk to you. I've got so much I've got so much I want to ask you about. But let's just briefly start before we get into the nuts and bolts of the bills, et cetera, maybe just tell us a little bit about you're new to the Washington legislature as of 2021. So maybe just tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to the legislature and how you picked up an interest in housing along the way.

Jessica Bateman

Well, I am new to the legislature, but I'm not new to legislative politics. I was a legislative assistant for three and a half years to former State Representative Chris Reykdal. He's now the Superintendent of Public Instruction. And before that, I came to Olympia to go to Evergreen. That's how I got involved in politics in my first campaign for I-1163. That's how I got started working as a legislative assistant, and then I became a planning commissioner for the City of Olympia working on comprehensive planning, and then I ran for City Council, was there for five years.

On city council. We dealt significantly with a growing unhoused population in Olympia and how we were going to manage and deal with that, which led me to working on permanent supportive housing and also more broadly, housing policy and how we create and build housing in Washington and the systemic barriers to doing that. We also worked on passing middle housing legislation while I was there. And when I came to the legislature, my goal was to legalize middle housing statewide. I didn't know I was going to do that in my second year as a legislator.

David Roberts

Don't get used to this heady success. I don't think it's typical.

Jessica Bateman

It was just by happenstance representative Nicole Macri had sponsored a middle housing bill for a couple of years, and she had other work that she was doing. So last year in 2022, I sponsored House Bill 1782, and then this year it was House Bill 1110.

David Roberts

Well, we're going to get into that in just a minute. So you've had your hands on housing policy directly at a municipal level, and this is kind of where the rubber hits the road with all this stuff. A slightly more general question, it seems like I and a bunch of other people I mean, not really me. I'm peripherally interested. But I know a bunch of people who have been banging their head on this wall for years. Decades of just urbanism housing in general, the dominance of cars, the lack of housing, et cetera. All this. And it seems like in the last, I don't know, call it five years, the dam has broken a little bit and things are happening.

Like, there's tons of bills passed in California recently, Oregon, and now Washington. I was looking at the list on Siteline for the listener. Sightline is a local non-profit research house. Awesome on housing. They list 50 bills related to housing that were proposed in the ledge this session. I mean, obviously not all of those passed, but it seems like housing has finally kind of roared onto the agenda. And I just wonder if you have any insight into how or why that happened and if you feel like do you have any sense that you're part of a movement, like a group of people here who are pushing this?

Or is this just like one of these things where the time was right and history turned and things changed?

Jessica Bateman

I think it's a lot of all of those things. Honestly, the reason why we were able to take action on housing this year is multifaceted. One of the core issues is that our housing crisis continues to get worse. And as it gets worse and is experienced by people across the state, different generations, people are seeing their kids living at home. People like my dad, who just retired from Boeing, and watching his youngest, my little sister, who's a nurse, not being able to get a starter home of her own like he did, build her own family. It's a lot more relatable how the housing crisis is impacting people.

And it's a kitchen table issue that people, if they're not struggling with not being able to find a first home, which in Washington, first time homeowners, can only afford a home in three counties, and they're all in eastern Washington. That was a number from session, it might have gotten worse now. They're struggling with rent prices and seeing hundreds of dollar rent increases that put them more at risk of becoming homeless. And as a result of that, they're asking questions like, why can't we have more housing? Or what can we do to stop this? And thinking about having neighbors that live in middle housing becomes less ...

There's less stigma associated with it when people see it as something that their families could benefit from. Having said that, we've had a housing crisis that has been growing for years. And we have seen those that are in housing policy have really experienced a lot of frustration watching a lot of good housing bills die over the years. And last year, 1782, my middle housing bill died. Fantastically. In a year when the housing crisis was bad then, we'd seen 15%, 20% year-over-year increases in home prices. And so last interim, I and a group of other House Democrats got together, and we're talking about what are the barriers to passing housing legislation.

And there's a number of them, but one of them was the structure and the way that we organized our committees. We had a local government committee, which is where all the zoning and land use policies went. That's how you create more housing. And then all the symptoms of not having enough housing, like tenant protections, helping folks stay where they are, keeping them housed, that was in another committee. And then you had the investment in truly affordable housing through the Husing Trust Fund in a different committee. So we worked to create one committee that was all housing, everything housing holistic view.

And I think that was integral because as you saw, I mean, if you look last year versus this year, how many housing bills made it through the process, there was a significant uptick. And I also think us talking about the connection between housing and climate. I've been working on this issue for eight years, and my very first City Council race, the environmental organizations in my community, called me a developer-shill, because I was pro- unabashedly pro-housing.

David Roberts

That's just automatic now, though. That's just like part of the landscape ...

Jessica Bateman

Totally, which is why come up with something new because that's what's been thrown at me for eight years. However, it is frustrating as someone who partners with organizations and environmental groups to have them not see that connection, which is very real. Like if we're not going to address land use, then we're not going to realistically address our climate goals in Washington state. So to see premier environmental organizations stepping up and saying land use and climate are inextricably linked, we have to address both. And also, on the other side, equity. The way that communities have excluded people by race and by economic means through single family neighborhoods is very explicit.

And so we had a coalition this year that really focused on working families, communities of color, the environment all coalescing around the one issue that really does impact all those different facets. Because even though we're going to get into a wonky conversation, I'm sure at the end of the day this is really about people. And people having an opportunity to have a home, people having stability, people having the ability to put down roots in their community, to build equity, start families, have livable, walkable neighborhoods, have a future. That's what this is about.

David Roberts

I love both sides of that answer, but I particularly love the first side since a recurring theme on this podcast is that in the spirit of Elizabeth Warren procedure matters, the structure of the bureaucracy matters, administrative capacity matters, it's boring, no one pays attention to it, but it really does matter. It really does affect results. Okay, one more general question. I think sort of ordinary people at this point have probably grokked that there's housing problem going on. But some of the questions I get are like to what extent is it a West Coast thing versus a countrywide thing?

To what extent is it an urban thing versus a statewide thing? How universal is it? Like is Washington particularly bad or is it just bad like all the other states are bad because housing policy is bad everywhere.

Jessica Bateman

I mean, the country has millions of homes behind to keep up with population growth for building and constructing housing. So it's obviously not Washington state, or West Coast specific. However, you do see the real struggle to build housing commensurate with population growth in especially those high opportunity areas where people are really going to for jobs and economic opportunity. They also can be areas that are really good at weaponizing public policy to prohibit housing from being built. And that's a real challenge, which is one of the reasons why we have to address it at the state level.

Which is why you've seen California and Oregon. Oregon was first. But Oregon, California and Washington state. I do think if there's data that shows that Washington is particularly bad in terms of our per capita construction of housing, I think we are the lowest for that.

David Roberts

No kidding. Yikes.

Jessica Bateman

So we do lead the pack, unfortunately. But on the West Coast in particular, it is nationwide, but it is also really, I think, dramatic on the West Coast, where you see so many people wanting to come here for jobs and for opportunity. And in Washington state, it's not just impacting the large cities like Spokane, Seattle, or Tacoma, that statistic earlier about first time home for first time home buyers. It's only affordable in three counties, and they're all on the east side of the state in really kind of rural, expansive counties where there's not a lot of job opportunity.

So a part of this is about where do people want to live and what systemic policies do we have that make it difficult to build housing? And that is not specific to any one city. The vast majority of cities outlaw middle housing or anything other than single family homes in the vast majority of their areas where they can build housing. That's not specific to only Washington state. Other states are also in that vein as well.

David Roberts

So let's get to middle housing then, in your bill. I want to cover this bill, and then maybe we can mention talk about a couple of the other bills briefly at the end. But just by way of introducing this subject, I have like a little 32nd rant. I feel obliged to deliver because every time I talk with a policymaker in Seattle, I talk about this. What you see in Seattle, and I think this is typical of a lot of growing cities, is you got a lot of people coming here, you've got these single family neighborhoods that are fixed in place that won't allow anything to be built.

And so all new population, basically any working class people who move here, are put in big apartment buildings along giant arterials. So what you have increasingly in Seattle is a completely two-tiered bifurcated system. You're either living in a nice house in a quiet single family neighborhood, or you're in a big apartment building on a five lane, six lane street. And it's terrible on so many levels, but it's just so grossly unjust. And it just puts this sort of economic inequality in physical form all around you. And what's missing there? What's missing between these big apartment buildings on the arterials and the quiet single family homes, is what's called middle housing.

So maybe just start by telling listeners, maybe who aren't up on these debates, what do we mean by middle housing? And then let's talk about your bill.

Jessica Bateman

Well, your observation is correct both in the description of what middle housing is and constitutes. So middle housing is everything between a single family home and an apartment or multifamily housing. So that could be a duplex. Two units that are connected, threeplex, fourplex, sixplex. My bill goes up to a sixplex. I think technically middle housing can go. I'm not sure how large they can go, but the largest that we have in my bill is up to a sixplex. The description that you gave is very apt in Seattle and the vast majority of cities, but using Seattle as an example, they only allow the construction of single family homes in over 75% of the city.

And so you have this economic and racial segregation where people that have historical wealth or connections or intergenerational wealth, they've been able and they have these homes. The median home price in Seattle is almost a million dollars. And then you have the new people that have no way of accessing homes like that to buy or to rent. And it's also about a person's health. Whether or not you get cardiovascular activity is do you live near a park? Do you feel safe to go to that park? Do you have sidewalks?

In terms of upward mobility and our investment in that from the state and education, well, so much of your lifetime income earning potential and your opportunity is based on your zip code and the people that live around you and the opportunities that are provided.

David Roberts

And also if I could just insert also I've seen it. I'm pretty sure this has been said explicitly in Seattle planning documents is that these people who live on the arterials are referred to by city planners as buffers, basically for that air pollution that the cars create and the noise pollution that the cars create. Buffers to protect the single family homeowners from that nasty pollution, which is just, like, manifestly grotesque, I think.

Jessica Bateman

Right, and our opportunity is really dependent upon that opportunity being available to others. And so I have a little sister, she's 27. I own a home. I won the lottery, I got lucky and I bought a home at just the right time. I have a fixed mortgage. I know year over year, give or take, how much that's going to increase. There's a significant amount of stability there that I want other people to have. And also, I couldn't afford my home today if I had to buy it now. As a legislator who has two jobs, so also as a city council member, having gone through that experience, we tried to pass middle housing legislation and it took us over two years, 44 public meetings, 1,200 pages of written comment, three public hearings.

And I can tell you that the way that we have these processes at the local government level, we hear from predominantly homeowners and older whiter, male homeowners that would like to maintain their property values. They have a definite stake in the status quo staying as it is. And it's by design, and it's been that way forever. And it's not embedded with equity because folks that don't live in the community yet, they're not voicing how new housing would provide them with an opportunity. You just add so many layers.

So that's why having a statewide floor for zoning is so important. It also creates stability and predictability for people that build housing so they can know statewide it's predictable, which is great. So the bill as it stands now, it went through a lot of changes in the process. It would apply to cities 20,000 or greater. Cities that are 20,000 to 75,000 would have to allow, will have to allow two units on all parcels, that allow residential construction. They would also have to allow four units near transit and four units anywhere if one unit is affordable. And that's up to 60% AMI for renters and up to 80% for a person who's going to buy the home.

David Roberts

One of the things I was wondering about, reading about this is this category of cities from 20,000 to 75,000 is that most of them what is the sort of distribution of cities here? Because I know the cap for that was lower in the previous bill and it got raised some. So you're including more cities now. And I don't have any sense of what percentage of cities or which.

Jessica Bateman

I'd have to look at the numbers. What I can say is the bill started at any city of 6,000 or greater, so it impacted more cities when it started. And that was by design. We wanted to be really ambitious at the start. The vast majority of cities in Washington are small. There are over 260 and most of them are small. So when we increase that population threshold, the implementation at 20,000, we knocked off a whole bunch of cities. But the ADU bill that passed, which we can talk about, applies to all cities. And so the thought was for these smaller communities that really pushed back on how this change in housing would impact their community and what their community felt like and what their community needed, we could argue that, okay, well, the ADUs felt they felt less opposed to that.

David Roberts

Right.

Jessica Bateman

That drives me crazy because it's not embedded in best practices or data or science.

David Roberts

Well, what in a housing policy is not ultimately like comes down to feels. There's not a lot of rational discussion around this where you look. So from 20,000 to 75,000 every lot, you can build at least two things. And if you're close to transit, four things. And if you set aside one apartment for low income housing, four things.

Jessica Bateman

Correct.

David Roberts

And then 75,000 up is all one big category?

Jessica Bateman

Yes. That's four units anywhere, six units near transit, and six units anywhere, if two are affordable.

David Roberts

Has Inslee signed it yet? It is passed the House and the Senate, and it's waiting for a signature, or has been signed?

Jessica Bateman

it's going to be signed on Monday the 8th.

David Roberts

By the time this pod is out. So when this is law, if I'm a single family homeowner anywhere in the state, in a big-ish city, I can sell my home and my lot to a developer. The developer can knock down the house and build a fourplex. That can happen anywhere in a city over 75,000?

Jessica Bateman

Correct.

David Roberts

So it's four anywhere, six close to transit, and then six with some affordability?

Jessica Bateman

Right. And then we have that third category, which is the contiguous cities, which are cities that are right up along it's kind of technical, but the largest city in a county of 275,000 or greater, so using Thurston County, Maya County, for example, the largest city is Lacey. Any smaller city that abuts up to it is a contiguous city has to allow duplexes everywhere. And so that was it started out being in the 75 category, so it would have allowed more homes and hounds near transit and anywhere if one or two were affordable. That got narrowed down in the Senate so it's just two anywhere.

David Roberts

But just for listeners, the reason this category exists is because there's all these like Seattle is surrounded by all these little communities, sort of satellite communities that are kind of part of the Seattle sort of municipal area. They're not really small towns per se.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, the thought being we want to make more housing available and abundant where people are and where people want to go. And naturally that's where economic opportunity and social opportunity exists. So Seattle being the largest city in the state, you have all of these smaller cities that are adjacent. It makes sense that they would also we want housing to be there too.

David Roberts

Well, this is huge. This seems like a genuinely huge and fundamental change. We can get into the politics of it later. But I want to touch on a couple of other aspects. What does it say about parking? Because parking is also sort of roaring onto the agenda as a thing people are starting to care about and look at and think about the negative effects of what does it say in particular about — because a lot of cities, I think listeners are familiar, a lot of cities have parking minimums. So theoretically one way a city could avoid this missing middle housing is by putting parking minimums.

So if you build four units on your lot, if you're required to put four parking spaces in, that kind of is going to eat a lot of the space and inhibit a lot of the growth. So what does it say about parking?

Jessica Bateman

Love the parking. All the feels about parking. Parking adds ... not only does it add cost to constructing homes, it also takes up in our urban areas valuable space that could otherwise be used to house a person. So we prioritize vehicles over people when we create minimum parking requirements. It also doesn't make sense because you would want the person who's building the housing to make a market-based decision about: is it marketable to build this now? Will I be able to sell it or rent it if there is no parking? They're going to be much more aligned with that objective.

David Roberts

Yeah, there's something weirdly Soviet about how we think about parking. Why should bureaucrats be picking a number out of the air and deciding that's the minimum, it's just so goofy. We don't do that with any other service, product or service.

Jessica Bateman

So much of housing policy is really about the people that are currently housed wanting things to stay the same. And when other people move here, they inevitably it's more people, it's more traffic, it's more noise, it's more interactions. And so a lot of these policies underneath them, it's really about the people that are currently here kind of wanting to buffer themselves from any kind of impact.

David Roberts

Yes, I am subscribed to my local next door, and I can tell you anytime a new apartment building is announced, anytime new housing is announced anywhere, that is the first comment. Where are people going to park?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, people get really upset about it. So the bill started out more ambitious, and it ended up you cannot have minimum parking requirements for the homes that are available near transit. So for the two units and the four units near transit, no parking minimums in the neighborhoods. We initially started with only being able to require one space per lot, and that got expanded to one space per unit. So if it's a duplex, you can require two parking spaces if it's a fourplex, four and sixplex. Six. And yeah, your guttural response is correct. That was a concession that I had to make.

They can also, if they want more parking, they can go through a process to appeal essentially to the department of commerce to say, we feel like more parking is necessary, but they have to demonstrate that it is because of some impact to public safety. We were pretty explicit in how they actually have to provide evidence for that, because, well, cars are kind of inherently dangerous anyway, so it'll be hard for them to make that case. So there is some restriction on how much they can require. It's not as much as I would have liked, but again, this is a watershed moment in terms of land use policy in Washington state, and I'm optimistic about us in the future being able to come back and make tweaks if necessary.

David Roberts

Kind of a side note, but I'm curious. A lot of these bills pivot around what is and isn't close to transit. So are there complications in identifying exactly what does and doesn't count as a transit stop, or what does and doesn't count as close to transit? Because a lot of money and a lot of rules are now hinging on that distinction?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, and I know one question came up recently about, I think, trolleys in Seattle, which was not something that we accounted for in the bill, but actually, apparently by the definition in the bill for frequent transit would qualify. So the department of commerce is going to be going through a process to answer some more of these specific questions as it relates to what constitutes the different forms of transit. It does get really technical really quickly. And we were also concerned with one thing we heard a lot was bus stops can change and that is technically true.

But we want housing near transit because the utilization of transit is predicated on density. So that's really necessary. But there's going to be some more fine tuning of specific definitions around things like whether trolleys qualify or not. We did take out ferry terminals. That was something that was taken out. I have to go back and look at the exact specific definition that we ended up with for transit, though.

David Roberts

I'm curious about how exactly this is going to interact with local municipal government. It's worth stating, does not dictate any citing or design issues. It doesn't tell local governments that they have to cite anything anywhere in particular or design anything any particular way. It's just sort of minimum requirements. But I'm sure there was and will be resistance from some local governments sort of notoriously around Seattle, like out on the islands, Mercer Island and whatever. They are enthusiasts about pulling up the drawbridge and not letting anybody else come out there, not letting anybody else live there, not letting transit come there.

So I'm wondering, are you worried about shenanigans by local governments trying to circumvent these things? For instance, I think there's an exception for environmentally sensitive land and maybe there's something about historical land. I can imagine local communities abusing those rules. Sort of like what do you foresee in terms of the push and pull between this law and local governments who for whatever reason don't want to do it?

Jessica Bateman

Right, I think it's human nature to want to keep things the way that they are. And I don't inherently have ill will towards people that think that way because it's just kind of like how people tend to operate. But I do think it's our responsibility as lawmakers to be thinking about planning for the present, but also the future. And so that's why the statewide legislation is so important, because at the local level, so much of the response is inflammatory. It's an inflammatory and I'm talking like inflammation because people get really upset and they go to their city council folks and you are the closest to the people there and you just naturally want to make them feel better.

And you also I think there's a part of this that some cities feel like the state's coming in and telling them what to do. So I do anticipate that cities will try to find creative and innovative ways to circumvent this legislation. And I'm already thinking about ways that we can ensure that cities are held accountable for their responsible, fair share of providing housing. California has created an Office of Housing Accountability and they actually review housing elements in good detail. And the Attorney General there has a way of holding folks responsible if they don't do what they're required to by state law.

So that's one thing that I'm looking at. And then also really analyzing how historic districts are deemed valid.

David Roberts

Oh my goodness, so much shenanigans there in Seattle. Please do something about that. All of Wallingford neighborhood is trying to become historical, which is just goofy.

Jessica Bateman

So we need parameters, I think on I am a fan of historic architecture. I'm a housing nerd. I'm going to Palm Springs next week and I'm going to take a tour of the mid-century modern houses ...

David Roberts

I did that very fun.

Jessica Bateman

Right? And we also know as people have weaponized SEPA, a really good environmental policy to obstruct creating more housing. They also weaponize things like historic districts to obstruct the creation of more housing and to keep their neighborhoods kind of covered in amber and staying that way for all time. So those are kind of two areas that I'm looking at.

Also, I would say that these laws will become effective in the next round of comprehensive plan updates. So it's going to be a rolling implementation based on the city's comp plan update. The largest cities going in 2024 and then they've got six months for implementation to pass their building codes. So 2024-ish for the next round, the first round of cities. So we have some time, but I'll be thinking this interim about ways that we can prevent those very things from happening.

David Roberts

And is there provisions in there about homeowners associations and their covenants and things like that? I feel like I saw something mentioned that it's ...

Jessica Bateman

So the bill applies to all future homeowners associations. So if you create and build a homeowners association, this law applies to you. It does not apply to homeowners associations retroactively because we can't change the land use of a contract that already exists that people entered into when they purchased a home.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Jessica Bateman

So there are people that argue that we can and there're really smart legal experts that tell us, no, you in fact cannot do that. Other states that have passed similar legislation have not made it apply retroactively. I would also add the bill itself, it was kind of a wing and a prayer that this bill survived this year.

David Roberts

Yes, I know. I've been reading about it.

Jessica Bateman

It came back from the dead a number of times. So I think there's an interest definitely because there was a lot of conversation about there's no secret that not having this apply to current homeowners associations. There are a number of them in Washington state.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to ask, do we have a sense of how common that is, how big of a swath of housing those covenants cover?

Jessica Bateman

I don't have that figure off the top of my head, but it's larger than one would assume and the equity component is really bad. I mean, if you look at some of the areas, this bill will not be applying to some of the wealthiest whitest economically.

David Roberts

Those are the places with the covenants, right? I mean, those are the places with homeowners associations.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah. So there's an interest because of this bill. I think a lot of people in the legislature are talking about, hey, what can we actually do? And how can we push the envelope and look at this issue of homeowners association? So I anticipate we'll see some legislation on that next year.

David Roberts

And is there anything in the bill along economic justice lines sort of anti-displacement? I know the one provision is you can build bigger buildings if you set aside a unit for affordable housing. Is there more all along those lines?

Jessica Bateman

So one bill that we passed a couple of years ago was House Bill 1220, which requires all cities to assess displacement risk. And Seattle has done that. You can see a map that Seattle has. And so what this bill does is it allows cities that have deemed an area to be at risk, a high risk for displacement. They can basically pause implementation for up to ten years. That law, House Bill 1220, requiring cities to do an assessment of at risk for displacement. It also requires that they have a better mapping out of the housing needed for different income bands.

We can go really into the weeds on comprehensive planning processes in Washington state, but cities have never been required before to go into detail on the different income bands of housing needs. So those two things were brand new. They just went into effect. They're in effect now, brand new. And so the question came up with the bill was, how do we protect for displacement in areas with classic examples, south Seattle, and I don't think we've answered that question thoroughly yet. I don't think cities know how. And that's what they said to us when they realized what they were going to have to do for implementation of 1220.

We don't know what to do for displacement. And they kind of looked at us like, give us money to give people money. And the state, you want to talk about the numbers? I mean, we need a million homes over the next 20 years. Half of them need to be affordable at up to 50% AMI. That is not a number that the state can budget for the Housing Trust Fund. I mean, as a comparison, just the data, the Housing Trust Fund, which is our largest bucket of funding for affordable housing in Washington, that's capital dollars for the construction of truly and meaningfully affordable housing, was created 1986.

We've built 55,000 affordable homes since then.

David Roberts

Yeah, not quite on pace for half a million.

Jessica Bateman

Right, so what that tells me, and the whole premise of House Bill 1110 and some other supply side bills, is we need to figure out sustainable and progressive funding and revenue for massively increasing our investment in truly affordable housing. And at the same time, we have to make it systematically easier to build homes of all shapes and sizes a. to respond to the market and the demand there because let's be clear, half of those homes also need to be 50% and above AMI. And we have nurses like my little sister that also can't find an affordable home for her which is not spending more than 30% of her income on housing. So we need housing all over the place and of all shapes and sizes.

And the supply side bills this year are really focused on looking at there's some obvious low hanging fruit ways that we are making it difficult, in some cases impossible to build nimble, smaller, more modest homes that are also better for our environment and also increase equity in our communities.

David Roberts

Right. And for some reason this is controversial, but I feel like it's also worth noting that just building a bunch more homes is in and of itself an affordability strategy that's when you increase supply, prices come down. This is not controversial in any other market or any other area of public policy, but for some reason it's very controversial here. But ...

Jessica Bateman

It is.

David Roberts

Housing supply is an affordability policy.

Jessica Bateman

Right. I mean, one of the other things I think about with our investment because advocates for affordable housing will rightfully say, well, you need to increase the investment in the housing trust fund. And I agree that we do. As long as we have these restrictive policies that make it really difficult and expensive to build housing, the price per unit cost that the state is investing. We'll house more people if we make it easier and cheaper and more efficient. And that's not just like me saying that as a talking point, that's really true. There's a ton of research that shows us how we make it more difficult and expensive to build housing.

But minimum parking requirements are a clear example and we get pushback the same people who demand that any new housing has to be affordable also push back on maintaining minimum parking requirements. So going back to the displacement question, we're going to have to continue to do more work because I think simply saying that we can pause implementation of building more housing is not a sufficient answer to anti-displacement.

David Roberts

Yeah, well, let me ask on that exact note, maybe this is obvious and I'm just not getting it, but why do we assume that enabling more middle housing in these areas would produce displacement? Like what's the connection there?

Jessica Bateman

The argument that we heard from a couple of cities was you're going to see land values increase and demand in these areas already exists and with the opportunity there, you're going to see people being priced out either in their rent or selling their homes and having a developer come in and build the sixplex. That is then not affordable. And I can't argue that the value will go up and we will see some tear downs happen, although tear downs of existing structures happen only when it's economically a good decision for a developer to do that. Like in Olympia, my home and my property.

The structure is the most valuable asset on the property. It would make no sense for a developer to come in and bulldoze it down unless they were going to make a significant amount to recoup those costs and then make a profit. But in some areas, like Seattle, that might happen because of the land value, cost is so high and the demand is so high. But I would also argue on the flip side that say a black family that owns a single family home, should they not be able to sell it and make that profit and make decisions about what they want to do with that investment?

David Roberts

It seems like a species of argument, which I hear a lot of, which always slightly baffles me, which is like we can't let these places get nice because then people will want them and come buy them. So the only way to protect poor people in their housing is to keep the places they live grimy and unattractive and low value. That does not seem like a viable or attractive long term solution to me. Like that can't be the way we're protecting people.

Jessica Bateman

Right. And that's what the cities, they're saying it's inherently more affordable housing, naturally occurring more affordable housing. And that by legalizing middle housing in those areas, we are going to displace the people that currently live there. And so that was the argument that we heard and the compromise was allowing for the folks, those areas to pause implementation.

David Roberts

Right. Let's talk about a couple of other bills. This one, the middle housing bill, is sort of your baby. A couple of others which you did not sponsor but voted for, which I think are at least worth noticing. The other big one I think on housing is ADU reform accessory dwelling units for people who are not nerdy on this topic, which just means you can build a nice little unit on your property, a second unit on your property and rent it out or sell it to someone. What does the ADU bill do?

Jessica Bateman

So that's House Bill 1337, sponsored by Representative Mia Gregerson, who has been fighting for this bill for years and it finally passed, which is amazing. You can build an ADU on any lot. Actually, I think two ADUs on any lot, it lifts local barriers on ADUs.

David Roberts

Any lot period in the state.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, it impacts cities smaller than the middle housing bill. Yeah. So for the cities that are included in the middle housing bill, they'll have the choice, the ADUs count towards the unit count. So unfortunately you won't be able to like in cities where fourplexes are legal, you can't do a fourplex and two ADUs, but you could do a duplex and two ADUs. The whole point, both of them, is to offer more flexibility and that is successful. So it caps impact fees and parking mandates, legalizes two per lot and sets baseline standards for minimum lot sizes and the ADU size and height.

I didn't sponsor that bill, so I don't know all of the technical details, but I do know that it works in concert with House Bill 1110.

David Roberts

Right. And then one other worth mentioning, just for my friend Mike's sake, is single staircase buildings have been legalized. This is way nerdy in the weeds for housing people, but this is something that a lot of people have really set their hearts on. Were you involved in that at all? Or could you explain the benefits of a single staircase building or why that's an issue at all?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, I wasn't involved at all, but I was thrilled to see it move forward. And I think we made some changes in the house that requires the state building code to develop recommendations for single stair buildings for up to six stories and to adopt those changes by 2026. And that's important because when you have the requirement of two staircases that takes up valuable space that could be used for housing people, it also puts limitations on where things like windows can be in terms of the architecture of the building and the design of the building. So it can make it a much more livable space by being able to utilize that square footage for something other than a staircase.

They do that in other countries and it's completely safe up to six stories. So it was really a common sense solution, I think. And I know that the people who build houses and architects and designers are very excited about it, and rightfully so.

David Roberts

One of the things that has vexed local urbanists here in Seattle and I'm sure in other cities too, is what's called design review, which is you propose a building, you come up with the plans, your building, obeys all the codes, is ready to go. And then it has to go through this design review process where a board of architects ...

Jessica Bateman

Volunteer architects.

David Roberts

Yeah, volunteer architects come and be like that brick shade is a little too dark red. I'm into more of a lighter red. And then you have to have another meeting and another meeting, and this adds millions of dollars onto the cost of building anything and takes forever and appears to benefit no one, as far as I can tell, other than the volunteer architects who get a sense of power over all the buildings.

So that ODS process has been not nuked. There was a bill that would have nuked it that didn't pass, but it's been ...

Jessica Bateman

I know, I wanted that one.

David Roberts

It's been reduced to one meeting, right? Is that what happened?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, one meeting. And it requires the local design standards to be clear and objective. And so that means subjective is what the current process is, where you have volunteer ... listen, I get it. Architects, that's what they do. That's their job. And when you're given it's like the luxury of infinite choices and the luxury. So much of this process is all centered around the people that already have housing. Like the people that are on the committee, the volunteer architects, they have homes and they're being asked like, what shade of terracotta versus brick red should it be? And when it's the most obnoxious.

It's when they're making these decisions about something that is currently a parking lot, a completely unused space that could be housing during a housing crisis. And they're taking years to do it. And so by establishing this as clear and objective and not subjective is a huge improvement. And then also by not allowing more than one public meeting is also a huge improvement. One of my observations is this is so asinine for people that are not in these circles, that don't see these processes all the time, but the people that have been doing it for years, that are on these design review or local governments, this is just how they work.

Right. And so it takes people from the outside looking in, going, this is not the best way to do things we do need.

David Roberts

Oh my god. Anybody I try to explain it to, they're like, really? That happens to every building. What?

Jessica Bateman

Right. And you can have a set list of like, here are the shades of color for a certain area. It's in a book. Like, it doesn't have to be this group of people that is really subjectively looking at this and evaluating it.

David Roberts

Right. There were a couple of other bills that reduced permitting barriers that were good. The one other bill I did want to call out is 1181, which is basically tells cities to integrate climate change into their planning. Maybe you could just tell us what that bill does.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, House Bill 1181 is sponsored by Representative Davina Duerr and it requires cities to add a climate element to their comprehensive plans, which is a mandatory planning process they have to do. It's incredibly important because it does things like have them account for how are you going to reduce vehicle miles traveled and making the connection between land use and vehicle miles traveled and where you put housing and how you have energy in your buildings and putting those things all together. It's really essential for cities to be required to do that. Some cities were already doing things like that, but it was really only certain cities and usually more progressive liberal cities.

David Roberts

Right. So this is just you have to consider that stuff. You have to take it into account.

Jessica Bateman

You have to take it into account. You have to plan for how you're going to address it.

David Roberts

Right. That's a lot of bills. A lot of pretty big bills. There are a couple of big ones that didn't pass. I think probably the most significant one that went down this year was the one about transit-oriented development, which again, for non-nerd listeners is just this idea that transit stops, transit locations are obvious areas for density. That's where you want to put a lot of people. You want a lot of development around transit stops. And a lot of times that's just prohibited by current law. I saw a lot of predictions at the beginning of the session were that that was the one that was going to pass and that your bill was going to have trouble.

And then one thing happened, and then another thing happened and somehow yours got through and this one didn't. Can you explain what that bill does and is it going to rise from the dead next time around?

Jessica Bateman

So the Transit Oriented Development Bill is sponsored by Senator Leos and it would require cities to legalize higher density housing near major transit areas and more frequent transit. The idea being like in Seattle and these high economic opportunity areas in and around transit, you want to have more housing be the standard. So things like more stories of housing being an option for multifamily housing, more.

David Roberts

Than sixplexes, presumably. Right.

Jessica Bateman

We're talking about 100, right? Yeah.

David Roberts

Big buildings.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah. They ended up using far floor area ratio in the bill, which is really talk about wonky and confusing. No offense. Sightline. Thank you. So the bill did not it made it through the Senate. And I think, honestly, that people didn't really understand what it did, which happens sometimes. And then when it got to the House, a lot of emphasis and focus was on the fine details and there became a lot of negotiation and concern and feedback, a lot of conversations about minimum affordability requirements. There continues to be a growing number of people in the Democratic Caucus in the House that really believe that you have to have affordability requirements if you're going to let developers build this higher density housing.

David Roberts

I don't want to beat the subject to death, but I have to pause there. Again, I'm sure you've been involved in these discussions. I just want to know. It sounds to me like those worries about affordability requirements were a big part of what led to the bill not passing. And I'm just like, in what world is the no bill passing better than the status quo? Because as we were saying, build a bunch of big apartment buildings around transit, it's going to lower the average housing prices. Like it is an affordability strategy. So what is the ... could you explicate that debate a little bit more so I understand what the hell is going on.

Jessica Bateman

I've heard people say that it's possible to build more affordable housing because where I come from, you know, the work that I've done, you know, I've talked with developers. I'm not an expert in the creation or construction of housing, but I tend to believe that we should make it easier to build housing of all shapes and sizes because we make it incredibly difficult, expensive to do. And we have to own that. We have to be really honest about that accept what the problem is. And then if we want truly affordable housing, we need to subsidize it, we need to pay for it because expecting someone to do that themselves, whether or not that's a noble goal, it's less likely to happen than if we make it easier to build the bare minimum.

You can't build what's not legal to build, so you can't build a seven story building if it's illegal to do so. Middle housing, you can't build a sixplex if it's not legal to do so. In my bill, there is an incentive to go higher and include affordability. That's a choice. Some non-profits, especially things organizations like Habitat for Humanity, will take advantage of that. We have folks that believe that the developers can, if we do a minimum threshold of affordability requirements, that they absolutely can do that. We should expect them to do that. And then we have folks that think that you should let the market decide.

And then some folks like me that think we should also be investing more in affordable housing and subsidizing that cost and increasing that investment. There's a lot of other tools and things that we can do to do that. Also things like Land Trust and how can we partner with communities so they can invest in some of these opportunities and create truly affordable housing with our help and assistance? At the end of the day, if the housing doesn't get built, no one gets housed. And that figure of up to a million people over the next 20 years, half needs to be truly affordable and half needs to be 50 AMI and above.

We still need housing for the 50 and above. So no housing versus housing. I mean, I can't really understand that argument either. However, what I will say is that Representative Reed was the person who worked diligently once it got to the house and she did a tremendous job trying to piece that thing together and keep it moving and ultimately was not able to do that. The other thing I would say is that 1110 was worked on much further in advance, had more time for people to process. It was introduced last year and then during interim I was meeting with people across the state, building a coalition, visiting with the AWC.

The TOD bill was relatively new for people. They didn't weren't as familiar with it. We are going to have to come back to it because if we're going to be honest with ourselves about transit and the CO2 that comes from it in Washington, I don't see how we're going to be able to address that without having TOD.

David Roberts

Yeah, people have a lot of really weird hang ups about tall buildings. I think this bill invokes a lot of those. But if you go to the Vancouver suburbs, they have rail stops and they're surrounded by tall buildings and then they sort of go out from there and it's perfectly nice tall buildings are not scary.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, we're running out of land. We have a growth management act that stipulates where we need to build new housing, which is in cities. We need to preserve our rural areas, our farms, our forest lands and ecosystems. We have to build up. And what I ask people when they're opposed to housing is where are the magical homes going to be built? Because we have to build them somewhere. We are not going to stop people from moving here or people from having children. You have to go up. That's the only option. So I'm looking forward to a future where we have abundant homes of all shapes and sizes for everyone and where people aren't afraid of taller buildings and it doesn't disrupt what they think is the character of their neighborhood.

I think the character of the neighborhood is defined by the people that are in it and a sense of community and opportunity. So I think we're in the liminal space right now where people are coming to terms with the single family home with the white picket fence and the garage and the lawn. That's not the reality for all the homes in the future like it was in 1950. And it wasn't environmentally good back then either.

David Roberts

So you're pretty confident the TOD bill will be back next time around?

Jessica Bateman

I think so. And I think there's going to be a lot of work that will be done during interim to see where we can get more support for that bill and see how to move forward.

David Roberts

And then another bill that failed was lot splitting, which maybe just very briefly explain what the significance of that is and why you think it failed.

Jessica Bateman

Oh, boy. So it was really sad that the lot splitting bill died. That was by my co-conspirator in housing Representative Barcus, and it allows for people to more easily split a lot. So, for instance, I have a good friend, single mom, she's got a lot. She's got a single family home. It's large enough. She'd like to split it and build an adu and sell it. And the process is quite cumbersome, difficult to navigate and expensive. And so this bill would make it easier for people to do that legally so they can sell the second unit.

And it's important for opportunity when we have bills, legalizing ADUs and middle housing because people will want to take advantage of those things and they want to be able to create equity and make an investment. So it makes that more difficult.

David Roberts

Right. And this, you think, will also be back, or is there some irradicable level of opposition somewhere or is this just something that also you think people need to sort of wrap their heads around?

Jessica Bateman

I think the bill will come back next year. I think that there's an entire year from now for people to kind of wrap their minds around all the bills that passed. And I think they'll become more comfortable with something like that. I think there was some concern around the overabundance of housing that might be created if lot splitting passes two. I definitely think that was a part of it.

David Roberts

Oh, right. Because if you split your lot in two, then all of a sudden you can make four units because you have two lots, right?

Jessica Bateman

Theoretically. However, there are some real constraints that are just naturally occurring. Like, you can't feasibly build more than so many units on a space because cities still have the ability to maintain and create things like setback requirements, minimum lot sizes, et cetera. So height restrictions, if they have a two story height restriction in a single family neighborhood, that would apply to a Duplex as well. So I think so much of this is making people comfortable with what is the new normal and that this is not going to result in a complete overhaul of neighborhoods, that the cranes aren't going to come in and make everything look completely different.

It's going to kind of meld seamlessly. I live in Olympia, and I live down the block as little apartments and ADUs and a school, and there's a shelter and a grocery store. It's all a part of my close knit community and it's cool.

David Roberts

And it's fine. It's all fine.

Jessica Bateman

Right. And it's going to be great.

David Roberts

The one other thing that didn't pass that I wanted to mention, because insofar as there's any sort of note of off note or note of dissent about all the great housing progress that got made this year, is that the tenant protections bill did not pass. And I think there are people in the environmental justice community saying sort of the housing supply without the tenant protections is just going to screw us again. So maybe just explain what were the tenant protections and do you think they'll be back?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah. There were two bills. One was basically a rent anti-rent gouging bill that would have given the Attorney General the authority to take people to court if they are deemed to be increasing rent at a rate that is exploiting people and rent gouging super important. That did not pass. And then we also had a bill that would cap, like an inflationary cap on how much a landlord can increase rent year over year. Neither of those bills passed. These types of bills have for years failed to move forward in the legislature. I think there's a significant skepticism amongst lawmakers that these are bills that will help solve the problem.

So I think there's a lot of work that continues to need to be done building a coalition to make that reality different, to see a different outcome.

David Roberts

Do you think they'll solve the problem? Like, is this the policy you would pick to protect sort of low income homeowners?

Jessica Bateman

I support a reasonable cap on, like, an inflationary increase like they did in Oregon. I don't think that's going to solve the problem. I think it's going to be a near term fix that will ultimately not address the underlying issue, which is a lack of supply. I haven't seen a lot of data tell me that rent control actually results in lower prices for renters. And the underlying solution is really that we need to make housing available to more people. We need housing that's abundant. We need people to have choice. There needs to be competitive options for people, which right now it's essentially a monopoly.

And there's so much of a limited supply that people are able to just the demand is so high, they're exorbitant costs. But this is going to continue for a while. So in the meantime, we will continue to have people that are getting hundreds of dollars rent increase, $1,000 rent increase. And I am terrified as a lawmaker about my constituents being evicted and not having anywhere to go, because there is literally nowhere to go. So I see that as an interim step. The rent gouging. I think that if there is an aggressive and systematic increase in rent that is deemed to be gouging, I think that the Attorney General should have the ability to investigate that and hold people accountable for that because that is happening.

But there are people that really fundamentally believe that rent control is an essential solution and without it, that we are not going to see people be protected, that people will continue to fall victim.

David Roberts

Yeah. This is a deep and long standing debate in the urbanism world, a very heated debate. Are those kind of forces fixed in place or do you think there's enough wiggle room that this has a chance next time around?

Jessica Bateman

There would need to be a significant amount of work to build a coalition and to talk with lawmakers and to make I mean, the reality is that rent control bills and rent stability bills have died year after year in the legislature. So you have to be really honest about how do you change that outcome. And if there's not enough support amongst lawmakers now, how do you change that? And you do that by talking to them, getting broader coalitions of people together to talk about what's happening now to people and what will continue to happen, and coming up with a solution that legislators can support.

The legislature is filled with groups and organizations that represent them and the people that represent the landlords and the multifamily housing associations have a very large presence in the legislature and are there every day.

David Roberts

And people who get evicted do not have a large lobbying presence.

Jessica Bateman

No, they don't.

David Roberts

Speaking of forming coalitions and changing the political balance of power and political dynamics, I got some questions about how that happened. I talked to some of your colleagues and people who are involved in and around this stuff and they all you were singing your praises along exactly this lines, which is this middle housing bill failed last time and then you did the work of building a bigger coalition. Because in the politics, from my point of view, like someone who lives in Seattle and is continuously frustrated, it just seems like NIMBYs are like, everywhere and have a lock on everything and have a lock on every process from the local level to the state level. Somehow you overcame that.

So maybe just tell us a little bit about what the modern pro-housing supply coalition looks like.

Jessica Bateman

Well, first we had the most diverse freshmen class of lawmakers arrive this year, and so ...

David Roberts

The young people are coming. The young people are coming.

Jessica Bateman

Exactly. Young people. They're closer to the issue of housing instability, insecurity. They're more likely to be renters.

David Roberts

Yeah, they're all living it.

Jessica Bateman

Right. We've got members of Color now in our caucus. That number keeps growing as well. They also are disproportionately them and their constituents are disproportionately impacted by a lack of housing. So that was huge because they ultimately really changed the dynamic towards the more progressive side of this conversation. And I made it my mission. Last year, I went out and met with people in District. I went and met with the association of Washington Cities who was very much opposed to my bill last year. I met with their Legislative Priorities Committee and said, this is why I'm passionate about this topic.

David Roberts

They ended up endorsing your bill, didn't they?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, a week before it passed.

David Roberts

Still though.

Jessica Bateman

After 25 hours of negotiating with them, they ...

David Roberts

Still kind of blew my mind, I mean, this is for listeners. This is the AWC. The association of Washington Cities.They just represent all these little, whatever, 260, all these little cities and towns around Washington. And I would say it's fair to generally characterize their past behavior as on the NIMBY-ish side of the spectrum.

Jessica Bateman

They've been opposed to legalizing middle housing statewide for years. And so last year they didn't take it really seriously in terms of negotiating. And this year we did a lot of work. Prior to session, I reached out to them, and then during session I continued to do that. But I think fundamentally, when I looked at the problem of the bill not passing last year, I thought, this bill is being talked about in such a wonky way. From a zoning perspective, we have to talk about this like it's a kitchen table issue because it is. It's impacting where people are growing up, where they're not growing up, where they're taking jobs.

If they're taking jobs, it's impacting people like my dad who contemplated postponing retirement so he could help his daughter with a home. It's impacting people's daily lives in all types of ways. And we needed to talk about it like that. And because it impacts the environment and climate change is something we've talked about, we need to be talking to environmental organizations. And because it impacts and exacerbates these inequities with opportunity we need to be talking to organizations and communities of color labor, and we also need to be talking with people that build housing.

David Roberts

Yeah. How would you characterize labor's disposition toward housing supply currently?

Jessica Bateman

Well, the Washington State Labor Council last year at their conference passed a resolution stating that they supported eliminating single family zoning.

David Roberts

Hey, well, alright. It's one of these things that I've learned when talking about unions, never to sort of assume the obvious thing, but you'd think, like, building lots more housing would be looked upon favorably by the people who build houses. But I guess you can't always assume that.

Jessica Bateman

It took them some time to come to that conclusion. The young people are coming. Like the environmental organizations that supported this bill five years ago, I don't think that would have happened. They had an influx of new, young, diverse members getting on their boards and saying, hey, climate and housing are definitely linked, and we need to be taking this seriously.

David Roberts

So you think environmental groups coming around that was significant in the politics of this?

Jessica Bateman

Oh, 100%. Absolutely. Futurewise was the premier organization that I worked with last year. It was sightline. So to have Futurewise really leading the charge with an actual dedicated lobbyist, this was one of their two priorities that their board voted on. Sierra Club, Washington Conservation Voters. Absolutely.

David Roberts

That's great.

Jessica Bateman

We have folks that are serving in the legislature that they associate the old school environmentalism as a different one than today. Today we know that dense housing is good for the environment, and it didn't used to be associated that way.

David Roberts

And population, the old school environmental, if you told them if you limit housing, you're going to limit inflow of population, they're like, exactly right. Population. People are bad, people are bad. You still hear some of that, but I think that's fading, at least in terms of their active public.

Jessica Bateman

I've been working on this issue for eight years, and I've seen a change in how environmental groups talk about this issue and who's showing up at those tables for environmental organizations. Personally, when Futurewise told me that they were making this bill one of their top two priorities, I almost cried. And I said thank you, because not only I would love your help as a lawmaker, it really helps to have an organization support your work, but also to me, it did represent a C-change in how we're talking about housing and land use, and that gives me a lot of hope for the future.

David Roberts

So you got environmentalists on board more or less. You got unions more or less on board. Even the AWC, the Association of Cities, is titularly on board. If I'm thinking about state politics, who do I identify as sort of the concentration of opposition? Is there like, an organized faction that opposes this stuff, or is it just kind of ambient NIMBY sentiment?

Jessica Bateman

Before it was the AWC, but not this year. So the entire time that I worked with them, they were negotiating in good faith in terms of wanting to eventually get to a yes if they could. And so they were not actively opposed to the bill. They were neutral, and then they got to support at the very end. We did have a lot of the old school environmentalists individually emailing legislators and saying that middle housing conflicts with preserving the environment and tree maintenance.

David Roberts

The trees, my God, it's like a trigger word for me.

Jessica Bateman

Now. Tell me about it. I was on city council for five years. So yeah, that was kind of it. And then individual cities that were members of the AWC, but not speaking for the whole association, like the city of Auburn being a prime example, they were very much opposed. But that was basically it. There was no organized those were more tangential. There was no organized group.

David Roberts

And a similar question, how would you characterize the Republican Party's disposition toward these issues? Certainly at the federal level and in the sort of face of the party is very much like, we must preserve the suburban style of life at all costs. Joe Biden is coming to force you out of your house, et cetera. But you had a Republican co-sponsor, which is somewhat brain scrambling for me. So are they split on it? How would you characterize where they're at on these issues right now?

Jessica Bateman

I would say at first that politics nationally is different than it is at the state level. And I know that's what we see in the news, and I don't watch the news, but that's what people are used to and accustomed to for their lens at the state level. I work with Republicans. I get along with Republicans. We could be on the opposite sides debating a bill, and then we go to lunch in the member cafeteria and we sit next to each other and talk about kids and pets and it's very cordial and affable. So I would say that legalizing middle housing, despite being like a free market, right aligned theory policy, that a lot of Republicans, it conflicts with their big government, the state telling cities what to do, when actually, in reality, cities are telling property owners what they can and cannot do with their properties.

So it really ...

David Roberts

These people are supposed to hate meddlesome regulations, right.

Jessica Bateman

The message of local control, which is current law, middle housing cities currently have the authority to make their own local zoning decisions, and that's called local control colloquially. Well, this is when people talk about it, they call it preempting, preemption of local control. It's very much of like the federal government coming in and the state government coming in and preempting. Well, local control doesn't have a really great history either if we want to go back in history on that. And yet that message is really hard for Republicans to get away from because that strikes a chord with them.

David Roberts

Well, also local control disproportionately empowers the aforementioned older and whiter people, which also coincidentally happen to be the sort of base of the Republican Party, so it's not the ...

Jessica Bateman

Also the Democratic Party.

David Roberts

This is not all about policy. It's very much about them having power.

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, I mean, the people who vote in elections tend to be older whiter property owners. So that could be said, it could be true of Democrats as well.

David Roberts

True.

Jessica Bateman

However, we did get some Republicans. So the fact that Representative Barcus was a co-sponsor was huge. He was my number two on the bill. He didn't just co-sponsor it. He was the number two, which is extremely significant. Actually. His office is right across the street from my house.

David Roberts

Who does he represent?

Jessica Bateman

He has a property management company and then he represent, I think it's District 2. It's like right abuts my district, south. So Lacey and Tumwater south. And so he believes fundamentally that we need to have more housing that's available and that abundant housing is a significant pathway to a solution. That's why he co sponsored the bill. And he did a tremendous amount of work outwardly, talking with people, going on interviews, podcasts, radios, really stepping out and defending this bill. And then in his own caucus, when it came to the floor, he had to describe it to his caucus members and whatever he said to them inside, that caucus was successful because we got a ton of Republicans to support the bill in the House.

David Roberts

Really?

Jessica Bateman

Yeah, it was a vote. We have 98 members.

David Roberts

So this was bipartisan in a real way, not just the, like, one rebel Republican?

Jessica Bateman

No, they voted a significant number of them voted for it on the House floor.

David Roberts

Does that extend to other housing bills? Is that a general move on housing policy? Or was there something in particular about middle housing that resonated, do you think?

Jessica Bateman

I think the middle housing bill, I mean, it was pretty amazing objectively how much support it got. I think some people voted for the bill honestly because they just saw how hard I worked it and were like, just, okay, fine, leave us alone, Jess. I hope not. I hope that they really wanted the policy, but me meddling and getting in their way might have had something to do with it. But he really cultivated a sense of what the bill was, helped them understand it. That's the other thing that people underestimate the influx of bills that we get and how the sheer number and magnitude.

So when you have someone right in the other party that is shepherding it, that's the other thing. Like throughout the whole process when I was negotiating with the AWC, I was constantly checking in with him, letting him know what was happening, where it was going. So he was attuned so when it eventually got to the House floor, he knew the bill. It wasn't like a different bill because it changed a lot. But then it went to the Senate and we didn't have a Representative Barcus in the Senate. So all the Republicans over there, that was a brand new bill to them that they didn't understand and know.

And Senator Trudeau was the sponsor in the Senate. It didn't move in the Senate. So then she was the person who shepherded it over there and did an incredible job getting that bill passed. I still don't believe that it passed. It's going to be signed on Monday and until it's signed, I still don't believe that it happened.

David Roberts

This is how I feel about the Inflation Reduction Act to this day. Is there a Republican co-sponsor for the TOD bill, for the Transit Oriented Development Bill or any of these other sort of big ones?

Jessica Bateman

I don't think that the TOD bill got a Republican co-sponsor. And a lot of the supply bills, they garnered Republican support because like the streamlining permitting process and design review, et cetera. But the TOD bill the Republicans are not shy about telling you they will not support a bill that has minimum affordability requirements in it.

David Roberts

That's just what a bizarre place to draw a line in the sand. We will not help poor people. If you try to help poor people, we're out.

Jessica Bateman

Well, they view it as and you could talk to Representative Barkus about this because he's kind of the housing lead over there. But I think from what I've heard, the best way to get more housing is to make it easier to build more housing. And there's certain things I agree with that, I think ...

David Roberts

Why not both?

Jessica Bateman

Right. There's also politics and I think there might be political reasons why they might have that position as well. I'd let them articulate that. But my point is that if we want a bill to pass, we have to figure out we have the majority in the House so we can move it on our own.

It always helps to have Republican supporters as well, if possible. So any path forward would have to figure out that in some way.

David Roberts

Yeah, I'm just so curious just from a political standpoint about because this issue does not on the merits cleanly fall along what you would think of as ideological lines. It's more of a culture war split. And I'm just so curious. But to summarize, it's not monolithic opposition to anything having to do with housing as it is on, let's say, many other public policy issues, at least it's mixed.

Jessica Bateman

In the House especially. I mean, the Republicans, they have a listserv that I subscribe to and they talked about the progress that they made on housing and they mentioned the middle housing bill. And so leadership has supported the fact that their members supported that bill and they're talking about it publicly. That's awesome to a significant degree. Yeah. But I think the Senate was a little different. We heard the floor speeches on the Senate be different than they were in the House, much more focused. I mean, Senator Fortunado in the committee, in the Housing Committee, his first question was, he said, I don't like this bill, and I don't like it because my next door neighbor might sell their property and someone might build multifamily housing on it, and that would be right next to me.

David Roberts

Well, at least he's effing honest, right? This might personally inconvenience me and reduce my property value.

Jessica Bateman

I think he also added renters might live there because then ...

David Roberts

Worse yet, imagine they might even ride bikes.

Jessica Bateman

And Representative Barcus, I looked at him and I was like, do you want to respond to that? And he said, well, first, we love renters. Thank goodness. Because I was like, I don't even know where to go with that. I mean, I was in shock. I'm newer here, and this is my first in person session. So I was a little surprised by the comment, but Representative Barcus did a really good job. But my point is, I think as younger Republicans maybe get elected or the same kind of diversity of their caucus happens, hopefully we'll see the change in attitude around what used to be a controversial issue and I think is now becoming much more mainstream and honestly supported by the average constituent.

David Roberts

Interesting. I'm a little curious. When will the middle housing take effect? I'm sort of curious. Once the aforementioned older whiter people who live in the single family neighborhood see things happening, I'm guessing at least some of them are going to go complaining to the representatives, and it will be the politics for Republicans will get complicated somewhat. So A, when will things start happening as a result of this bill? And B, are you worried at all about kind of backlash to implementation?

Jessica Bateman

I'm not worried about a backlash to implementation because of my own experience in the city of Olympia after we passed our own middle housing. It is not a fundamental change that happens overnight. And in fact, we're going to have to do more work. It's not just about legalizing these home types. It's making sure that we have the workforce to build them, which we currently don't, that we have financing products for people to buy these different types of homes that typically haven't been purchased by people. There's a ton of work that's going to have to go into incentives, like a ton of stuff, when it will be implemented.

It's going to be a rolling implementation based on cities and which counties they're in based on their comprehensive planning process updates, super wonky. I know the largest more populated counties, Snohomish, King, Pierce. They're going to be implementing in 2024. They're the next cycle. And then 2025, another group of cities, and 2026, et cetera. So it's going to be a rolling implementation. They have six months to adopt building codes, which are the codes that allow for the housing. Department of Commerce is going to be doing model ordinances for them because some of the smaller cities are like, we don't have the staff, we don't ever done this before, which isn't a hollow argument actually.

And so Department of Commerce is going to be doing a lot of work in the next year and ongoing I anticipate coming back next session and there are a lot of other things that we're going to have to address and so I'm looking forward to working on more housing legislation in the future.

David Roberts

Awesome. Okay, final question. I kept you much longer than I said I would, but I love this housing stuff. I think most of where housing policy, the rubber hits the road is the sort of interplay in local municipalities and states. But is there anything in particular that the federal government could do that would make your job substantially easier, that would make these housing reforms substantially easier? Is there one or two things you could point to?

Jessica Bateman

I mean, they could say that any federal funding, the requirement is you have to legalize, you can't make it illegal to build middle housing.

David Roberts

Right nationwide middle housing bill, that would be something.

Jessica Bateman

I mean, it's not legalizing middle housing nationwide. It would be saying if you want our money, you need to have policies that are aligned with our climate and equity goals. You can't have climate and equity policies that conflict with our goals if you want our money. And right now they've taken what was considered a proactive and progressive position of incentivizing based on making these good decisions. So much more of a carrot approach. But listen, we are not going to make progress like New York. They just went through and we're trying to be more aggressive with legalizing, more modest home types statewide and that quickly fizzled out with pressure from stakeholder groups that were opposed.

And that was a governor supported initiative. Just like last year, 1782 was a governor request legislation. We don't have time. The urgency to make sure that we have a planet that we can live on, that we have housing that's affordable for people in places where they want to live. I mean, the time was ten years ago and we need to take it really seriously and do everything. There's just really common sense things and making funding a prerequisite that you have policies that allow people to live in your cities is one of them.

David Roberts

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this super educational and interesting and heartening and thank you so much for all your work on this issue. I feel like the state is going to be better for your efforts. So, Representative Jessica Bateman. Thanks again for coming on.

Jessica Bateman

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

In this episode, Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance discusses the barriers that keep lower- and medium-income customers from installing rooftop solar, the types of efforts most likely to overcome these barriers, and how to keep momentum moving forward.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

For all its explosive growth in recent years, rooftop solar is far less frequently installed by low- and middle-income households than by wealthy ones. Though that disparity is diminishing somewhat over time, it remains large.

The barriers keeping lower-income consumers from solar go well beyond the financial (though financial barriers are substantial), ranging from credit histories to low-quality and poorly insulated buildings to lack of supportive policy.

State policymakers, foundations, and non-profit groups have been trying for years to overcome this problem. Finally, the pieces are beginning to fall in place and it is becoming clearer which kinds of interventions work and which kinds don’t.

No one knows more about the history, design, and successes of these programs than Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance. She has been analyzing and advocating for these policies for years (she just came out with a report on how foundations can help), so I was eager to talk to her about the rationale for low-income solar programs, the features that make them work, what's in the Inflation Reduction Act that can help, and what further policies are needed.

Okay, then, with no further ado, Vero Bourg-Meyer, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

David Roberts

Cool, so there's a lot to talk about here with this topic, which I've had sort of, like, in the corner of my eye for years and years now, these programs for low-income and mid-income solar, getting solar to low-income, mid-income people, I sort of had it on my periphery forever. And so I'm happy to jump in directly. My sense of the sort of state of play among the wonks is the best way to help poor people is to give them money. And if you have money to help them and you want to do something other than just give it to them, you need to sort of justify, like, why is this better than just giving them money?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

So I guess to start with, my first question is just why should we care about specifically getting solar on these households versus just helping them with money? So what is the sort of justification for this kind of whole area? Why do we want to get solar on low- and middle-income households?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Well, so there are two questions in there, right? So one question is that there's a climate question. Obviously, we want solar not because we think it's great for savings and all that, but also because we have a climate crisis that's ongoing and we need to do something about this. So that's the reason why we want solar. But why LMI communities and I'll use LMI in a kind of loose way. LMI stands for low- and moderate-income. LMI sometimes is just low-income and that generally means kind of in this area, generally it means below 80% area median income.

Some people also define it as below 120%, but without going too much in the details, that's generally what it means. So the reason why you want to make sure people have access one of the reason you want to make sure those people have access to solar is they spend a much higher percentage of their income on their utility bills as the rest of us. About almost four times as much as you or me. And I'm lumping us in the same income brackets. I don't know if that's correct. So they spend a lot of money on their utility bills.

And so obviously when you're giving them away month after month after month to reduce those utility bills, that can have a really outsized effect on them. Right? So it's not just the cost of purchasing the solar to begin with, it's the continuing saving over the lifetime of the asset that you'd have to kind of look at.

David Roberts

It's kind of like giving them money every month.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, essentially. Yeah. Assuming there is a saving, which it has to be structured that way. It doesn't just happen like that. And then there is the resilience benefit that you can get when paired with batteries. And I was saying earlier, I'm going to use low-income communities as kind of LMI communities, very generally speaking. But we're also talking here about communities of color in communities that generally, because of redlining, have older housing stock houses that are not well insulated. When you start with that and you add storage, you get a really huge resilience benefit for them.

LMI also means higher rate of chronic diseases, right. So you need your dialysis machine to work all the time, not just some of the time. So that's another really big reason. But I'd say your question though, about why not just give them money? If you kind of put aside, is it politically pragmatic to just give them money? Which I don't think at this stage it is. We tend to wage a war on the poor instead of waging a war on poverty in this country, right?

David Roberts

Yes.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

So setting that aside, if you're looking at who deploys the solar in this country, it's the private sector, right? And there are other barriers that are kind of standing in the way of LMI communities getting solar other than just the initial funding. The initial funding is a big part of it, but there's also lots of other reasons why customers don't trust the developers. Developers are not interested in serving or generally not all of them.

David Roberts

Let's talk about those a little bit. Let's talk about those barriers. Because I know intuitively, as you say, the obvious barrier, I think, which jumps out at everybody is just not enough money. That's what low-income means. But that's not the only reason that deployment of rooftop solar is lower in these communities even than what you would predict based on income, right? The barriers that go beyond income. So let's talk about some of those. Like, what are the kind of things that are stopping these households from accessing rooftop solar?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Well, so the funding one, I don't want to just fully put it aside, right. Because that's a really huge one, the upfront cost, and just for your listeners who may not be familiar with the cost of solar for a regular household. So if you look at the average size of a solar asset in this country, which is about seven kilowatt, I believe, and then the average cost between $3 and $4 per watt. So that's what? That's $25,000, roughly, that you have to find.

David Roberts

That's not small for anyone ...

Vero Bourg-Meyer

It's not small. And that upfront cost you and I have access to other kind of funding. We have access to financing, right? Low-income communities might people might have a lower FICO score or no FICO at all, or maybe even no bank.

David Roberts

FICO is just a credit score, right?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes, that's right. Yeah, that's a credit score that's being used by lenders to decide how much they want to charge you, essentially, and whether they will even charge you, whether they will agree to give you a loan. Not to mention if you are really struggling to put food on the table, the idea of taking on additional debt is just not always interesting, at least not for everybody. We can get back to that. So a big barrier beyond the funding is the physical barrier, right?

So the site suitability, what's called site suitability criteria, roofs could be in a really poor shape. If you have issues of lead and asbestos in your house, it's really hard to get a contractor to go in and crawl in your attic to go install something. They're just not going to want to do it. And then there are some things that are kind of more linked to the type of housing you might be looking at, right. So single family homes is one thing. Multifamily homes have specific issues. You could think of where the meters are located. That's kind of a dumb one, but it really is a problem.

So if you have meters that are specifically dedicated to apartments, that's great. If you have one meter and then everybody kind of shares, that's creating kind of more issues. So, yeah, physical barriers are a big one. And also the way that the subsidies that we've mostly been using for solar up to this point so the tax credits, primarily. So the investment tax credit, up to this point, the PTC, the production tax credit, wasn't open to solar. Now it is with the IRA. You can't monetize the ITC if you don't have a tax basis, right. The non-taxable entities, affordable housing, the non-profit developers, none of those can access the ITC.

Could access the ITC until the IRA with direct pay. And then as an individual, a homeowner that does not pay taxes cannot utilize that in a very obvious way. So there are ways to kind of go around that. But generally speaking.

Isn't it also the case that LMI people are more likely to rent or more likely to live in apartment buildings where they don't?

Well, it depends actually ...

David Roberts

Isn't that also a problem?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

I mean, it is an issue. You'll find those traditional kind of split incentive issues, but it's not necessarily the case that it's everywhere. I don't have in mind the number, the percentage of renters versus homeowner on top of my head, but it really depends on the states. And I think that's when you're a state policymaker, you're looking at kind of building a solar program. Your housing market is not a monolith, and your solar market as a result is also not a monolith. So you have to really dedicate brain space to creating solutions that are really tailored to what you're trying to tackle to specific issues in your state.

David Roberts

So, barriers, we've got the obvious one. Finance and funding got physical site suitability, meaning like, the actual buildings themselves might need work before they're even ready for ... One that springs to mind always when I think about these communities is just who's reaching out to them and talking to them and educating them. Is awareness a big barrier?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Big time. And I would say those kind of behavioral barriers exist both on the developer side and on the customer side. On their developer side, they just will not market to them, right?

David Roberts

Right.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

They just viewed as not good customers, which is definitely not the case. There are studies out there showing about the same kind of default rates as ODA loans, right?

David Roberts

Oh, really?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Good enough. Yeah. So if it's good enough for a giant trillion dollar industry, I think it should be good enough for solar. And there's nothing as boring as an ODA loan. So I think we could do this. But on the developer side, that's really just a perceived risk kind of issue. And on the customer side, there are trust issues as well. Right?

David Roberts

Yes.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Lots of fly by night action.

David Roberts

Yeah, I was going to say scams are quite common. These people tend to be targets of a lot of scams.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. So one that you hear about and I don't have specific data on this, just kind of stories, but one that you hear about all the time is developers coming in and then promising a big government subsidy because they're thinking about the tax credit, and then a homeowner will just go for it and then realize oh, wait. I can't monetize this at all. This is not working for me. I'm not getting the money. This money is just paper and I don't have anything to apply it to. So, yeah, that's dishonest. Business practices are also out there.

So all is to say it requires a lot more effort for customer acquisition and you can't just sit and expect those customers to come to you. And obviously, as a developer, if you have the choice between targeting that group over here that you think is going to be much better at paying, which it isn't, but you think it's going to be the case, and also naturally trust you more versus a population that trusts you less and it's harder to get to. Well, the choice is easily made.

David Roberts

Right, there's all these sort of like, I don't know what to call them, soft costs, I guess. Just like developers tend to be in the socioeconomic bracket of a certain type of customer and then everything becomes easier. Communication, right. Like they understand one another, et cetera, et cetera.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

And then you have other things like language barriers, obviously.

David Roberts

Right.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

And that can be a big one in some communities.

David Roberts

So it's not just effort, it's who is going to talk to them. Like choice, finding someone that is trusted within those communities to communicate absolutely is a big deal.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

So we're going to get a little bit into how states are doing this later. But just I want to start with the IRA because obviously everything in the energy world is different now. We're in a new world. We're all discovering this new world. So what specifically did IRA do for LMI rooftop solar?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Lots.

David Roberts

Of course.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

I would say lots, but lots in ways that aren't necessarily fully clear at this stage. I mean, the way I think about it is because I work at the Clean Energy States Alliance, right? I look at it from a state policy maker perspective. How can they build programs around what the federal government put together and that kind of funding? So the three big buckets and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, obviously, but just to organize my thoughts, the three big buckets are the tax credits, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the Loan Program's office.

And I'll start with the least obvious one, which is the Loan Program Office, the innovation ... so there's something called Title 17 that offers clean energy loan guarantees, right? And that up to IJA. So that's pre-IRA, until IJA, someone applying for this, was required to show some sort of innovative element, right?

So the loan program's office wasn't going to say, "Oh sure, I'll guarantee your solar thing over there, that looks great." No, it has to be something a little bit more exciting than that.

David Roberts

That's sort of the point of LPO, right? Seed innovative things.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, well, since IJA that's not the case anymore.

David Roberts

And by the way, we. Should say IJA is the hell I don't know what it stands for. The infrastructure ... the Infrastructure Act.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

The Bipartisan Infrastructure law. So what does I stand for? Infrastructure and Investment and Jobs Act or something. So the kind of the first big piece of climate legislation passed in this new era that we are in the projects that are supported by a state energy finance institution can access loan guarantees now from Title 17 from LPO without having to show that they're super fancy and innovative. And the funding then for LPO was also expended through IRA. The IRA really put in a lot more cash into this thing that they started doing. I'll give you an example to show you how this relates to low- and modified-income solar.

So imagine a community solar developer wants to develop some solar that benefits LMI communities and they go and get some grants from the state to serve a specific area. The developer now has access to an LPO loan guarantee and they could say, I need a construction loan. Go out, find that construction loan is typically the most expensive part of the process in terms of capital cost. And now they can talk to their private lender and say, hey, I got this grant from the state. That means I can apply for this loan guarantee. How about you give me a lower rate because DOE is going to be there and guarantee that I'm a good bet for you. Right?

So that's a really interesting kind of piece of the equation that I guess doesn't really get talked about much unless you work at LPO.

David Roberts

Federal loan guarantees can basically lower the cost of capital for developers.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

And it doesn't have to be that the state participates in the way of grants. They could be doing things like a loan loss reserve or straight up loan. They could invest in however way that they want. They just have to support the project, at which point the project becomes eligible for an LPO guarantee. And that's as long as that support is being done by this state energy finance institution. Which can be a big number of things, but it could be a state energy office. So the folks I work with.

David Roberts

Or a state green bank.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, absolutely. So that's one pocket of money in the IRA. The next kind of pocket of money that can really have an impact on LMI communities in terms of solar deployment would be the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund. So that's an EPA program in total. So it's got a bunch of buckets, it's got a $7 billion bucket that they're calling it Solar For All. Actually, the implementation framework came out yesterday from EPA, so it's all very new and exciting. This was the talk of the town this morning. So there's a $7 billion bucket for cold solar for all that will only apply for the benefit of LMI communities.

And that's $7 billion that the states can apply to, in its states, municipalities, tribes. But essentially what EPA wants to see is they want to see solar, rooftop solar, community solar distributed storage and upgrades. And the really cool thing about that and the rules that we just learned about yesterday is that electrical panel upgrades, roof repairs, they are covered under that.

David Roberts

This addresses the site suitability stuff we're talking about so you can get some money to prepare your house for solar.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Absolutely. And hopefully you can enjoy the benefit of a well built solar program that your state are going to put together.

David Roberts

Right. So states put together some kind of program and then go to the EPA and say, hey, we have this program, give us some money to fund it.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

That's the idea. That's the idea. And then there are two more buckets in there that could apply to solar. I mean, solar is part of it, but then it's open to kind of different types of applicant. There's a $14 billion bucket that focuses on kind of clean investments. So that's going to go to two to three national non-profits. So the point there is to leverage funding and private sector lending or investment, generally speaking, at a national level. So do things really big, essentially. And 40% of that is as part of the justice 40 framework, is going to go to LMI communities and the remaining $6 billion is to capitalize organizations that are directly lending or providing financial assistance and technical assistance to LMI communities.

So the $6 billion bucket and the $7 billion bucket are all LMI and the $14 billion bucket is 40% LMI.

David Roberts

That's a lot of billions.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, that's a lot of billions. Exactly. And I think the fun part of this is when you work in and around state government is everybody is super excited but no one knows what's going to happen. And there's a lot of like, how are we going to do this?

David Roberts

Yeah. I guess it goes without saying that these monies have not started dispersing yet, right? We're just figuring out the rules for them. So no state has yet gotten this money?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

No, not yet. But then at CESA we are actually going to be working on trying to build some sort of a template program for states that they can use and replicate. Because the key here, particularly with the $7 billion bucket, is that it's going to go quick. I know it sounds ridiculous, it's a ridiculous thing to say, but they are opening in the summer and then the money has to be out of EPA within like a year, essentially.

David Roberts

No s**t.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

Wow.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

So there's like a bunch of we're hurting toward the trough here.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yep.

David Roberts

And once you divide that up among 50 states, I guess it's maybe not as big as it looks on the surface. So I guess the other bucket is the tax credit which ...

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes, the tax credit. And so the tax credit is a fun one because ... I mean, they're all fun.

David Roberts

Nothing like money. Nothing like money for the study.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, exactly. Going to solar for LMI communities to get us excited. But the tax credit is really big, right?

And it seems like every other week there is another study that comes out and says, "Hey, this is going to be this big. No, it's just kidding. It's this big."

David Roberts

Right? It's uncapped. Which means we've been over this on the pod before, but just for listeners who don't know, these tax credits are not ... there's no upper limit set. So how much money the Feds are going to spend on these tax credits depends entirely on demand just how many people apply for them. And so, as you say, we keep getting these new analyses saying, "It's going to be a $3 billion program, no, $5 billion, no, $10 billion." The estimates of how much of this is going to be demanded keep going up and up.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. And it's really big. There's one piece. So the part of it that ... there are a couple of parts that are exciting. There's one piece that's the structure, the change in the structure of the tax credits that can make a huge difference in some institutions that before the IRA did not have access to tax credits, now can have access to tax credits. And then there is a piece of it that actually is capped, but that we don't exactly know how that's going to work. So let me start with this last one first. There is a new LMI, what we're calling an adder.

So it's an allocation and it will be either 10 or 20% extra. So 20 percentage points or 10 percentage points extra on top of whatever else you have. So either your 30% base or your 40% or your 50% if you're meeting all of the criteria that the statute has set. And that is capped at 1.8 gigawatt per year. So the way this is going to work is not like the rest of the tax credits where you just kind of go through your projects and your tax credits work the normal way. This one is allocated after the fact.

So it's a whole process that projects are going to have to go through with treasury. And at this stage, it's a little bit unclear how this is all going to work. There are some rules that were just issued, I want to say about a month ago, but don't quote me on that just recently, let's say. And the way this is working for 2023 at least, is that we're only going to have about 60 days, depending on the category. You find yourself in 60 days to apply for the tax credit within a whole year.

David Roberts

After your project is done.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Well, no, that's the kicker. That's the kicker. You can't apply retroactively. You have to wait. You can't place in service your project before those 60 days. So that's the part where we're not too sure how this is going to work. And then DOE, treasury are going to have to figure this out because it doesn't quite fit a traditional residential solar business model.

David Roberts

This is sort of like where non-profits like CESA come in, right? Like you figure this out, hopefully you set up some sort of template, right, some sort of template that businesses can use so that every project doesn't have to sort of learn all of this from scratch.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

We can help find the information list. But yeah, at this stage, we're not sure how that's going to work, but it's potentially still very big. And then on the structural front, so direct pay and transferability are those new two fancy things that we can do with tax credit. So direct pay being you go through your project, you finish your pleasant service, et cetera, et cetera, and instead of receiving tax credit at some point, so after you file taxes and request all that, at some point you get direct payment from the government. So that's really exciting for all the non-profits that previously did not have access to that.

And I'm talking there's so many non-profits, I think maybe that's something that people don't necessarily see. There are a lot of non-profits working with and for and organized by as well, LMI communities, right?

So we're talking affordable housing, we're talking health clinics, we're talking homeless shelters, all sorts of stuff.

David Roberts

So just the shift to direct pay alone is sort of an equity is a justice thing, right, because it's mostly going to be non-profits.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, I mean, it's too bad that they didn't want to just when we're talking about kind of giving money directly, I think tax credits are way that the government kind of gives out money directly, right? And they decided when they passed the IRA, Congress decided, "We're going to do this only for non-profits." Why not for people? I don't know.

David Roberts

Yes, you do know, though. His name is Joe Manchin, right? Let's not pretend we don't know why all the flaws in this bill are in there.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

Okay, so there's buckets and buckets of money in the IRA of various places for LMI communities, LMI developers, non-profits who want to work with LMI communities to go get so let's talk a little turkey then about what these programs look like. What are the sort of tools that states use to reach these communities? And maybe if you want, you can use Connecticut as your sort of standard bearer, because as I understand it, they have the top of the line program.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. But I should say they had because it's finished. It terminated. The program terminated.

David Roberts

Oh, it was like a set amount of money they dispersed and then ...

Vero Bourg-Meyer

No, they were looking for a specific megawatt capacity and they reached out and then the legislature was like, "Yeah, you're done. You're moving on to solar, to solar and storage." So now they're doing solar and storage with justice instead of just solar with justice, which is also really exciting. And I should say part of my work at CESA is working as part of the Scaling Up Solar project, which is a DOE funded project. So my salary, part of my salary comes from DOE. We tried to help states replicate the Solar for All program from Connecticut, and it was a really successful program.

I like to talk about it in terms of how much of the savings that people get, because that always blows people away. So there is a VIC study that kind of shows the kind of savings that the customers from the Connecticut Solar for All program received. And we're talking $1,300 a year. That is ginormous.

David Roberts

Per household.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes. That's not chump change, nothing. And then within that, you have about $700 worth of solar and then you have efficiency stacked on it. So what they did that was really smart to start with is that they looked at all the incentives that were available in their states and there was part of it, the efficiency part, that was really just managed by the utilities, and they were like, well, let's make sure that we do those two things together.

And solar plus efficiency in general, it's a winning combination. I want to say, in terms of savings for anyone, not even just for LMI communities, but if you stack your incentives and you stack your products, solar and efficiency together works really, really well. So you remember at the beginning when we're talking about how this upfront cost is really an issue and there is no access to financing that's available for you if you are in a certain income bracket. So the program is really a lease program. So it's third party ownership, TPO. And I should mention that there is a bit of a debate in the advocacy world out there on the kind of the value of TPO versus direct ownership.

So some people are really married ...

David Roberts

Yeah, I've been tuned into this for a long time and I heard debates about it. Not only like, financial debates, like, which is better financially, but also which is better for the homeowner and obviously third party ownership, which, just to explain to listeners who don't understand it's, just a company owns the solar panels on your roof and what you're buying from them. You buy the power from them, basically. So you as the household do not have to pay for the panels and the installation. The company pays for that, they own it, and you're just basically buying the cheap power.

So that's what third party ownership means. So what is the debate?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

So the debate is, when you're using third party ownership, some people will say, well, you're not getting all the benefits, all of the wealth creation that happens with solar, which if you're looking purely financially that's true. Yes, that's correct. I don't think there is any need to debate that. Anyone who's ever looked at a solar model can tell you that's true. But the issue there, I think, is that what I personally think is that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can utilize third party ownership models for what they're really good for, which is giving access to solar, to families, so that they can get savings right now, right?

Not tomorrow, not in five years, when we figured this out, not hypothetically, once a project magically comes online, maybe potentially, perhaps mayhaps in the future, but like right now. Right. And in most of the programs that I can think of, state programs that focus on third party ownership, there is some aspect of trying to convince the developer that there needs to be a pathway to ownership. Right?

And I think that's actually been folded now into the greenhouse gas reductions fund solar for all competition that we were just talking about.

David Roberts

Isn't it standard in these TPO arrangements that you can buy the panel at the end of whatever the lease period is?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Right. Yes, it is very standard. I think what we're talking about here is accelerating that. Right. So how do you make a pathway so that at the end of, let's say six years? Because that's about when tax credits or tax equity investors would get out of that investment. In about six years or seven years, is there some way that you can help that customer actually purchase the panels directly? Straight up. Right. And I think there are developers out there thinking through this. There are states out there thinking through this. And I don't think we need to be married to one system or one deployment model over another.

I think they all are good for some things and less good for other things.

David Roberts

So you can get a little bit of a hybrid, then you can get some sort of benefits of TPO and then maybe ownership in the longer term.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, absolutely. And then to go back to the Connecticut, because I kind of went astray there to go back to the Connecticut model, it's a public-private partnership between the Connecticut Green Bank and a company called PosiGen. They are a developer that was born out of Katrina, essentially, and that really was born in New Orleans to try to help folks get over the consequences of Katrina and really bring some resilience benefit to customers. So what they do is that they stack up efficiency and solar incentives, as I was mentioning earlier. And what the state of Connecticut also did with the Connecticut Green Bank did, is that they created an elevated incentive.

So an extra amount of money if you met some income qualification criteria. So if you are meeting those criteria, you're getting extra money, PosiGen comes to your house, and then no matter what, you have to go through what's that called? An efficiency test, essentially.

David Roberts

Efficiency audit.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Thank you. So you go through your audit and then the company will tell you, okay, well, here are the things we can do kind of on the cheap, the minimum we can do. Or here are some extra kind of much deeper retrofits that we could do on your house that will bring you much deeper savings.

Which one do you want? And they give them a choice. And in addition to that, you get your solar. So the other thing that the Connecticut Green Bank did at the time, which is not necessarily required for that kind of a project to work or that kind of a program to work, but that was really helpful in the context and that's something that states have to think about was to support the company in a different way financially as well. So they offered subordinated debt to the company because at the time PosiGen was a new company, the market was untested.

They were like, "Okay, well, if you need to be successful serving these customers, if you need an extra bit of support over here, we'll provide that and that money goes back to the state." So it's just an investment like any other investment. And that really helps that developer be motivated to serve those customers really well. So these are kind of just on the financial side and on the behavioral side ...

David Roberts

Just pause here on the financing. So the idea here is PosiGen comes to your door and says, we'll give you an efficiency audit. We'll figure out what you'll need, you'll stack it up and we'll do it for no money down.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

For no money down, right.

David Roberts

From the homeowner or the building owner's perspective, this is just a no brainer, right? Does anyone say no to this?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

The no money down is just the first piece, I think it's no money down and cash flow positive, right?

David Roberts

Right. So you're making money off it from the word, from the word go.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

From the get go, you got to make a certain target. And the way that they access those customers as well and how they decided who to enroll in the program, they did not use FICO scores. So as a company, just generally speaking, they do what's called underwriting to savings. So they look at how strong of a saving they can give a customer and then they essentially bet that it's going to work and that it's going to be strong enough for them to be able to recover their money. So if the customer doesn't make money, they don't make money.

David Roberts

Okay. So that seems to me to overcome or at least substantially overcome the funding barrier. And then if you're not using FICO scores, you're sort of overcoming or getting around the kind of credit score barrier. What about just the sort of like education and community engagement piece? How did Connecticut approach that?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

So they did a lot of community based marketing and that's been shown to work really well to sell solar in general. And there's been actually also studies looking at the type of messaging that works in LMI communities versus non-LMI communities and turns out the messages need to be about the same. People want savings. People want something fancy and new that works really well, and they want environmental benefits.

David Roberts

Let me put something cool on your house and you'll make money from the second yeah, you don't have to fine tune that a lot for different audiences. It seems like a pretty universal appeal there.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. But one of the reasons that really worked is that the Connecticut Green Bank was super involved in selling the program really hard. Right. So no one wakes up in the morning and says, oh, I'm going to figure out how to put this expensive piece of infrastructure on my roof.

David Roberts

Not these households, right? That's probably not the top of mind.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Exactly. And even without that, I can't remember when that was exactly. But a few years ago there was some study about priorities in spending for people. Energy was like the last one.

No one wants to think about it, basically.

No one wants to think about it, just people interested.

David Roberts

So Connecticut was aggressive then at sort of like very aggressive reaching these communities.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. And that means going to fairs and running solarize campaigns, which are bulk purchasing campaigns for solar and co-branding stuff. Right. So you talk about this trust issue question if the state is there to say, no, seriously, this is a good program, we stand behind it, we picked these people. And then in addition to that, they also vetted all of the contractors that were being used. So it's more believable for a customer that has trust issue than if some guy came to your door and said, yes, trust me, I'm totally going to put something free on your house.

It's going to be great.

David Roberts

So it has official state backing, right?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, absolutely. Which I think is really important.

David Roberts

Are there other pieces of the Connecticut program that are particularly that other states should.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

If you're looking at purely the lease program? Well, I should also mention it's a lease, right. It's not a PPA, so as opposed to a PPA where and there are pros and cons to using each of those. But a PPA, a customer's bill will go up or down depending on how much the sun is shining that particular month, right. And if you're very low income, that could be a problem for you. Right. Seasonality could be an issue. If it's the summer and I don't know, if you're not in a state that has good net metering policies, you could end up paying more than you anticipated.

And that's problematic, obviously. A lease the big difference is that the payment is stable. It's always the same thing every month. So it's nice that kind of being able to see over the horizon and say, yeah, this is how much I'm spending for energy. And so there are lots of other things that they did on the financing side and on the kind of the state programming side that are, I'd say, a little too complex to explain without a paper support. But they're really cool programs at the Connecticut Green Bank. I encourage anyone who's even just a little bit interested in kind of state level policy innovation to really go and look at the annual report is a great place to start because they do really cool stuff.

David Roberts

Are other states taking note? I know Rhode Island. I've seen in your work that Rhode Island sort of learned, seems like learned from Connecticut and more or less kind of took those lessons. Are these things actively spreading in states or other states?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Hopefully, if we do our job right. Hopefully. And in Rhode Island. So the format that was followed was pretty much the same, except that we didn't have efficiency there. As an added piece, the main difference is that Rhode Island, the Rhode Island program, so the Affordable Solar Access Pathways, or ASAP, that came out post IRA. So that means the low-income adders, the ITC adders, are folded into the program.

David Roberts

So it's sort of built around the IRA money.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes. And then the way that this is going to work so they also just selected they ran an RFP and selected a vendor, which also happens to be PosiGen. That's going to be the first. So that's brand new information. I think it's public for PosiGen, but I'm not sure whats fully public yet. But I cleared it with them. I'm allowed to say it. The big thing there is that when the RFP was launched, we asked the private sector, what level of incentives do you need to get to this level of savings for a homeowner? And then not only that, but what levels of incentives or what kind of money are you going to send back to the consumer or to the program?

Whichever you choose. If you get access to extra incentives through the tax credits. Right. So now you have not 30%, but maybe 40%, maybe 50%, maybe 60%. How is that shared with the customer, with the ultimate customer? So that's one of the questions that was being asked in the ...

David Roberts

Yeah, I guess you do want to take care to design these things. So you're not sort of like inadvertently just using public money to make a particular solar company richer, super rich.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes. Because, I mean, it's great that they're motivated to do this and you do want the private sector motivated to do this, but ultimately it's got to create benefits for the LMI consumer.

David Roberts

Right.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

That's the most important piece of this.

David Roberts

So if I'm a state and I am looking at Connecticut and saying, "Hey, that's cool what you did. You created enormous savings for these households. You installed whatever megawatts of new solar. Our state wants to do something similar." It strikes me that this is, among other things, just administratively there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle here. There's a lot of sort of so what are the kinds of things that if I'm a state that wants to replicate this or do something similar, what do I need in place before I do this? And then one of the questions that always comes up for me is a simple one, which is just sort of how do you identify LMI communities?

Is there a common national metric or is every state sort of every state kind of bespoke figuring it out on their own? And just in general, if I'm a state, what do I need to do to get ready if I want to do something like this?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

So on the question of what the states have to do to get ready, I think that probably the most important thing. If you wanted to do the same thing as Connecticut, would be make sure that your legislation enables third party ownership very clearly because there's nothing that turns off a contractor or developer quite so quickly as telling them. So we're not too sure, we're not entirely sure what the regulatory context is like. But just before you can enable LMI solar, you have to have a friendly solar policy, just generally speaking. Right?

So do you have net metering enabled? What I'm going to say is not relevant to the Connecticut program, but do you have community solar enabled? Is it authorized in your state? Can everybody do it? Or is it something that only the two utilities that are in the state can do and oh, by the way, they don't want to do it, so it's just not happening. So these things are good places to start. But in terms of how you figure out where your low- and moderate-income communities are located, there's tons of different ways of doing it.

There are states that have gone through very lengthy process stakeholder processes and regulatory processes you can think of. California is one, New York is another, to try to figure out what constitutes a disadvantaged community or low- and moderate-income community. There are lots of different terms floating out there. And those states have gone through the process and they've talked to people whose livelihoods are really directly touched by these things, right. Not just policymakers, but people in communities. And then the federal government kind of stacks on top of it and says, well, I'm going to define low-income community for this program this different way, and then for that other program a different way.

So it's a bit of a mishmash of all sorts of definition. Often you'll have for the state definitions, a mix of ethnic and racial kind of threshold, foreign languages. You'll have poverty levels, essentially. You can have sometimes unemployment levels. But yeah, this mapping question is complicated.

David Roberts

Well, the IRA has a ton of adders and sort of set asides for justice communities. So it seems to me like this is a national concern. You need some common metric because there's so much money at stake here, it really matters how these things get defined.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

So you do need some common metric, but also states are very different, right? So a state like Vermont, which is very rural and very white, is going to be different from a state like, I don't know, California, which has a lot of urban spaces and a lot of people of color, big Hispanic population. So you can't quite blanket define everything. But I think some at least definition of what the factors need to be. Right?

So states maybe need to have a definition that fits those four criteria that include race and ethnicity, that include poverty level, that include XYZ with kind of flexibility, and what those need to be might be helpful. One of the things that we're trying to do that we're working in Colorado on a community solar program and on a community solar project or pilot project for manufactured homes. And Colorado does a lot of work with the Weatherization Assistance program WAP. They've been doing a lot of work on that for a long time. And they were the first state to use federal dollars to be authorized to use federal dollars from the WAP program to install solar.

They're moving away from that at the moment because it's too complicated. But they still want to coordinate the WAP program and the solar program. The Web program is going to use whatever the WAP program uses, which is a percentage of the federal poverty level, whereas the other programs that they're going to build are going to be using their local flavored, definition of income and race and ethnicity and et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it's all a big mess, but a big beautiful mess.

David Roberts

Big, beautiful mess. Oh, one thing I wanted to double back on, I meant to ask you this when we were talking about Connecticut, specifically about the renter issue, because this is something, this is something I get questions about all the time, like I rent, like what can I do?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Community solar.

David Roberts

Is this how I mean, you mentioned that Connecticut doesn't have community solar as a big piece.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

No, they do have community solar.

David Roberts

Is this the primary way of overcoming this sort of landlord tenant split incentive?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

I think it is. I think it is, although so there are some programs there's a program in Hawaii, for instance, through the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority that's allowing renters to participate in leases, essentially, and they have on bill financing that's enabling that with the Hawaii Electric Company. And that's working, I think hopefully it will work really well. That's a new program. It's called the Gems Energy Services program. But yet, just generally speaking, outside of exceptions like that of Hawaii, community solar is definitely the way to go. I mean, it's the way to go not for renters only, but also if you just have trees around your house and you can't access the sun.

David Roberts

What if you want to get solar panels on a big apartment building, an apartment building, say, that is occupied mostly by LMI people? Is there anything in these programs that can work with landlords or get around that?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yes, so I think the SOMAH program in California would be one that applies to that. And it applies to affordable housing, really. So the way that it's structured, and I'm not super familiar with it because it's not what I focus on. But one of the interesting pieces is, so heard, the way that they define the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the way that they provide funding for folks is that they request that the rent and the utility be kind of lumped into one payment, which is good for a number of things. But then when you start installing solar on something, it makes it more difficult because any changes to how much you pay in utility will trigger an increase in your rent.

So that's not super helpful. And they worked with the program in California. They worked with HUD to kind of get rid of that. So that was a good piece of the puzzle. And they are renters. They're renters. But you got to work directly with the non-profits that own the affordable housing. And that's not easy. They have lots of things to figure out and lots of other issues to figure out. Right?

David Roberts

Yeah. That seems like an area where, like a super simplified model that you could just replicate across would be helpful. We're running out of time. And one of the big things I wanted to ask you about was the reason that this whole conversation was prompted in the first place was a new report that just came out, which is specifically looking at how non-profit foundations can sort of enter this LMI solar space induce, help, support. We don't have a ton of time, but maybe you could just say a few words about if I'm a foundation and this seems like a good thing that I want to do, are there models?

How do I get involved?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. So first you should read the report.

David Roberts

Of course, always read the report.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Energize your impact. It's on the CC website. But what I'm going to say is true, I think, for states, it's true for the federal government, it's true for the foundations, it's true for the green banks. If you are building or looking interested in supporting LMI solar, you need three pieces. You need the capital, you need the customers, and you need the capacity, the capital. There are tons of different ways for foundations to provide capital. That's what the report is about. And we focus on really we go in depth in some of the fancier ways, the guarantees, the equity investments.

David Roberts

There's grants, there's loans, there's loan guarantees.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. And equity. I didn't know that before starting this research. I had absolutely no idea that foundations could do equity investments. It blew my mind when I thought that was possible. So that's your capital. Then you have your customer side. Where are you going to find your customer? How do you help people find customers? That's the second big bucket. And the third bucket is the capacity. And there are models in there that kind of look through how you build capacity in LMI communities, and particularly in either the LMI serving institutions or the non-profits that kind of support these communities.

And one model I guess that I'd like to point out is called Technical Assistance Fund from our sister organization, the Clean Energy Group that's explained in the report is really about finding that trusted third party advisor to help a community figure out or a community institution figure out, like, what are the options out there. To start with, if you want to build a pipeline of projects, you need to actually help the projects be born. And that sounds completely obvious to say, but you can have all the capital in the world if there are no projects to apply it to because people don't know what they need. Do I need a big battery or a small battery?

Do I need a battery at all? Like, what kind of solar can I use? Can I put it on my house? Can I put it on my hospital? Should I put it in a field over there? How does this work? Just generally speaking.

David Roberts

Who is that? Who is that? Who are those trusted? How do you find those people? Who are those entities?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

They're contractors. And I think the fact that they're trusted just means that they're not selling you the final products, right? So generally speaking, developer will be the person that tells you, this is what you need. Believe me, this is what you need, and I'm going to sell you. Exactly. And that does not necessarily inspire trust. So you really want kind of a third party there to be able to help figure out what the options are. And these are just essentially engineering firms that look at your situation, look at your needs, and try to help you make sense of it.

So that's a big thing.

David Roberts

So a foundation can just support and fund those?

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really fundamental piece of the equation. There's a piece, an editorial piece that was written by Joe Evans, who works at the Kresge Foundation and who is absolutely brilliant in all this stuff, but also wrote an op-ed aptly named "It's the demand side, stupid." And I think it's not subtle, but it gets to the point, right? It's like you need all of it, right? You need the capital, the consumers, and the capacity for this to be successful.

David Roberts

And you need to basically cultivate and educate customers. Like, this is one of those kind of areas where you just can't rely on a market in some sense because you're creating market demand by educating.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Oh, it's absolutely it's all about building markets. It's all about building markets.

David Roberts

Right. This has been awesome. As a final question, I just was wondering sort of what is the prize here? Say we just got low- and moderate-income households up to parity so that they're installing solar at the same rate, say, as other households. How much power in terms of like megawatts and gigawatts, is this a substantial amount of energy we're talking about, or is this mostly about these sort of extra energy benefits for these communities or is this really a substantial amount of it's big.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, it's big. I was thinking earlier, if you don't care about all the reasons why you would need solar on LMI buildings, if you have no human there's not a human bone in your body that thinks it's just fair and good and just and for some reason you only think about the grid.

David Roberts

I know some people like this.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah. They're out there. There are some of them. The solar potential of low- and moderate-income household is about 40%, 42% to be precise, according to NREL, of the total US residential potential, right. It's a pretty big chunk that's out there.

David Roberts

So it's almost half the rooftops.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah.

David Roberts

So that's not a small market too.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

No, it's not a small market. It's a big market. It can have a huge impact in terms of the grid and the climate and obviously a huge human impact for the people that are buying it.

David Roberts

Right. And it's worth saying, because I don't know if we mentioned it earlier, but the households themselves get immediate benefit in terms of their energy bills lowering, and they get positive income to start off with. But over time, this stuff also accrues right. These benefits also accrue to the next generation. Air pollution lowering affects children. So these benefits are ...

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Compounding.

David Roberts

Compounding over time.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Absolutely.

David Roberts

Vero, thank you so much for coming and decoding this area for me. It sounds like lots is happening.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

No, thank you.

David Roberts

The money is raining down and we're all dancing around.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Yeah, we're all dancing around trying to figure out how is this all going to work? This is a very exciting time. And if there is one thing that I would want people to remember, is that LMI solar really matters. It can make a huge difference in people's lives. And it doesn't happen by accident. It needs to be designed. So get out there and design stuff.

David Roberts

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.

Vero Bourg-Meyer

Thank you so much. Bye.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.

The Inflation Reduction Act is ambitious climate policy, but history shows that ambitious policy is not always followed by ambitious implementation. In this episode, Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University and David Beckman of the Pisces Foundation talk about Mosaic, a grant-making coalition that aims to help build a robust movement infrastructure to ensure that vulnerable and underserved groups can take full advantage of the significant funding offered by the IRA.

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Text transcript:

David Roberts

For all that has been written about the Inflation Reduction Act, the most salient fact about it remains widely underappreciated. What is significant about the bill is not just that it sends an enormous amount of money toward climate solutions, but that the money is almost entirely uncapped.

The total amount of federal money that will be spent on climate solutions via the IRA will be determined not by any preset limit, but by demand for the tax credits. The more qualified applicants that seek them, the more will be spent. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill’s spending at $391 billion, but a report last year from Credit Suisse put the number at $800 billion and a more recent Goldman Sachs report put it closer to $1.2 trillion.

Big companies will have teams of lawyers to tell them when they qualify for the tax credits, but there are also billions of dollars in the IRA that are meant to be spent on vulnerable and underserved communities. Those communities do not typically have teams of lawyers.

Who will work to enable them to take full advantage available of the money? Getting that done will require campaigns, relationships, and grassroots mobilization. It will require movement infrastructure.

A relatively new grant-making coalition called Mosaic is attempting to help build that infrastructure by dispersing money to the frontline organizations that comprise it. Mosaic is a cooperative effort among large national environmental groups like NRDC, big foundations, and various smaller regional, often BIPOC-led groups.

It has pooled philanthropic money and thus far given almost $11 million of it to dozens of relatively small groups and campaigns — 85 percent of them BIPOC-led, 87 percent of them female-led — selected by a governing committee from well over a thousand applicants. The governing committee contains a super-majority of representatives from frontline communities; the foundations have a super-minority.

To discuss the need for movement infrastructure, the Mosaic effort, and the possibilities IRA offers for frontline communities, I contacted Dr. Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and David Beckman, one of the founders of Mosaic and the current president of the Pisces Foundation. We talked about what movement infrastructure is, the failure of the climate movement to build enough of it, and Mosaic’s theory of change.

So, without any further ado, Hahrie Han and David Beckman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Hahrie Han

Thanks so much for having us.

David Beckman

Yes, thanks David.

David Roberts

I want to start with you, Hahrie. You have written in the past, and one of the themes of your work is that social welfare legislation or policy can often fail to reach, let's say, its full potential if there isn't the sort of civic and movement infrastructure around it to help it succeed. So maybe you can just talk for a little bit about what do we mean by infrastructure here? What does infrastructure mean? And maybe also what I think would be helpful is maybe you could cite some examples of times you think legislation or reforms fell short of what they could have done because of a lack of infrastructure.

And then maybe some examples of when there was infrastructure and that was helpful.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, I think that's a great question. There are so many instances when in trying to tackle some of our stickiest social problems, we put an enormous amount of attention and effort into trying to build the coalitions that we need to pass the policies that we want. If we think about any of the landmark legislation that we've had in recent decades, from the Affordable Care Act to the IRA to any other of these big kind of efforts, they've taken years or decades even to pass because of all the work that it takes to get them through. But then what so much research and so much history has taught us is that if there isn't the same kind of effort that goes into the implementation, that the gains that we made with policy alone are really fragile.

There's one famous book that looks at some of these gains, these policy wins, and calls them a "hollow hope" if they're not accompanied by the kind of infrastructure that you're talking about. And we just have a lot of those kind of examples throughout history. So to give a couple of them. For example, this book, "The Hollow Hope," starts with landmarks court legislation like Brown v. Board of Education, where, if you actually look at the ability of that one decision by the Supreme Court to actually translate into integration on the ground. It didn't actually achieve its goals, and its actual outcomes felt really hollow until you saw this mobilization of a lot of the school districts and parents and communities on the ground to make real the promises that were in that Supreme Court hearing.

David Roberts

That particular example is kind of telling since that infrastructure withered a little bit and now those gains are being reversed. So it's not just a one time thing like sort of implementing it and making it real is perpetual effort.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, I think that's a great point, right, because the thing that I always like to remind people is that any policy gains that we have are really fragile because they can always be reversed on the one hand, as you point out. But then also because oftentimes when policy gets implemented, it drifts away from what the original goals are. There's a famous political scientist, Jacob Hacker at Yale who looked a lot at basically welfare policy and a lot of social policies. And what he finds is that if you look at the impact of those policies on people's lives, that often there's a big gap between what legislators intended and what actually happened because of that process of drift.

And that I think is also a really important point because what it tells us is that you don't need Congress to take another action to reverse policy gains, but in fact, it can just be ignoring a process that can lea to that kind of drift.

David Roberts

Entropy, basically. Like if you're not continually reinforcing it, it naturally will start to erode.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, exactly. That there's just kind of natural chaos in the system. Or sometimes there are people that are actively working to undermine the ability to achieve those goals.

David Roberts

Yes.

Hahrie Han

Totally.

David Roberts

And they never quit. And they seem to have great infrastructure. If I could just insert one of my perpetual gripes in there. Like infrastructure working against social welfare legislation is just robust and seemingly permanent.

Hahrie Han

Yeah, it's easier to stop something than to create something new. And it's also easier to organize people around their prejudices and to organize people around hope.

David Roberts

Yes, indeed. So what are some examples then of the other side where sort of the infrastructure has come together around a law and made it?

Hahrie Han

So one example that I like actually is the Community Reinvestment Act, which is not a perfect act by any stretch of the imagination. So I know that there are lots of ways in which we wouldn't necessarily hold it up as a paragon of legislation.

David Roberts

Can you tell us what that is?

Hahrie Han

Basically, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed essentially to try to stop redlining in poor and Black communities. And so when it first began to come out in 1970s, 1980s, a lot of banks weren't lending to certain communities because they would literally draw red lines around neighborhoods where they wouldn't make investments. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed as a way to try to stop that redlining. One of the things that was really important that they did in passing the Community Reinvestment Act is that they essentially created these mechanisms through which communities could have continual oversight over the way that banks were acting.

And so the Community Reinvestment Act essentially created these boards that were an accountability mechanism for banks. And alongside the Community Reinvestment Act, there was a bill called the Home Mortgage Data Act. HMDA, it's what it's called for short. And what HMDA did was it made available the data that these local communities would need to be able to look in and see whether or not the banks were making investments in the ways that they should. So that alone doesn't actually cost government a ton of money. But by creating that accountability mechanism, what it did was create this ongoing hook, essentially around which communities could organize and essentially hold banks accountable.

And so over time, we've seen trillions of dollars of investments being driven into lower income communities because of the Community Reinvestment Act.

David Roberts

And so what do we mean then? I mean, we're talking about infrastructure here, sort of vaguely. What do we mean concretely by having the infrastructure in place to make these laws perform the way we want? What is it comprised of?

Hahrie Han

So, that's that's a complicated question. In my mind, movement infrastructure has a lot to do with the relationships, with the structures and the vehicles and the resources that a movement needs to be able to respond to the kind of strategic challenges that are going to come its way. And so I think one mistake that people make a lot in thinking about movements is to think about the most effective movement as being the one that has the best plan at the beginning. But actually, what we find is that the most effective movement is the one that can best respond to the contingency that comes up that it didn't expect.

And what do you need to respond to contingency? Well, you need to have strong leaders, good people who are interconnected with each other. You need to have resources that you can deploy. You need to have vehicles that can move nimbly and agilely in response to things that might come up that you don't expect. There are a range of those kinds of things that I think comprise the movement infrastructure that enable that response.

David Roberts

David, let's go to you for a second. The Mosaic effort is an effort to build this kind of infrastructure. So I want to talk about what that infrastructure is, but let's back up a little bit. Mosaic is a coalition of all these big, long-time foundations and big green groups that have come together with the sort of explicit goal of changing the way environmental philanthropy is done. So let's start then, with that. What is wrong with environmental philanthropy? Why does it need to change? What are its sort of flaws and shortcomings today?

David Beckman

Well, that's a big question, too. Let me just say about Mosaic. It is really the name hopefully paints a picture of the idea and the theory, which is that it's not just the big organizations, but it's all of the organizations and the people, the activists and the advocates that are individually doing important work but are not collectively able to keep pace with the extraordinary challenges and the opponents that you referred to. They can do better in a more connected fashion. And what's been missing is the investments in that connectivity and the tools that Hahrie discussed. And we can talk about what they mean in the context of the IRA.

But part of the reason that those tools that are so essential to movement success are missing is because, in the main, big philanthropy hasn't invested in them. Bridgespan, one of the leading social sector consultancies, has published a whole report about how field building, which is another way of looking at this, is one of the most effective, yet underinvested strategies in philanthropy. So this is an endemic problem, I think, that has a lot to do with the fact that infrastructure is so important, but it's invisible in some sense. It's not vivid. It isn't like you can't take a picture of the forest that you've saved.

It's the conditions, the how that you get to that result.

David Roberts

Right, it's not obvious also what the metrics are, right? Like, if you're doing it right or not, it's not clear what you're it's difficult to measure.

David Beckman

That's right. It's difficult to measure. So your question about philanthropy, of course there's lots of different philanthropies and there's more coming on the scene happily every day. But in the main, big environmental philanthropy funds in an atomistic way. It funds narrowly. It funds in a way that is exclusive instead of inclusive, and it tends to concentrate power. So four aspects that are not well suited to big scale social change and not well suited to implementing something of the scale of the IRA. And let me just give you a couple of facts about this. The atomistic part is really concentrating resources in single organizations and not building the fields that make them stronger.

The connections that Hahrie is talking about narrow. In 2018, the Environmental Grant Makers Association, which is not an association of every environmental funder, but many of the really large ones, surveyed its members and found that just 200 nonprofits of the perhaps 15,000 that focused on the environment got over 50% of the $1.7 billion that its members donated in 2018. And that is astounding, if you think about it, 15,000 or so registered 501(c)(3)s and 200 are getting half the money. And that year, five nonprofits got 13% of that $1.7 billion funding pie. The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife, EDF, and the place I used to work, NRDC, four of those got $100 million dollar grants from the Bezos Earth Fund a couple of years later.

So you've got deep concentration. And then BIPOC organizations are funded at just a fraction between, say, 1% and 10%, depending on the study you look at. So there's not an inclusive focus. And last, something we're trying to address with Mosaic, most of the decisions are made by program officers and boards. Relatively few people with a certain type of demographic background, usually not always. And so there isn't much investment in participatory grant making, which is what we're modeling with Mosaic, where leaders actually get to compare and to cogenerate strategy and then to deploy money themselves as opposed to having to ask for it from a philanthropy.

So atomistic narrow, exclusive and concentrating isn't a recipe for success in general, and certainly not with respect to the IRA.

David Roberts

This is so reminiscent like this is a critique of left versus right philanthropic funding that goes back decades, since I remember paying attention. It's always the right is investing in infrastructure, right in the organizations, in the relationships. Like, you look at the Federalist Society that is basically all about relationships and look at the tentacles it has sent out into US society, just remarkably successful. And then you hear people on the left saying, "I can get a grant for a particular campaign or a particular accomplishment or a particular policy, but it's impossible to get just operational funding, just basic funding for my organization to survive."

And those who do get it, as you say, are so concentrated, and when a single group gets so much money, it creates this perverse incentive for the group to sort of put its own interests first, right, to keep getting the money. So you get almost a resistance to cooperation and a resistance to working with others.

David Beckman

Yeah. Well, the competition for money I have experienced myself when I was an advocate and lawyer doing environmental justice work and water advocacy and the things I did at NRDC, there's no question that it gets in the way. And part of the problem is there's not enough money because the organizations I mentioned, I think, are good organizations. So the issue isn't that they shouldn't be funded. It's that everyone else needs to be funded, too. And money needs to flow in ways which are both equitable and fundamentally effective for large scale social change and philanthropy in the main.

Not always, but in the main has missed that. And that's a big problem.

David Roberts

I wanted to ask kind of a practical question about Mosaic. So you have this grant making board, this representative board that has a lot of diverse people on it, and you have over 1000 relatively small scale applicants and what sounds like a really labor intensive process by which all these applicants are vetted. And the board discusses them with one another and they're winnowed down and et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I was reading about this in The Chronicle of Philanthropy or whatever the heck it's called, and it just sounds exhausting. People involved were saying it's exhausting.

It's like finals week all year. And yet the result of that is $11 million, which is, in the context of these small groups, obviously nothing to shake a stick at. But like Bill Gates, it's just dropping $100 million here and there on this and that company. So I'm just asking about, I guess, the ratio of soft costs of work, of time intensiveness versus the amount of money that's being deployed. Do you think that's sustainable in the long run?

David Beckman

Yeah, it's a good question. Well, the good news is that Mosaic is about to announce $10 million in additional funding. So it's a new effort that is beta testing a lot of the concepts that we're talking about and learning along the way. So I've been able to participate, which is a really interesting experience as somebody who also spent a decade and a half as an advocate and then runs a foundation, a private foundation that's in a more traditional mode. And it's true it takes a lot of time, but I'll tell you, it takes a lot of time the other way, too.

So it's not really a question so much of how much time, but what is the quality of the time that's invested. And I think the benefit of participatory grant making that I see, particularly when it's done well and leaders are involved, is that it itself is infrastructure. There are relationships that are formed, ideas that are exchanged, trust that is built, theories of change that are debated. And the environmental movement, as you know, both of you know, is fractious and doesn't always agree with each other. And so there's a value there that I think is differentially impactful compared to several program officers or one making decisions.

Should there be more money in participatory grant making? Absolutely, and in fact, there's a study that says that just a fraction of foundations participate in any way with grant making approaches that devolve power to other people. And I think that's partly because there's not a lot of good examples of where it's worked. So hopefully, one of the things that Mosaic and other efforts can do is to demonstrate the benefit of this approach for others.

David Roberts

Can you just very briefly describe the approach? It's a committee and there are meetings. Is there more to it than that?

David Beckman

Yeah, it's just like a meeting, David. There are a couple of things. First of all, the application process seeks collaborative proposals. So that in itself is different. Usually, in my experience, it's like a single NGO approaching a single foundation. So already, from the beginning, the proposals are done in a different way. They're done online, they can be done verbally, which I think is a really good progressive approach. There's no long 15-page proposal that is required. So that's an attempt to lower the barriers of entry. And then there's this fabulous staff that has incredible data crunching capacity, that looks for heat maps and does some initial vetting.

And then the leadership that makes the decisions is not involved in all of that. So it's not that everybody's engaged at that stage. But then we met in for three days and went over, did a whole kind of retreat, and reviewed the top section of proposals that the staff had prepared. And that was a debate like some of the best debates I've been involved as an environmental advocate, where people are talking about what is needed, where how do you compose a grant slate that's equitable and effective? How do you fund the grassroots? How do you fund relationships between the Big Greens and others, networks and communications and the rest?

So what comes out of it? I think and I can compare because I run a foundation, I think is a really good way to approach things that really deserves a place much more solidly in the mainstream of environmental grant making.

David Roberts

Hahrie from your perch as Mosaic is sifting through all these applicants, what kinds of things should it be looking for? What are the ingredients of this sort of movement infrastructure that you're talking about that you can identify in groups? Are you looking for certain kind of people, certain kind of strategies, certain kind of goals or financial structures. How would you go about building movement infrastructure? What are the sort of indicators that you're looking for among grantees?

Hahrie Han

It's a great question. So I think that in thinking about movement infrastructure, in the end what we're trying to do is identify individuals and organizations that aren't just the kind of individuals and organizations that can do a thing, but that can become the kind of people that do what needs to be done, right? And so this kind of gets back to the idea that when you're thinking about implementing a bill as large as the IRA or building a movement as broad as what we need in the environmental movement, you have to anticipate the fact that there are going to be challenges coming your way. You can't anticipate.

And so I have to think about who are the kind of people that are going to be able to respond to that? What are the kind of organizations that can respond to that? And so then how do I actually think about and identify that at time one without knowing what the challenges are that they're going to be investing in time two?

David Roberts

Yeah, exactly.

Hahrie Han

The things that would look for would be things like what is the extent to which they're building networks among their people that are bridging versus just bonding. And so the idea of a bonding network is one in which people are connected to other people who are a lot like them. Bridging networks are ones that not only create those bonds, but also enable people to bridge across to different kinds of people who aren't necessarily like them. And so what that means is that you have an organization that's constantly growing and renewing itself. I would look for organizations that are investing in building a kind of inclusive leadership in the way that David was describing, partly because I think obviously there are moral reasons why we would want to make sure that we have an inclusive leadership, but partly also for strategic reasons.

There's a lot of research that shows that the movements that can best anticipate and respond to contingency this is true not only for movements, but actually for corporations as well are ones that have lots of different kind of for lack of a better word, kind of sensors out in the community to sort of understand what are the changes that are coming our way and how do we figure out how we can anticipate, how we need to remake ourselves for the future. And so if you don't have that kind of diversity of people giving you input, then you're not able to respond nimbly to the constantly changing world around you. So there are a lot of things like that that I think begin to give us a sense.

David Roberts

Yeah, I think this is such an important point and maybe I'll touch that back to you also, David, because I feel like and I've done a couple of pods on this recently, been thinking about it recently and this idea of trying to fund a more diverse give money to more diverse groups and et cetera. It's so often framed in terms of sort of representation as kind of an end in itself, like a moral good in itself. It's just good to have other people there because you want to check the box. But the point of all this and this is the point that comes across in management literature and all this is not just that it's good, but that diverse groups make better decisions.

It's an improvement in your ability to do good things. It's not just for looks or not just for box checking. It makes you perform better. And I wonder David, if you've you know now that you've really gotten your hands dirty trying to assemble a group like this, I wonder your thoughts on that, if you found that to be the case.

David Beckman

Absolutely. And I would just to add to what you said a second ago for many grant makers, again, not all, but I see and hear a lot that makes me think that equitable grant making for some is their charity, not their strategy.

David Roberts

Right. Yes.

David Beckman

And there's a big difference. There's a big difference. There's certainly a moral imperative to fund communities and people who have more than their fair share of problems and who have been deprived of money from big institutional funders historically. So that stands on its own. But the point you're making is not only I think about the fact that better, more creative and interesting solutions come up which do, but that you can build power that way. As Hahrie's pointing out by bridging between what could be sort of atomistic, semi-competitive or worse, communities within a movement and to find some sort of working relationships, if not stronger relationships, productive relationships that allow big, important social change to happen.

And that I think is one of the most important things that's missed when we pick fractions within a movement, either the Big Greens if you're talking about the environmental movement or frontline organizations, I think both can play a role and they can play a synergistic role when their collective impact is built on some relationship. And sometimes that isn't that we're going to totally agree, it's not kumbaya, let's all get along. It's that often when you're in relationship and you're in those rooms you can find that you might disagree about two or three things and maybe those are not going to get resolved but there's three or four things that you can agree on and through that kind of doorway you can make progress that you couldn't make otherwise. And that's why some of the effort in answering the question you asked earlier I think is worth it because it's not just process or overhead, it is actually the work, it is actually the infrastructure.

David Roberts

Another question for you Hahrie is about backing up from the implementation, just the legislation itself. It seems to me like not only should environmental philanthropists be thinking in terms of infrastructure and implementation, but obviously legislators should too. Like, you can do better or worse in the text of a law on those terms. And this is something I feel like this is another critique of Democrats that goes way back, which is that they don't lose well, right? Like they don't lose in a way that improves their chances the next time. And even when they do pass legislation, it's not like always part of the goal of the legislation should be to make future reforms easier, to make future reforms more likely.

So I wonder, a. do you see anything in the IRA that qualifies as kind of that like an eye on infrastructure building?

Hahrie Han

Right.

David Roberts

And if not, what would you like to see, like, in future legislation? What are the sorts of things you might put in legislation that would help this infrastructure building?

Hahrie Han

Yeah. I think it's so important in designing policy to think about what the feedback effects that you're creating, because a lot of the most effective policies that we've seen throughout history are ones that have these feedback effects that essentially what you want to do is create a feedback effect that strengthens the constituencies that you want to strengthen and then either weakens or divides the opponents to the bill, right. And that's how you create the kind of loops that you're talking about that enable the passage of the next set of reforms, make them even more likely than they were before with the IRA.

I think the opportunity that's on the table is the fact that so much of this money is essentially being delegated out through state agencies and other local governmental agencies that are operating at many different levels of government. And the extent to which this money can be doled out in a way that builds what I like to think of as relational state capacity, right. The ability of these governments to co govern and work in partnership with community leaders and community groups on the ground that only then makes the next generation of reform and policy and funding and implementation that much stronger.

And so I feel like a lot of the design questions that we have on the table right now about how this money gets allocated through this network of state and local agencies and other intermediaries is going to be really important in helping determine the extent to which we have those kind of feedback loops or not.

David Roberts

Yeah. And something I've actually heard from people in the back rooms involved in building IRA is that among Democrats in Congress, there's been a learning, let's say, that you don't necessarily want to channel all your money through state governments, right. Because there are a lot of perverse state governments who will do things like refusing billions of dollars of free. Federal money so that they can keep their poor people from having health care, that kind of thing, right. Like they've learned from the past that you can't rely on. So a lot of the IRA is sort of built around the idea of going straight to communities, straight to local communities, which I thought is heartening that the Democratic establishment is learning things.

Hahrie Han

Right, yeah. And it's heartening, partly because it's learning how to play that political game, right. But also heartening because then that implicitly builds this capacity and these capabilities in these local communities in a way that can have greater effects down the road.

David Beckman

Yeah. And if I could just add to that, just to connect something we've been talking about. So what does it look like to make a grant on movement infrastructure? A couple of the grants that Mosaic is making this year focus on a really bridging network of 17,000 plus climate advocates, policymakers, academics. It's just connecting that group. Another grant is facilitating rural implementation and trying to create networks that make it easier for folks who may not be as commonly working in the areas of electrification and tax incentives and so forth to pry those opportunities. And there's another grant that's actually focused on government officials themselves and educating them about the opportunity, not in environmental terms, even necessarily, but in terms of what they can do for their communities.

So those are ways of sort of spurring the kind of relationships that Hahrie is talking about.

David Roberts

From where you're sitting here. So you got a bird's eye view of dozens and dozens and dozens of small groups who want money. So I wonder part of shifting funding from a couple of big groups to a wide variety of small groups is about just sort of like hedging your bets and building infrastructure. But I wonder if you found among the applicants just ideas and strategies that are not represented among the big groups. In other words, like genuinely new ideas for how to approach things. I wonder if you could just talk about some of the applications and the patterns that emerged.

David Beckman

Well, one of the things that's amazing is that it's such a diverse set of ideas. And from a philanthropic practice perspective, when you're not relying on a single individual to vet potential proposals, I mean, nobody knows everybody, and everybody's got a limit to their day. You just get an eye-opening kind of response. And I think that was something that everybody CEOs of big groups are part of Mosaic CEOs of smaller groups, EJ groups, felt. So some of what we saw is a desire to sort of shift the terms of debate. And I don't know how that, I don't think, is very well-funded in mainstream environmental philanthropy.

Different theories of change, different approaches to the economy, questions around how to frame economic growth in different ways, indigenous perspectives on the protection of the environment and elevating the rights of nature. As a theory, these are not directly related to a tax incentive for decarbonizing your house, but they come through and they're interesting perspectives that don't get a lot of play. More practically, we saw a lot of really interesting collaborations between different organizations, some of which work together, some of which don't, and are using the opportunity to apply for a collaborative grant to stretch their wings in ways which, as Hahrie saying, may grow into something that has nothing to do with the proposal before us. One interesting proposal was to build solar capacity in communities of color using the tax incentives and actually, I think, direct grants that are available for solar installation, not only generally, but in underserved communities to turn that into a workforce development effort for brown and black people.

So there's a whole set of things that I think are going to be helpful in actually reaching the goals of the IRA which are not guaranteed to happen and can build for the future.

David Roberts

One other question I wanted to ask in terms of what was on your mind as you're picking grantees is, and this is anyone who listens to the pod will know that this is an enduring obsession of mine. But it seems like one of the basic headwinds facing implementation of the IRA, facing basically any progressive effort, is this massive, extremely well developed propaganda apparatus on the other side that has basically captured rural America, has almost entirely captured rural America. And in a sense, like any attempt to do anything reality based in the face of that just gets swamped. So I wonder if there were a lot of ideas among the applicants about, to put it dramatically, information warfare about how to fight back against what is the inevitable tide of misinformation about this bill, about these technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Was that a theme?

David Beckman

Yes, but maybe in a more positive sense that the IRA, I think to the credit of its designers, is itself a pretty profound attempt to push back on that narrative. But because really what we're talking about is decarbonization in theory, but the practice of it is through electrification of power and cars and incentives for clean energy and right down to what any of us, as people who live in a home could get a credit or a refund for purchasing like a heat pump. And there is, in the IRA, specific money that goes both to vulnerable communities, EJ communities, as well as to rural communities, which there are 40 million people in the US who live in rural communities, 50% of the land mass of the country.

And so we're talking about a significant space in the country and a lot of people. The opportunity, for example, to decarbonize rural electrical cooperatives which have really relied on coal, which has very significant public health impacts, in addition, is a huge opportunity that isn't necessarily cloaked in environmental terms. It's a great opportunity to reduce cost and to create jobs. And there's a whole set of parts of the IRA that are entirely focused on farm communities and forest communities that involve credits and other types of incentives for regenerative agriculture, for dealing with water scarcity, increasing water scarcity, and things that just have basic bottom line benefits economically and are part of cleaning up and making the economy greener in those areas.

So I see those set asides, or those components, set asides is probably not the right word, for environmental justice and for rural communities as a really powerful step. And I think it connects a lot to what Hahrie is talking about in terms of will this change the experience of people who might think of environmental groups as not their friend and really recontextualize what this is about.

Hahrie Han

And if I can chime in here just on the question of disinformation that is spreading in so many of our communities and especially in a lot of these rural communities. I've been doing a lot of work recently studying evangelical communities which operate in a variety of different kinds of contexts. But one of the things I've really learned from the way a lot of evangelical churches organize their communities is they have this idea that belonging comes before belief. That so often, I think, when we think about building an environmental movement, there's sort of this implicit assumption that belief comes before belonging, right?

Like that you've got to sign on to this idea that we all need to decarbonize before we're going to invite you into our meetings. And if you show up in your Range Rover and your hunting gear, maybe you're not going to feel as welcome as you do otherwise. And these churches have the very opposite idea where they say, look, you don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe in any God, and especially our God. We're not going to be shy about what we stand for, but you're a part of us no matter what.

And they have this attitude of radical hospitality. And that's really undergirded by a lot of research that we have on disinformation, where when you're trying to combat that kind of propaganda, the least effective thing you can do is throw a lot of scientific evidence at someone who ...

David Roberts

Fact sheets.

Hahrie Han

Right. But the best thing that you can do is have someone who they trust, with whom they feel this sense of belonging, come and talk to them and present an alternative narrative. And so, in that sense, I feel like a lot of the work that Mosaic is doing in investing in these community based organizations that can build those communities of belonging in rural areas across America is another really important piece of combating this kind of disinformation.

David Roberts

Yeah, I think that's such an important point. I mean, you have results that support this basic conclusion from sociology, from neurology, name your field. It all is coming together to basically show that social relationships are primary and very often your beliefs are derived from those rather than vice versa, as you're saying. This is also a long-time criticism of the left and this is sort of conventional wisdom at this point. Unions were sort of the left's tool. Unions and liberal churches were the left's tool for doing that, just for literally bringing people together in the same room so they can see and smell one another and share beers.

And that stuff is so important. And unions have withered notoriously and liberal churches have kind of withered and the left has nothing to replace them. So in that sense, I think it's just great to be funding these super basic, just like get in a room together, group type things.

David Beckman

And if I could just say, one of the challenges practically with the Hahrie's talking about radical hospitality is that let's just say that the federal government doesn't come with radical hospitality even if it's offering billions of dollars that can be used. So breaking that down, how do you apply for money? How do you even track? I'm a lawyer. I have difficulty with the Federal Register and I was trained and supposedly I'm supposed to be competent in that. And a lot of the investments that we're making and others I think hopefully will be too, is about creating some basic kind of open doorways that make the opportunities accessible and relatable when they are not, in any of our lives necessarily top of mind.

We're also supporting faith communities through Mosaic and veterans who are trying to organize around climate change and other new or newer voices, nurses and healthcare professionals who I think reflect some of the experience and the research that Hahrie is talking about where it's a lot better to have somebody who you trust, who is in relationship with you, talk to you about an issue that you might not hear. The same if it's sort of an environmental leader on television or something like that.

David Roberts

Yeah. And this is to Hahrie's earlier point. Once that relationship is established, it works for the next thing too, right?

David Beckman

Yeah.

David Roberts

That's, I guess, what we mean by infrastructure. Like, once it's there, it's built and it operates beyond the immediate context. Hahrie, I wonder one sort of question I had is a lot of the money in the IRA is just for very practical, prosaic stuff machines, retrofits, whatever. And so most of the attention around all this is sort of building these networks, building this infrastructure to allow people to access that money. But I wonder if you've given any thought or David, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this too, is whether the money itself can be spent in such a way as to serve this goal.

Spent in such a way as to encourage infrastructure. You know, not only sort of trying to get the money, but trying to direct the money in ways that are reinforcing of this larger goal.

Hahrie Han

You know, one thing that I think about is this question of what are the mechanisms of accountability that are being created through the way the IRA gets deployed? Because ultimately that question of accountability is the one that's going to determine the extent to which these ongoing feedback loops are created in the ways that would favor ongoing reform or not. And so as all this money is being deployed for heat pumps or other basic machines that are needed to help decarbonize the entire economy, I think it's not just about spending that money once, right, but it's about restructuring the way the economy works in these certain kind of communities. And how can that be done in a way that will continue to ensure that the kinds of voices that we want at the table are continually there and that those voices are strengthened through the development of this whole new system?

David Beckman

Yeah, two thoughts on that. One, that a very kind of visual thing came to mind because there's a part of the IRA that is focused on environmental justice and on transportation projects in the that literally physically split communities, usually Brown or Black communities. And the opportunity actually to reconnect is quite a beautiful visual metaphor for what you're asking about and I think would almost naturally create the opportunities for communities to rediscover their connections in ways that have been literally physically severed by decisions. But beyond that, and more broadly, I think this is where advocates activists come into play because I think a couple of possibilities are out there.

One is that the IRA is successful, but the experience of individuals and even companies is very solitary. I go to Home Depot, I get something from my house that costs less, or I can fill out a form and get a rebate check from somebody. That's a solitary experience. It may be very marginal in terms of anybody's psychological thinking about these issues, but if environmental organizations or those that are interested in these issues are able to surround those sorts of economic activities with new connection opportunities, information that as Hahrie says it is relatable where trusted messengers are delivering it.

So that act of participating in the IRA's opportunities is also an act of stepping forward and opening yourself up to, well, you know what? That heat pump actually performs better than what I had before. Maybe some of these environmental ideas aren't so crazy. That's where you get chess not checkers. And that's so essential that activists and advocates working on climate really seize this opportunity to work dimensionally around these opportunities. Because if they don't, I think we could have a different level of success, but not something that would be as systemically transformational as is possible.

David Roberts

Right, yeah, I think about the analogy in fitness or weight loss, one of the sort of most common forms of advice now is find a group or a community or even just another person and make your goals public like put your goals out there and then be sort of accountable to that other person. Or I think about the conversation about game-ifying things. Just sort of like make things that are solitary social in some way, where you get social reward or social feedback or you have social accountability. A., that's good for you to have those networks, but also, like, you're just more likely to do those individual things if you have some social network that they're involved in.

And your answer made me think of how you would think about doing that with IRA, right? Like somehow making the act of going to get your heat pump social in some ways so that it brings some feedback or accountability or so it weaves you more into some sort of group setting.

David Beckman

Right, that's the play. That's the thing to do. And that can make a huge difference. Ask can organizing around money that is not actually available to individuals but is going to so many parts of the economy that impact people directly? Like ports, there's $3 billion for ports and $3 billion for reconnecting communities, I mentioned that a minute ago. And on and on. And that involves influencing government actors, as Hahrie was pointing out earlier, both to take advantage of the opportunities and then to do so well to propose projects that are going to make a difference. That's a classic organizing opportunity.

David Roberts

And of course, if you have the infrastructure in place, you can reward politicians who do the good thing, thereby showing the other politicians that there's positive feedback to be had in this direction.

David Beckman

Yeah.

David Roberts

David, one more question for you, which is slightly prosaic, but I have been thinking about it a lot, which is just this sort of initial round of throwing open the gates of environmental philanthropy money to this much wider variety of participants, smaller groups, et cetera, et cetera. In a sense, the initial rush of it is like a sugar high. Like it's great, I think everybody's excited. But over time you do need the foundation's obsession with metrics and accountability, I think we can all agree, has maybe sometimes gone overboard and results in a lot of paperwork and a lot of unnecessary difficulty and gatekeeping.

But those needs are not made up, right? So are there any sort of performance metrics or what does accountability look like when you're moving into this kind of fuzzier relational stuff? What would it take for a grantee to lose their funding? What do you have in place in terms of accountability? Or have you thought about that a lot?

David Beckman

Well, it's a good question and it's a question, I think that people in philanthropy and people who are looking for money think about a lot. The baselines, I think, are important, what's the context in which we're operating and a lot of the there's kind of basic due diligence that an organization is a 501(c)(3) and so forth and so on. But beyond that, whether it's a Mosaic context or a more traditional foundation. A lot of the metrics are artificially simplified, and they become, at times, bean counting operations. And I know this because I used to propose those to foundations when I was doing advocacy.

David Roberts

It's easier, right? I mean, one of the things about it, it's very easy if you have a simple marker.

David Beckman

Right, I'm going to write a report, and then I can send the report to the funder and say, look, I wrote a report, and if I'm lucky, I got on David's podcast, so I got brought attention to it. And I'm not suggesting that those things don't make a difference. I used to write reports, and I think they can make a difference in the right circumstances. So the question becomes, what are we comparing to? And I think where we are right now is sort of a bit of an artifice. Having said that, you can evaluate and learn from movement building just as you can grants, just as you can from any other.

You just need a much more relational touch. And I would ask Hahrie might want to jump in on this because she's looked so carefully at the types of outcomes that occur. And I think the outcomes that we're looking for, we're looking to be patient funding. We're looking to recognize that we're not going to necessarily see some sort of vivid and tangible, like ribbon cutting, in a year, and that we're not really asking people to propose things to us which we know as a collective. Making decisions from the advocacy community, from the field, are simply unrealistic. So I think one of the most important things to do is to recognize that if we're going to build resilient organizations, that that in itself is the outcome we're looking for, as opposed to some sort of simplified, kind of artificially linear, kind of gantt chart that we can say was met or wasn't met.

Hahrie Han

I totally agree with what David was saying. And an analogy that I use sometimes in thinking about this is the idea that in the corporate world, in the for-profit world, we invest in companies all the time based on their assets, right? And that I would be foolish, in fact, as an investor, if I only evaluated a company's profits in the prior year and didn't look at their assets going forward, that I should, in fact, be really making judgments based on what they can do in the future. And I think in the same way, for movements, a lot of philanthropy, I think, tend to only hold movements accountable for the equivalent of their, quote unquote "profits."

But really, what they should be investing in is what those assets are going forward. And I think one of the things that's really exciting about what Mosaic is doing is trying to strengthen those assets and then continually invest in them over time.

David Beckman

Yeah. One, just as a quick vignette, we've been doing this only a couple of years but it's long enough now to start hearing from grantees who themselves report in excited tones how amazing it is from their perspective to be able to get funding for things that would simply not even be possible in other contexts. And what it means if you're a small hub for advocacy in appalachia to have some communications money or to have some of the things that maybe the larger organizations just take for granted. And we're going to be developing a lot of that information because I think you're onto something, David.

That mainstream philanthropy. To move hundreds of millions and billions in these directions is what we need to do. And that we're not going to be able entirely to tell people just to trust us, that we have to meet folks where they are and focus on developing sort of a comfort and a conversance with what we're attempting to do here.

David Roberts

What about and I guess I throw this one to both of you too. We're so behind the eight ball on climate change and a lot of other environmental problems that a lot of solutions are relatively obvious. Like, a lot of the things that need to be done are relatively obvious and uncontroversial. But you can sort of imagine different demographics coming at this from different places having some pretty fundamental disagreements about the theory of change or even sort of what kind of society we're shooting for. There's sort of a climate socialist left and then there's like a very sort of establishment center-left kind of big environmental group.

And there are real philosophical and ideological disagreements. And I wonder just how do you deal with those when they can we find enough in common that they can be kind of papered over and we can move forward together? Or do you worry about those emerging in a more enduring way?

David Beckman

Well, I mean, as you know, David and Hahrie those cleavages have already emerged in enviornmental advocacy. And I think we're in the midst of a reckoning about how larger organizations have operated, how big philanthropy operates the role of a just transition versus simply looking for tons of reduction. Part of Mosaic's, kind of, birth came not from me but from 18 months of really cogentive development with 100 different leaders that really looked at those questions. I think as much as infrastructure is important intangible ways as Hahrie is emphasizing, the relational components are essential. And they don't resolve every question whether you're in business or you're in sports or whatever you're doing in life, your own relationships.

The fundamental question isn't whether people can truly agree on every last detail. It's whether they can form more productive relationships in the advocacy work they're doing. That's the goal. And if you can make an advocacy community of 15,000 organizations like 10% better that is a net effective investment that's huge in terms of its outcome. So we're having these conversations as part of Mosaic and they're going on across the field. And the question is, where do you build the infrastructure to have them in ways that are reperative? One of the focuses of Mosaic is about relationships and trust.

And some people look at that when we show a PowerPoint. They're like relationships and trust. What does that have to do with the environment or climate? Well, actually ...

David Roberts

It has everything has everything to do with everything.

David Beckman

That's right. But it's not a commonly you can look at a lot of foundation websites before you're going to find relationships and trust.

Hahrie Han

Difference and disagreement is inherent to any kind of collaborative effort, especially one at the scale, though, that we're talking about. And I think the idea that we're going to be able to either paper over or ignore those differences or get everyone to just get along sometimes feels like it's a frustrating way to approach the problem. And what we know from a lot of previous experiences and research and so on, is that what makes it possible for these kind of coalitions to navigate those kind of deep strategic differences like the ones you're describing about? Is the extent to which they create equitable power sharing agreements so that the super left-y groups and the center-left groups can kind of have the sense that we know we're not going to all agree on everything in the end, but we're going to be really clear about how we're going to make decisions together, about what we're going to do and how we're going to allocate resources.

David Roberts

We're going to be heard, right. So often it's just about that as much as anything else.

Hahrie Han

Right, and so having a participatory board where there's this transparent governance process just kind of starts to create those habits of learning how to share power across lots of different theories of change.

David Roberts

I think that working together in person or like face to face often shows people that despite our differences, there is actually a time we can work together on there and we do have more in common than we thought. Whereas the common communicative environment these days of social media is more or less structured to have the opposite effect, right, to sort of exaggerate differences and to encourage people to dig in and be the most extreme version of their selves. So anything that works against that is a social good in my book.

Hahrie Han

Yeah. I think that sometimes we mistake attention for power. And part of why social media can be so alluring is because it gets you lots of attention and the more divisive you are, the more attention you get. But to actually build power, you have to build those kind of bridges. And so what we have to do is kind of break that idea that having more attention is necessarily the same as having power.

David Beckman

Yeah. And I'll just say quickly that Mosaic launched into the teeth of the pandemic and we've made far more progress when we were able to actually meet together. It's a very different thing to look at somebody through. Effectively, whether it's your handheld screen or a screen on your desk, tends to reinforce the sort of archness that people can bring into a room where there are diverse perspectives, but there's nothing like the in-person meetings and even the socialization between people who don't know each other just to create a little bit of grace between them.

David Roberts

A final question that I'd like to hear you both weigh on, which is very general, but just this shift in approach that Mosaic sort of represents, of focusing on movement infrastructure, focusing on relationships and just sort of infrastructure building and having a much more diverse, pluralistic decision making structure, sharing power, all this kind of stuff. Very much for reasons we've discussed. Tax against a lot of the sort of trends and tendencies on the left in the past few decades. What's the theory of change here? What would you like to see if this catches on? Like, you know, in a positive world where this new strategy catches on?

What would you like to see in, like, five to ten years? What can you imagine improving? What is the sort of theory of change here if this new approach takes over? What do you think is possible in the next five to ten years?

Hahrie Han

My mind goes back to the point that you were making, David, earlier, which is that there's been this long standing pattern where it feels like the right invests in the kind of deep work that is needed to make large scale shifts in society and politics. And the left feels like it's swimming along in the shallow end all along the way. And we're in a moment right now where clearly the change that we need is deep and not shallow, and it's got to operate quickly and also in the long term. And so for me, it's like when you build this kind of infrastructure and mechanisms like Mosaic, what I would love to see in five years, ten years, is a kind of deepening of the movements and the network of organizations that are able to continually advance the kind of agenda that we really need.

And so you can think back to the early decades of the rise of a lot of the kind of organizations that comprise the right. They sort of started at the same place that we are now, in a way, and steadily built over a couple of decades. That kind of death that is now being deployed.

David Beckman

Yeah. And I'll just build on that. I think, from a very practical sense, the conversation we're having today is about profound existential challenges that we're facing with climate change and beyond. I hold, as somebody who's devoted my professional life to this, both real pride in our grantees and the work that's being done. Where would we be without the laws that we've got and the work that's. Been done. And at the same time, this recognition that so many have that notwithstanding our best efforts, that those efforts aren't adding up to keep pace with the scale of the change that we're facing.

And so, very practically, Mosaic and things like it, if it can be a model, is designed to create a more powerful and effective environmental movement that can effectuate the big change that we need. Not just theorize about it, not just plan for it, not just write about it, but actually implement it at scale and over the time period that's available to us, which, with climate, is not that long, by 2030. That's what we need to be focused on, and that's what Mosaic and things like we've been talking about today are really directed toward.

David Roberts

A positive note to wrap up on. Hahrie Han, David Beckman, thank you so much for coming on and talking through all this stuff, and good luck with your efforts.

David Beckman

Thanks so much.

Hahrie Han

Thank you for having me.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.