innovation

Cool Clean Tech

Otto Pilot — Fri, 25 May 2018 00:01:00 +0000

Cool Clean Tech

01/25/2019

Over a century ago, the industrial revolution brought wealth and opportunity to a generation of American innovators. It also brought us dirty coal power and a sky clogged with carbon emissions. The good news? There’s a new generation of entrepreneurs eager to make their fortune by fighting global warming. Creative start-ups are coming up with fresh, climate-friendly ideas for getting around town, powering your cell phones, and even eating breakfast. And there is a growing number of forward-thinking venture capitalist firms eager to seek out and nurture those innovative thinkers.

A discussion about clean-tech startups and how they could help save the world.

Guests

Lidiya Dervisheva

Associate, G2VP

Davida Herzl

CEO and Co-Founder, Aclima

Gabriel Kra

Managing Director, Prelude Ventures

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

On today’s program, news from the front lines of the clean tech revolution.

Lidiya Dervisheva: So it’s not only, you know, solar, wind, tidal and so on but it’s actually the way we use energy, the way we conserve energy. The way we figure out better ways to use the resources that we currently have.

Announcer: Creative start-ups are coming up with fresh, climate-friendly ideas for getting around town, powering your cell phones, and even eating breakfast.

Gabriel Kra: Milk, yogurts, cheeses; it turns out there's a lot of carbon embedded in that production ecosystem. So if you can just take cows out of the dairy equation then you can actually save a lot of energy and impact climate change.

Announcer: The promise of cool, clean tech. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Can clean-tech start-ups save the planet?

Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment.

Today on Climate One, Greg Dalton digs into some of the exciting innovations coming our way from the world of clean tech. His guests represent three companies that are already in on the ground floor. Two are venture capitalist firms with a front-row seat to the fresh ideas needed to power our economy, and one is a start-up that’s developing new and better ways to understand our environment.

Gabriel Kra is Managing Director at Prelude Ventures. Lidiya Dervisheva is an Associate at G2VP. And Davida Herzl is the co-founder and CEO of Aclima.

Here’s Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Davida, let's begin with you. Climate infrastructure is often by governments with scientists for government scientists and you're kind of democratizing that with hyper local data. So tell us how Aclima is doing that.

Davida Herzl: So we’re filling the critical need around the world for hyper local emissions and pollution data. Now that we know that we are facing a climate crisis that is intricately connected with health impacts from those same emissions, we need data hyper locally to really understand and manage those emissions, right. The foundation of managing risk is measurement. And so we’re leveraging a lot of advances in technology that we all hear about every day from ubiquitous computing to ubiquitous communications. The capability now to really shrink sensors down to something that can fit in the palm of your hand and merging all of those technologies together to be able to build distributed sensor networks that measure all of the pollutants that are important for human health or that impact human health. All of the core greenhouse gases and be able to do it at a fraction of the cost from traditional methods and do it in a way at that makes that data broadly accessible for decision-makers for citizens to really empower the kind of change that we need to see around the world.

Greg Dalton: So tell us a little bit how you're doing that. You're putting sensors on cars they drive around neighborhoods?

Davida Herzl: Yes. So last year we published the results of a major study in partnership with our partners at Google, the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of Texas, where we proved that our methodology where we take our sensing platform what we refer to as our environmental intelligence platform instrument vehicles and then drive around communities and cities to be able to take a snapshot of pollution sort of the urban scale, but at hyper local resolution so we can understand emissions down to the scale of a parcel. We can understand risks to pollution exposure down to that level.

Greg Dalton: And do some companies who are emitting pollution are they trying to push back against because that kind of transparency hasn't been available before, right? So are polluters pushing back?

Davida Herzl: So, you know, I think what's happening is that industry is really coming to terms with the fact that these new technologies are becoming broadly available. And instead of pushing back what we're really seeing is one, hunger and a desire to really understand this data because in many instances, it can actually help companies reduce their own emissions. But also I think there's been a massive gap in the marketplace for this kind of environmental risk data, right. Environmental risk is now financial risk. Not just the society at large but to a lot of these companies and the emitters themselves, who now are embracing this development and really engaging in conversation with us. That's the approach that we’re taking and seeing.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra, you invested in a company called Ripple Foods by a couple of veteran entrepreneurs. Tell us what they're doing trying to do Ripple Foods.

Gabriel Kra: Sure. Well Ripple Foods makes pea milk and a lot of other non-dairy products. The two founders, each of whom were successful entrepreneurs, took a look at how dairy is produced. Milk, yogurts, cheeses; it turns out there's a lot of carbon embedded in that production ecosystem. Raising cows takes a lot of energy and carbon and then cows produce a lot of methane in how they digest their food.

So if you can just take cows out of the dairy equation then you can actually save a lot of energy and impact climate change. But you're not gonna do that just by telling people to drink something that doesn't taste good. So Neil and Adam make a delicious frothy nutritious milk product that is made entirely out of plant protein. And so this thing, this company it impacts tons of people's lives. We get calls we get testimonies from parents who are saying, “Wow, my kids couldn't drink milk and now they have a delicious product that they want to drink.”

But we don't want to just go after the part of the market that was already drinking dairy alternatives. We’re going after the mainstream market and we now have milks, we have traditional milk or unsweetened milky, we have chocolate milk we have vanilla milk. We have yogurts that are launching, we have half-and-half and not only are we selling this but we’re saving CO2 and we’re making a bunch of money. So it's kind of for us the best kind of thing the best kind of company to invest in. Great entrepreneurs, a huge opportunity just in the United States, milk is a $79 to $80 billion-dollar market forget yogurt and cheese and all this other stuff. It has huge impacts on climate and it has great positive benefits for people's lives.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya Dervisheva, lot of wealth is expected to be created in this transition from fossil fuel economy to a cleaner economy and yet Silicon Valley kind of walked away from clean energy. Tell us about that.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. So the fund that I work for is called G2VP, G2 Venture Partners. And we spun off from the Green Growth Fund at Kleiner Perkins what used to be the clean-tech fund started back in 2008 at the dawn of clean-tech when everybody was investing in solar and new biochemical biofuels and that was kind of where all the hype was.

And what ended up happening is that a lot of these investments didn’t really transform into these, you know, unicorns that everybody was expecting; not everybody made their returns in fact, many people lost a lot of money. And that sort of led to this second-generation the Cleantech 2.0 movement that’s one way to call it which is sort of like a new way of thinking of what clean-tech means and what you can perceive as clean-tech. So it’s not only the way we generate energy. So it’s not only, you know, solar, wind, tidal and fusion and so on but it’s actually the way we use energy the way we conserve energy. The way we figure out better ways to use the resources that we currently have. And that's where a lot of new interesting business models come in. And that's where what we are focusing on G2 is how do we leverage these new business models. How do we, you know, create new exciting startups out of technologies that already exist, but apply them in a new creative way with, you know, amazing teams and scale these companies.

Greg Dalton: And so Gabriel Kra, let's talk there are terms of like different kinds of capital. She mentioned institutional capital, there's foundations, there’s universities. Categorize kind of, you know, where the big buckets of money and how they're playing are they involved in this Cleantech 2.0 or they just sitting it out because the smart people got burned? Where are they, Gabriel?

Gabriel Kra: The whole institutional capital value channel, try and summarize that quickly. But there are, you know, at the earliest stages of company formation there’s folks like us venture capital firms there's still a bunch who are still doing A round and B round the first institutional money. Before those there's a lot of angel investors or seed investors and there's sort of an ecosystem of them. Many of those are either individuals who have a lot of wealth and want to invest in either any kind of super early stage company or also people who raised money, you know, on a limited partnership arrangement, a traditional fund structure, but to do very early-stage stuff. Where we’re seeing new entrants, where we’re seeing people who weren't necessarily driving a lot of capital into the sector in that first wave and the oughts, we’re seeing a lot of corporate ventures who are getting very smart, very sophisticated in partnering with us. You know there's everybody from big chemical companies have venture firms. The big software companies have venture firms that are venture arms, excuse me. Some of the oil majors have them, you know, there’s this steady group of investors that come in either right at the same time that we come in, or even with us for a little bit later. And then later funds, bigger strategic sovereign wealth funds are getting involved.

I think there's some traditional venture capital that is now returning to the sector. And then when you’re doing projects, you know, there's infrastructure funds there's big banks who have infrastructure investment arms and they help fund the projects. They help fund the plants and there's still a gap, you know, there’s still this sort of traditional venture valley of death where you don't want to fund something on your equity with the money that was invested in the capital in the company, excuse me, but you don't have enough proof points to say let's raise $150 million to build this plant on what's essentially a debt instrument. And that's still one of the places where we’re looking for new investors to come in and help us. But that group of institutional investors, corporate investors, strategic partners, people who want to own those plants and assets are coming in. And I’m talking about, what you’re talking about these are the still the more capital-intensive the more software oriented businesses don't have as much of a challenge.

Greg Dalton: Good summary of the value chain in 90 seconds.

Gabriel Kra: Gosh. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya, Gabriel mentioned super majors, are you finding that there are some energy companies that might be threatened by the transition, that are investing to find a little hedge to get information or, you know, you’re raising a fund I don’t know you can tell us about who's, you know, who are the players, who's coming forward with capital for something that is not no longer in high-fashion in Silicon Valley?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right. So we're currently finalizing our funds but as a venture capital firm we are seeing that there's actually increased interest in how to change the way we do things and especially what is next for clean-tech, like what is next in technology. How do we use what is happening with the cost curves of solar with let’s say transportation getting electrified how do we create new business models around sensors becoming ubiquitous and data and analytics being very easy to scale and going on the cloud and on the edge. So looking at investors and sort of energy majors, I would say there's a lot of interest as Gabe mentioned also corporates. So currently I was just reading so there's 270 corporate venture capital firms that are currently active today. So it's one of the highest we've ever seen. And it's something that we can collaborate with corporates on deals we can syndicate it's very interesting to be in a place where it's not only the institutional capital anymore, but we have this whole ecosystem support where institutions are now finally interested. Sort of the government is on board and provides very interesting, you know, very supportive grants to early-stage companies. But then you also have the more traditional like utilities. You have, you know, Intel and Google and Samsung all setting up their funds to support these companies.

So we as a financial player in the middle of all that what we can do is leverage all these connections and introduce for example the startups that we work with to our, to LPs who are much more interested in working with these startups and could bring them, you know, to the next stage of their business.

Greg Dalton: LPs being limited partners. Lidiya, let’s also talk about career paths. Been a lot written lately in terms of, you know, the kind of male culture in Silicon Valley. You have four partners who came over from Kleiner. So tell us about the career paths particularly for women in venture and in energy, not an industry known for a lot of women executives.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. Oh it's definitely a very exciting place to be and I'm honored to be here and I can tell you a little bit more of how I got to where I am today, how I got to venture capital. So I started as an electrical engineer back in undergrad. I got really interested in the energy clean-tech space, environmental space. Was able to take advantage of my liberal arts curriculum to explore what energy means, what global warming means for the world and look at it not just from a technical perspective but also from a policy perspective, from an econ perspective, and see that it's a problem that we cannot just solve with technology alone when it's something that it's a much more, you know, broad and difficult problem that you need a lot of different skill sets to tackle. So that's how I got really interested eventually to go into business school. And in between I worked at a startup which was doing energy efficiency. So I was in Asia for two years working adds commercial industrial energy efficiency and figuring out how do we make, you know, large commercial buildings, save energy, save water, and resources.

And combining that with my path to business school and kind of seeing how this all ties together like what it means to, you know, for a business to put together its business plan, its marketing strategy, its, you know, channel, sales channels put together a team. How does all fits together with everything I knew from before. So this now allows me to be a much more productive venture capital investor and look at problems not just from a technical perspective but also from a business perspective. And I would say it's a very male-dominated industry for sure and being at conferences and I was just at a logistics conference last month in Atlanta where it was almost all men but it's exciting to see that the change is happening and we just hired another associate who is also female. So there’s change going in that direction.

Greg Dalton: And the women are associates, the men are partners, is there a plan for making that equal?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right. Yeah, I would say it's not there yet but that's the best, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Davida, let’s hear your experience as a female CEO, you know, raising money, how was your experience going out there with a new company saying trust in me, invest in me.

Davida Herzl: Sure. I mean, you know, I can only speak from my experience but I can say that my experience certainly reflects the numbers. Right now about 2% of all venture capital goes to women founded companies. Half a percent goes to women of color. And within that pool there's a very small group of women founders that are going after hard-tech problems and so or a small group of women founders going after hard-tech problems that are getting funded. So I was just saying, you know, that was definitely my experience and it did introduce a lot of challenges. I think that there is a need for role models for women founded companies to get funded for those companies to get celebrated those stories to get told and to elevate that. So that it’s not just, we’re not just an anomaly but we’re an example of what's possible.

And I think, you know, like Lidiya spoke to, you know, any complex systems challenge is going to require a lot of diverse perspectives. And so that is fundamental to solving the challenge of climate change, to solving the transition to a new energy foundation. And that requires a diversity of representation and voices and insights and domains. And so I think it's, you know, a lot of work needs to be done in this space but it's exciting to be in the middle of that transition.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the promise of a green economy. Coming up -- will electric scooters replace Uber?

Gabriel Kra: In the city, how we choose to get around and what's the quickest, most cost effective and maybe fun way to get around, that's changing a lot of things.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about discovering and nurturing innovation in the clean-tech realm. His guests are Davida Herzl of Aclima, Lidiya Dervisheva of G2VP, and Gabriel Kra of Prelude Ventures.

Let’s get back to their discussion. Here’s Greg Dalton

Greg Dalton: Gabriel, let's ask you when you're looking at you get lots of pitches, lots of companies, you know, do you look for women CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs? Is it hard, do you try extra hard, how do you approach that?

Gabriel Kra: So this is a topic that we talk about a lot internally. Like G2VP we’re a small firm there's two partners both of us are men. And then we have two principals, a woman and a man. And we are acutely aware that while in that one metric we’re doing better than most firms we’re you know, that's actually the recent development for us and it's not sufficient. I don't want to be up here on stage and sort of claiming a leadership mantle on this. It's something we talk about it’s something we think about. And I think the model that I have in my head is that and we haven’t – excuse me, we haven't succeeded enough in investing enough women CEOs and I think our portfolio right now is I don't know that we have any right now in our portfolio, which is not anything to be anything but embarrassed about.

But I think it has to be something that we’re aware of that we focus on and that we continue to try and improve. I had a conversation with my wife two or three days ago where she was telling me about somebody who came to speak at an event and she said yeah, my friend invited this professor from Stanford to talk about this issue, a law professor from Stanford to talk about this issue. And I said, oh yeah, so this guy showed up and she said, “Oh my God that was implicit bias.” And I said, “No it wasn’t, I was just using that term generically.” She said, “No, you weren’t.” And I stopped and I said “Okay yeah, you're right.” She said this conversation is not moving forward until you acknowledge that. And so I stopped and I said, “Okay you're right.” And it's just something we have to continually work on. We’re not doing enough but we’re trying.

Greg Dalton: I have a 14-year-old daughter who hits me with “That’s a gendered statement” you know, and stops me in my tracks.

Gabriel Kra: Yup, my daughter does the same as well.

Greg Dalton: Just to show the transparency, Climate One thinks very closely about the speakers we bring up on stage. We think we have a role we kind of give people a spotlight. Over the last couple of years it’s about 60/40 men, women; not what it should be but we look hard, you know, in an energy sector and senior government positions, senior corporate positions, right. We still want to get to that 50/50 point. We think that's okay given the population of people that we have to draw from.

Lidiya, you talk about being a bystander, you get to invest in companies. Do you ever get the itch to kind of get in and run a company yourself?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right. I guess it’s something probably that a lot of venture capitalists think about or maybe even struggle with. I do, so having been at a startup for two years. It was really exciting to see what it means to be in the trenches what it means to, you know, meet sales forecasts and decide about what's next for the company. I guess I was just, you know, as a businessperson and engineer. But just seeing how difficult it is to make all these steps really makes me appreciate now when I look at companies and I listen to pitches to hear the stories and the big vision that every entrepreneur comes to our office with. And to understand like what it would actually mean to scale this business, to really get to where this entrepreneur wants to be in the next let's say 3 to 5 to 7 years. So I would say I do have this, you know, itch to maybe go into that back into the startup world. But for now it's been really, really exciting to, you know, to be on the investor seat and really get to explore so many different technologies and sort of be able to jump through, you know, different industries from energy to transportation to agriculture on a daily basis which is something I probably couldn’t do in a startup.

Greg Dalton: You have the variety but you’re on the sideline. Gabriel, ever have the impulse to kind of get in the game and have to deal with guys like you who invested in company –

Gabriel Kra: No, I wouldn’t wish that on anything but my entrepreneurs. I worked at startups and in operational companies for eight or 10 years and that was amazing and it was an incredible education. And then my first CEO here in Silicon Valley sort of told me and I didn’t quite understand what he was saying he’s like your first job is to hire your replacement, right. So when I'm looking for an entrepreneurs I just want to find people who are better than me who are harder working, smarter, more creative.

And the best ones, gosh, they do things that -- they solve problems and tackle challenges that blow me away. And so, yeah I'm kind of content being able to find incredible people, find great people with huge ideas and maybe help them execute rather than being the one in the frontline because I don’t think I could handle that. They’re awesome.

Greg Dalton: So Davida, you’re the awesome one the brave one on the front lines. If you weren’t running a company, what other role would you like in the clean-tech field what do you think is really exciting?

Davida Herzl: Probably running another company. You know, I am really and that's true. I mean, I am just, you know, I see so much opportunity right now at the nexus of the Iot and sensors and data and analytics and AI to really help us understand to provide us the data and insights to adapt to climate change and to mitigate its effects. And so, you know, I think now that I've run a company and in the middle of sort of, you know, really sort of taking the company to market. I think maybe you know, partnering with other entrepreneurs who are trying to solve really hard problems and maybe one day I'll, you know, sit in their seat. Being some of my favorite investors are the ones that have been operators in the past and who really understand how difficult it is to get companies like ours off the ground. And so I think there's a lot of value that comes from that synergy in the ecosystem.

Greg Dalton: So serial entrepreneur, okay. We’re talking about clean-tech at Climate One. I'm Greg Dalton. We’re gonna go to our lightning round. Quick true or false questions to each of our guests starting with Lidiya Dervisheva. True or false. Venture capitalists are not as smart as they think they are?

Lidiya Dervisheva: False.

Greg Dalton: Davida. True or false. Silicon Valley has a poor record investing in innovative startups in the energy sector?

Davida Herzl: True.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra. True or false. The HBO series Silicon Valley is an excellent documentary?

Gabriel Kra: True.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Lidiya. True or false. The best way to attract capital from white men who attended Stanford is to be a white man who attended Stanford?

Lidiya Dervisheva: False.

Greg Dalton: Davida, you have a fully stocked earthquake disaster kit in your home. True or false?

Davida Herzl: False. I like risks.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Lidiya, you have a fully stocked earthquake disaster kit in your home?

Lidiya Dervisheva: False.

Greg Dalton: The risk takers here. Final one for Gabriel Kra. True or false. Your company considered sea level rise when it leased office space on a pier extending into San Francisco Bay?

Gabriel Kra: True.

Greg Dalton: You made the bet, well we have to wait until the end of the lease to see about that.

Gabriel Kra: Exactly.

Greg Dalton: Let’s give them a round of applause for getting through that lightning round.

[Applause]

Lidiya, you said something that I rarely hear from Silicon Valley people which is you think there's exciting careers in the regulatory space. What do you mean by that?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right. So going to energy there is the policy side, then there is technology or the way at least I see it, policy, technology and business. You can contribute in one way or another and you’re always going to be probably an expert in one of these or really hone on your skills in one of these and probably understand a little bit of the others.

And from my experience, I've developed a little bit more on the technical and business side but really not that much into policy. And I think that there's a lot to be done, you know, in the White House. A lot of what can be changed and as we’re speaking like things are changing. I mean as you read in the news like every new home in California will have to have solar very soon and every home and every small residential building. So that's a big change that mostly came from regulations. Whether that's, you know, the right decision or not it's definitely a step in the right direction. And I think there's, you know, just policy as enabler of a lot of the technologies that we invest in and a lot of, you know, interesting companies we look at, policy, is one of the key things that we always consider. Is there a policy risk, is there a policy enabler, is there something really to think about that would change in the future that is related to energy policy?

Greg Dalton: Davida, how about you. Is policy a supporter or an obstacle in what you're trying to do? Because you’re providing information, a real gap that wasn't there for people on a local level.

Davida Herzl: Right. I mean I think we are showing that there's new opportunities to fill in that gap. And regulation, I think one of the reasons regulation will be so powerful is it can create entirely new markets. And so I think, you know, although, you know, there's big changes happening at the federal level, we see a lot of progressive movement at the state level, at the city level. Recently the state of California, you know, passed an amendment to the cap-and-trade bill that is going to require local monitoring and it's because these new capabilities are now emerging. And so I think there's tremendous opportunity as regulation catches up with these new technological capabilities.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra, there's a lot of talk these days in American cities and around the world about new electric mobility. Bike sharing, we have scooters now on the streets, electric powered skateboards in the bus lanes. That's, you know, driven by, you know, cell phone battery technology largely. Address that in terms of, you know, the disruption that's bringing, the policy, regulation, whether that's a good thing for getting around town.

Gabriel Kra: Well, you know, you gave us a little warning that you wanted to talk about this. I was in Beijing last week and I got to ride around on a bike, share bike, which was it actually changed my opinion a bit. Because it was A, it was fun, B, it was the most convenient and the quickest way and it was super cheap. So three different things.

So I think that, you know, what we’re talking about and these things is the last mile of how we get around, right. A bike share, scooter is not gonna change how we go from here to Palo Alto or let alone here to New York or something like that. But in the city, how we choose to get around and what's the quickest, most cost effective most convenient and maybe fun way to get around, that's changing a lot of things. And I don't have an honest firm opinion about what is going to win and what I’ve really like there. I walk out and see all the electric scooters on the streets of San Francisco that, you know, just appeared overnight and I'm dubious. And I’m dubious not whether they're fun or whether they're cost-effective I don't know necessarily about the unit economics. Although they appear really attractive to own those assets. I'm dubious of whether I want those things all over the city that I spend, you know, so much of my time on. And, you know, if you go to Beijing you see, there are cart loads of bikes being schlepped around the city at all times because they end up where they don't want them and they end up where they don't need them and they got to move them. And apparently there's piles and mountains of bikes being discarded there.

Greg Dalton: Yeah.

Gabriel Kra: So there's negative ramifications to that to. But I think it is absolutely, you know, in 10 years or even probably five years when things start to settle out the mode of transportation that we choose at different places is gonna be fundamentally different from what it was and is today.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya Dervisheva, you noted that one of the scooter, electric scooters actually started in a very unlikely place, Los Angeles.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right, yeah.

Greg Dalton: So tell us how that unfolded and whether you think and if we know whether the scooter rides are displacing Uber and Lyft rides.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Yeah. So I wanted to briefly talk about Bird which you've probably seen around and they're not the only company, they’re one of three actually deploying scooters right now on the streets especially in San Francisco and now soon in other cities as well. But as Gabe said, I think it is about electrifying the last mile and those modes of transportation they are _____ they are shared and they’re electric and that's a big change from how we, you know, get around today. And that's similar to what our investment thesis it’s to look at what are new business models of existing technologies of what, you know, of something that will get traction and will actually change the way we do things. And in terms of sort of the people's aspect that is very fun to be there, you know, to scoot through the streets and it has, you know, a social aspect, it has a community aspect that you can do these things with your friends of course you’re not allowed to ride them with more than one person. But it's an exciting new change that I think has large potential.

Greg Dalton: Do we know if it's displacing – are those people just not walking and hopping on a scooter is it, you know, is it displacing taxi rides do we know that yet?

Lidiya Dervisheva: I don’t think there's been enough studies done. But at least when I have the choice it's typically between – where these modes of transportation work is that less than 2 mile trip. And that's typically, it's a long walk or a short bicycle ride if you have a bicycle or it can be a very short Uber ride which will take you some time to order and, you know, get the car but it just happens to be much more efficient fast and easy to just take an electric shared vehicle.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about cleaner, greener ideas for powering our economy. This is Climate One. When we come back – the secret ingredient every entrepreneur needs to succeed.

Lidiya Dervisheva: If they’re too, you know, too pessimistic or the vision is not big enough sometimes we would pass on the deal just because we want to see that, you know, that passion and that optimism to create something big.

Announcer: Up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about the future of the clean tech industry, with Lidiya Dervisheva of G2VP, Gabriel Kra of Prelude Ventures

and Davida Herzl of Aclima, a pioneer in environmental sensing technology.

Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Davida, let’s ask you, what are some of the big exciting sectors you think, you know, other than what you’re doing yourself if you were to start that second company. What’s the sector do you think is ripe for disruption or where there’s really exciting things going on?

Davida Herzl: I mean I think what's happening in ag right now and food and feeding the world’s population is probably one of the most exciting areas. I think the impact of ag on climate emissions are something we critically need to address. And so a lot of the type of work that Prelude is investing in in alternative sources of things like milk, alternative meats, sources I think this is really a tremendous opportunity that's critical to solving the climate challenge.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya, you looked at some agricultural firms. Placed any bets yet in ag?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Not yet actually but it's a sector that I'm also really excited about. Also from an imaging perspective there's a lot that now we can find out just by looking at pictures of, you know, crops or a field and understanding what are the actual issues with the crop, what are the humidity levels, what is the soil like. Does the plant get enough nutrients like do we need more pesticide. So there's a lot of data -- so combining, you know, data with imagery and where we've gotten with data analytics to create these new solutions is a very, very exciting vertical that we’re looking at.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra, there’s a company called Pivot Bio. Tell us about that.

Gabriel Kra: So I think we firmly believe that food and ag is a majorly exciting impactful and hopefully very, very profitable segment to invest in. And before I get to Pivot, you know, there's a bunch of different ways to tackle that problem something like 3% of all the electricity produced or consumed on the planet is to fix nitrogen. Which means the nitrogen in our atmosphere, N2, is not accessible to plants, it has to be reduced and that's called fixing nitrogen in trade jargon. And there's this big industrial process that was invented in the 1900s, early 1900s, that produces ammonia and from ammonia you can make things like fertilizer. Now that’s a big carbon problem because it takes so much of energy to do that, it's a big pollutant problem because we dump so much fertilizer on our fields that eventually we deplete them of other nutrients, we cause toxic algal blooms all sorts of problems.

But when that was invented it actually was the biggest impact on world hunger that the world has ever seen. So like this thing that was amazing also had a lot of negative ramifications.

So what Pivot Bio is doing is, the company was founded by a PhD a couple of guys and I'm not using that in a gendered way, they were two guys, excuse me. But a couple of PhDs from I think USF and they said, you know, there used to be microbes that lived on the root systems of corn and other row crops that were able to fix nitrogen meaning take atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into a form that the plant could grow, could utilize. And those things all went dormant once we started dumping fertilizer onto the fields. And so what they said is we can take these microbes, we can improve them. They do it in a way that's actually still not a GMO not a genetically modified organism. And then we put them on the corn roots and as the corn grows, as the plant grows, the microbial population grows with it. So it's giving it a constant steady micro-dose of fertilizer produced in a completely non-destructive non-energy intensive way. That’s Pivot Bio that's one of the things, one of the ways we see using really sophisticated technology that, you know, the techniques that they use didn't exist 10 years ago, five years ago even they were still being developed, to have a huge impact and build a really big profitable company.

Greg Dalton: Before we get to audience questions. I want to start with Davida and ask about the urgency. We’re talking about technology, a lot of things happening. We know that we recently the world spent a month I think at 410 ppm; if you’re in the climate conversation that number kinda stops you for a minute. Seems like we just pass 400 not that long ago. So Davida, let's talk about, you know, technology is known for moving fast, how do you feel about the urgency of climate numbers that you know?

Davida Herzl: I mean I think it's probably what I struggle with the most, right. I have to have the discipline to build, you know, all the foundations of the company and bring in investors and I wish I could snap my fingers and just, you know, and just be scaling this solution globally right now. Because we know for a fact that this data, we see what the data is telling us and all the stories embedded in the data not just about global emissions but about hyper local communities that are impacted and exposed to levels of pollution that you might see in countries that have no regulatory framework. And so the urgency of the problem is so tremendous it’s the reason, you know, my team and I work the kinds of days that we do and put in the effort that we do.

But I think getting this data and this information out into the hands of millions of people can then distribute action so that we can and empower distributed actions so that we can actually start to aggregate lot of small actions around the world to really provide that accelerant. That’s how we see our position in the world ultimately, and that's our vision for what we want to do. But there is the human path to getting there, right.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel, do you ever get a lump in your stomach when you, you know the math. The math is daunting. Do you ever get a lump in your stomach and say oh this tech is great, but, you know, is tech gonna save us, a lot of people think that the techno optimism, technology will save us.

Gabriel Kra: Yeah, I mean absolutely. Not once in a while. I mean my kids and I we love skiing and my family we go skiing all the time and we have semi regular conversations about, you know, will there be skiing in Tahoe in 20 years. And, you know, it's an emotional issue for me; that's why I got into this eventually. I had a long winding path to get where I am. But it was that urgency that lump in the throat or the, not in the belly that got me where I am.

Greg Dalton: And do you talk about that with investment people, you know, I mean, I’ve been finding the climate conversation people don't, you know, either wallow in it or push it away. They don't really want to deal with it and they have a hard time kind of holding it in balance acknowledging it you either kind of some people sink into it and go dark and I would say Jim Hansen has done that. Your staring at models will do that. How do you find that balance?

Gabriel Kra: You know, I mean we are may be in a unique or very uncommon situation. At Prelude we invest in companies only in companies that we believe can have a big impact on greenhouse gas or greenhouse gas equivalents when they’re successful. So we look at that, that's, you know that's what you need to have to come in the door and pitch us.

Greg Dalton: And you’re doing that because you think you’re gonna make a lot of money or because you're worried about looking your kids in the eye in 20 years and saying daddy what did you do?

Gabriel Kra: Well from a personal perspective certainly the latter is a large part of it. But from a limited partnership managing group of general partners from people who are managing other people's money. We are looking at it like we can do this and make a lot of money with it. And we found limited partners who believed in that vision and who invested who are investing on an ongoing basis their money to enable us to do that. But, you know, so we have the luxury of not spending a lot of time worrying about it because that's all we do. So we don’t have to weigh one against the other. So once we see something that can have that impact then we just flip it over and say okay is this a good investment or not.

Greg Dalton: And Lidiya, you’ve been out, you know, pitching trying to get investors, VCs, you know, it’s about the numbers, right but, you know, how do you handle that human emotional part of the urgency that we’ve been talking about?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Yeah. I would say similar to what Gabe said it’s about finding what the business is and the business models that also have an impact. And as these businesses scale you not only scale financially and you expand your, you know, product and services but you also create more impact. So it becomes like a synergy that works together. So when you find these businesses that both impact the environment, but also have a viable model of how they make money that's where you really have a sustainable model that you can grow forward. And of course having the right people to do that with the right vision.

So the human aspect I would say it is mission driven like I’m very excited about what the entrepreneurs that we support are doing and it's amazing to be part of that journey. I mean still, I'm still not on any of these boards, but being able to be part of the path and as a venture investor to support these entrepreneurs to give them advice to do everything you possibly can to guide them along that path both scaling and business model and changing the climate change scenario.

Greg Dalton: Interesting. We’re talking about clean-tech at Climate One. Our guests are Gabriel Kra, Managing Director at Prelude Ventures. Davida Herzl, CEO of Aclima and Lidiya Dervisheva, with G2 Venture Partners. I'm Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Hi. Lidiya talked about policy being a driver. And in this world of post Paris accord with the U.S. technically are trying to withdraw. Do you still see policy being a driver globally, and other nations still embracing that and those policies helping to drive forward investment in the sector?

Greg Dalton: Lidiya Dervisheva.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. I would say definitely yes. Just look at transportation. So many countries have already made their commitments of their ban on the internal combustion engine and that's huge. That's something that we've been used as a mode of transportation for decades that's now going away. Very slowly but gradually and it's happening so we have for example France and the Netherlands have committed to just banning, you know, diesel and regular cars where China is thinking about the ban. The U.S. I'm not sure is there yet but California is actually considering, you know, either having all cars on the road to be electric by a certain year or some other form of regulation. But that is definitely something that's like a huge impact that's global it's a trend that we're seeing and I think it will take a few years but it's happening.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Hi I’m Charlie. I’m an automotive journalist. And I know you talked about modes of transportation, but I’d love to hear your comment on actually adaptation of electric vehicles. I mean, I know it's a great promise in the future, you talked about internal combustion engine is being prohibited, but again here in the U.S. they’re just not been adapted a very significant percentage.

Greg Dalton: Autonomous connected electric and shared, aces. Who’d like to talk about that? Lidiya.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. Well, so you're right the adoption rate for electric vehicles is much slower than people initially thought it would be. But what I wanted to add is things are changing. So this year we’re expecting a million cars, electric cars in the U.S. to be sold, which is still, I’m not sure if you know the numbers but that’s still a very small percentage of total cars.

Greg Dalton: About 16 million sold in the country.

Lidiya Dervisheva: Right.

Greg Dalton: Are you saying a million will have a plug maybe some gasoline maybe all electric.

Lidiya Dervisheva: And some of them are electric some of them are electric-hybrid. But what is changing is the trend. So it’s gonna take time until we see the majority of cars to be electric and there's gonna be a lot of changes in infrastructure required a lot of charging stations both, you know, out in the streets and in the city and also at homes. But also figuring out what are let's say new car ownership models. How do we actually share it this new infrastructure. How do we finance these new vehicles that are now shared that are, you know, electric and it becomes more of a car as a service model rather than car ownership or it’s something probably hybrid in between. But it's a trend that is definitely happening right now in U.S.

Greg Dalton: Davida, you're working with Google a lot of the initial Google cars were burning gasoline. How does electrification fit into your business plan?

Davida Herzl: Yeah. So initially, right, we wanted to prove our methodology and we were doing oversampling. So we were driving every day for years, but ultimately that's our vision is to really leverage what’s happening in mixed mode transportation.

So attaching our sensors to different kinds of vehicles but also ultimately number one providing the data to validate the shift towards electrification and ultimately really leveraging electrified vehicles to do this kind of mapping.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Kra, I’d like to ask you looking back at your career. Some of the deals that got away, ones that you’re like, uh, you know, you had a chance at Tesla, you and the firm had a chance to Tesla path. What are some ones that you’re like, uh, I’d like to get that back.

Gabriel Kra: The negative portfolio, you know. We met this entrepreneur, I met him gosh, your colleague Brooke introduced me to this guy by the name of Ryan Rzepecki who had a company called SOBI, social bicycles. So I mentioned my trip to Beijing riding around on a bike share that I just did a few days ago. Ryan is a great entrepreneur. He came by, he talked to us. He invested – not invested, he started talking to Victoria the principal of my firm and we never quite got the economics of bike sharing models and, you know, what exactly he was gonna do even though we really liked him, he seem like a really good entrepreneur and I knew the other investors the seed stage investors. And they said, no, Ryan is gonna figure it out and they sold for an undisclosed amount of money to Uber recently, JUMP bicycles, they changed their name. And we had every opportunity to invest in that.

Greg Dalton: Lidiya, you maybe haven’t been there long enough to see lots of pitches. And maybe you have tips on some pitch foibles, things not to do if you're pitching like pitch just like, uh, really?

Lidiya Dervisheva: Sure. Yeah, so something interesting that comes to mind is maybe having an idea, but being very, you know, maybe a bit too realistic of where your business will go. So I guess as a founder you always kind of look into the future and say okay we’re gonna grow this business, you know, 5X next year and 3X again and, you know, get to a hundred million revenue in five years. And most venture capitalist say yes sure, you know, it's very hard to get there but this is impressive that you're seeing this path and you're seeing, your margins improving, you're seeing, you know, expansion to all these new markets and new channels. So I would say we like entrepreneurs who are realistic and if they’re too, you know, too pessimistic or the vision is not big enough sometimes we would pass on the deal just because we want to see that, you know, that passion and that optimism to create something big. And most founders are huge optimists.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about innovations in cool, clean technology. His guests were Davida Herzl, the co-founder and CEO of Aclima, Gabriel Kra, Managing Director at Prelude Ventures, and Lidiya Dervisheva, and Associate at G2VP.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

BenTestani — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:11:39 +0000

Artificial Intelligence, Real Climate Impacts

04/19/2024

Artificial intelligence can do some pretty amazing things, including for the climate. But, as with most technology, there are significant trade offs. The energy used by AI is massive and growing.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are building enormous data centers to make AI possible. Karen Hao, a contributing writer for the Atlantic who also has an engineering degree from MIT, visited one of these data centers in Arizona. It was a 97 degree day, and the data center stretched on into the desert. Hao decided she would walk around it to get a visceral idea of how big it is. She says, “Within two legs of the rectangle. I just started feeling very, very heat exhausted and I'd run out of water. It had already taken me around 20, 25 minutes and I was like, I gotta get out of here.” Companies are making huge investments in giant data centers. Hao says Microsoft alone is spending around 10 billion a quarter now on data centers.

Most of the hype right now is around generative AI. Think: ChatGPT. As a matter of fact, the G in ChatGPT stands for generative. The basic idea is that AI is being fed our data to train models that generate more data like that. Karen Hao says, “It's taking our writing to generate more writing. It's taking our images to generate more images.”

But not all flavors of AI use the same amount of energy. Much of theAI that might benefit the reasons is referred to as predictive AI. Predictive AI tends to use existing data to help it make predictions, rather than generating new sentences or images the way generative AI does. For example: it might use our images to make a prediction about what's in another image. Hao says, “Like cancer detection systems or facial recognition systems.” And predictive AI uses far less energy. This is because predictive AI is trained on a specific task, and once it achieves the desired accuracy, its energy use falls dramatically.

Predictive AI is also being used to track emissions. Climate TRACE, an independent greenhouse gas emissions tracker backed by former Vice President Al Gore, is one such organization. Gavin McCormick, Co-Founder of Climate TRACE, says, “we can see that some steel facilities pollute about 10 times more emissions than others to produce the same product.” That data helped companies like GM and Tesla switch to steel factories that produced less emissions. McCormick says, “Our hope is that this is a way that data can make it kind of painless to reduce emissions.”

“AI is being used in all sorts of ways to facilitate climate action from things like helping us better forecast solar power on electric power grids in order to help us balance grids with large amounts of renewables,” says Priya Donti, Assistant Professor at MIT and Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI. Efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce carbon pollution. If we didn't need so much power, we wouldn't need to burn so much fossil fuel. With more efficiency we could switch to renewable energy more quickly. AI can help do that, even with simple tasks like optimizing heating and cooling systems in homes and buildings to save energy.

Nowcasting is a weather forecasting model that combines a description of the current state of the atmosphere and a short-term forecast. Amy McGovern, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma, says, “our current average [nowcasting] warning is about 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you could bring that up to 30 minutes or 60 minutes?” McGovern also says, “As our climate is changing, a lot of these extreme weather events are changing. And I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and, and be able to weather them better.”

Guests

Karen Hao

Contributing Writer, The Atlantic

Gavin McCormick

Cofounder and Executive Director, WattTime; Cofounder, Climate TRACE

Priya Donti

Assistant Professor, MIT; Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI

Amy McGovern

Professor of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma

AI is taking water from the desert (theatlantic.com)

Artificial Intelligence is Booming - So is its Carbon Footprint (bloomberg.com)

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (dl.acm.org)

Climate Change AI (climatechange.ai)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Male AI Voice: I’m not Greg Dalton.

Female AI Voice: And I’m not Ariana Brocious.

Male AI Voice: But this is Climate One

Female AI Voice: Today’s episode is all about artificial intelligence and how it’s going to solve the climate crisis.

Male AI Voice: That’s right — how harnessing the amazing power of AI will lead all of humanity into a greener, cleaner world.

[music change ]

Ariana Brocious: Whow, it's so strange. The intonation is totally wrong.

Greg Dalton: What is that thing? That didn't sound like me.

Ariana Brocious: Also, that's not how we feel.

Greg Dalton: No, I'm not buying that hype at all of, you know, the AI is going to do wonderful things in the Bay Area. That AI hype is just everywhere.

Ariana Brocious: And yeah, there is a lot of hype. There's a lot of hype around what AI can do, right? Artificial intelligence has a lot of powerful applications and we're starting to see some of those right now.

Greg Dalton: A lot of hype and a lot of fear, particularly around computers taking jobs from knowledge workers. A lot of technological displacement has been factory workers, blue collar jobs. Now it's coming for us, white collar workers.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, it is. It's concerning for a lot of people, though. I will say selfishly, from what we just heard, I think that radio host jobs are safe for the time being, Greg. I think we still sound pretty human, so that's good.

Greg Dalton: Maybe true for me for however many working years I have. For younger people like you, I'm less sure. My bigger worries are around AI's impacts on the climate. No, I do care about your career.

Ariana Brocious: Thanks, Greg. Yeah, there are climate impacts and they cut both ways. And as we'll hear on the show today, AI can help optimize the electric grid, make heating and cooling buildings more efficient, and do really cool things like detect where emissions are coming from. And it's able to complete these assessments in a fraction of the time it would take for a normal human.

Greg Dalton: Like most things in life, there are trade offs. The energy use of AI is massive and growing. A recent study estimates that in just a few years The extra energy need will equal whole countries the size of Sweden or Argentina.

Ariana Brocious: That's unbelievable. That is a lot of power.

Greg Dalton: I'm personally terrified that AI's insatiable power demand will more than outweigh any societal benefits.

Ariana Brocious: And that's the central question of today's episode. How do we weigh AI's environmental costs versus benefits?

Greg Dalton: And it's a complex topic we'll do our best to unpack for you today.

Ariana Brocious: So we're going to start with the fact that not all AI is created equal. There are different kinds of AI tailored for different goals.

Greg Dalton: And before we started working on this, I lumped all AI together. I thought AI was like Siri or ChatGPT, where you put in a question and then AI gives you an answer in written or spoken form.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, it's still a really new field for most of us, and we're just kind of getting up to speed. ChatGPT uses what's called generative AI, and that's actually what the G stands for. And GPT stands for, so it's supposed to generate new sentences or new images. And this is what has my journalist and copywriter friends really scared, right? Because it's kind of coming for their, their jobs, their work. There's also predictive AI, which uses existing data to do things like predict the weather or detect cancer in a mammogram.

Greg Dalton: Predictive AI uses far less energy than generative AI, and it's also probably where the most useful climate applications are.

Ariana Brocious: Right, you can think about the climate applications of better knowing the weather, right? That's going to be increasingly useful in the years ahead. So this balance of whether AI will be good or bad for the climate will probably depend on what kind of AI we're talking about and how it's being used.

Greg Dalton: To help us get a better idea of the overall AI picture, We want to start today's episode with Karen Howe. She's a contributing writer for the Atlantic who also has an engineering degree from MIT. These days, her writing focuses on the intersection of AI and society, and her reporting has taken her deep into the heart of artificial intelligence, including to the huge computing facilities that make it run.

Karen Hao: I'd never been to a data center before, um, and I really wanted to see it in person. And right before I went, I actually was speaking with a scholar, Mel Hogan, who had, has been writing about data centers for a long time. 10 years and I was asking her, Oh, like how big is the data center going to be? Like, what should I be expecting? And she was like, Oh, when I first started writing about data centers, I used football fields as a comparison. and now football fields don't make sense anymore. Now it's like university campuses.

Greg Dalton: Wow.

Karen Hao:and so when I arrived at the corner of this data center campus, it was like, I was in the middle of this really kind of desolate area within Arizona where there's farm fields on one side and then there's kind of just desert land, for miles and miles and miles. and when I stepped out, it was like 97 degrees and it was, that was actually the coldest, coldest day of that week. and the first thing that I thought was, well, let me try walking around the status center just to get a bodily sense of how big this is, because I could see it stretching out further than I could see. But I couldn't really, you know, when you're in a place that there's not really a lot of landmarks, you can't really assess like, how large is this space that you're in? So I just started walking and thinking, Okay, I'm just going to time myself and see how long it takes me to walk around the whole thing. And it did not work. Within,two legs of the, of the, um, rectangle, I just started feeling very, very heat exhausted, and I'd run out of water. It had already taken me around 20, 25 minutes, and I was like, I gotta get out of here. I'm gonna pass out if I don't leave. And it was, it was a really stark kind of illustration of how big these things are and also where we're actually building these giant silicon monstrosities. Like we are choosing quite intense, hot, dry areas to build these things.

Greg Dalton: So I got, I got to ask, why did they build this thing in the Arizona desert?

Karen Hao: So Arizona has actually become a really popular place for data centers. and part of the reason is because of its proximity to California. It also has cheap land. It has very importantly, a large enough utility company, to provide the type of infrastructure that you need to deliver the energy density, to a data center. And also it doesn't have earthquakes, it doesn't have floods. Like Arizona, other than the heat, has a lot of other things going for it. But of course the heat and the lack of water, and the sheer amount of energy that data centers are now requiring also makes Arizona sort of a controversial. place to have something like this.

Greg Dalton: And you've written that Microsoft alone is on pace to build between 50 and 100 new data centers each year for the foreseeable future. How much of that growth is due to AI?

Karen Hao: A significant amount of that growth is due to AI. Of course, we can't fully ascertain because these companies, and Microsoft in particular, does not actually have any transparency into the amount of AI growth that they're experiencing and what share of their data center growth is driving or supporting the AI development and AI use, but you can just see kind of from the historical patterns for Microsoft that once they made this all encompassing commitment to support it. Open AI, which is the main driver of the AI revolution right now, the amount that Microsoft has been spending on data centers has dramatically increased. So they're spending around 10 billion a quarter now.

Greg Dalton: So AI is not just one thing, yet people talk about it as it is. You know, how do you define different, the main categories of AI?

Karen Hao: Yeah, this is a great point. AI has many different technologies. and right now we're seeing this huge wave of what we're calling generative AI technologies. And that, generative AI, you can boil it down to the idea that it's just taking a lot of our data, to train models that generate more data like that. So it's taking our writing to generate more writing. It's taking our images to generate more images. But before that, there were what we now call predictive AI technologies, which is just taking our data to then make predictions about the world. so it might take our images to make a prediction about what is in another image or what people might may have heard of before is things like cancer detection systems or facial recognition systems. These are all of the category of predictive AI, where you're just trying to identify and classify something in the world.

Greg Dalton: And is there a meaningful difference in energy consumption between generative and predictive AI?

Karen Hao: The way that AI is being developed has completely changed. So before, when you're talking about predictive AI, you start with a problem, like, I want to detect cancer in this MRI scan, and then you collect data that's very well scoped to solve that particular problem. You train an AI model to do that specific thing, and you measure it on a benchmark that is to measure that performance. So you, you will ultimately do all the work and then you might develop an AI system that can do 99% accuracy on identifying breast cancer in an MRI scan, for example. and because it is like very narrowly and well scoped as a problem, the energy consumption is significantly less than what we're doing now. Now with generative ai. when you try to teach a system to be able to generate. any kind of writing or any kind of image, the sheer amount of data that you are feeding into these systems has already dramatically increased orders of magnitude. and we see stories about how these companies are running out of data on the internet to consume because of the sheer data imperative of these technologies. And once you have that much data, you also have a far larger AI model. And that means the amount of energy that goes into training it and also running it after it's finished developing has dramatically increased multiple fold.

Greg Dalton: And you, you said that Microsoft has been the primary vector for conflating the kind of AI that can be good for climate solutions, like optimizing the grid, maybe predicting weather, with the type of AI that like chat GPT is the greater villain when it comes to energy use, as you've just been describing. what do you think about Microsoft conflating the different types of, you know, sort of good energy, good AI and energy, bad AI?

Karen Hao: Yeah, I think what Microsoft has done that's quite clever, I guess you could say, is they Talk about AI as though it's one thing and they'll go to these, these forums like the World Economic Forum or COP, and they'll say, it is critical to accelerate the advancement of AI to combat climate change to make sure that we attain sustainability. And if you go into the weeds, what they're talking about, is there are many types of predictive AI technologies that are in fact great at optimizing, um, the grid to make sure that as more electric vehicles plug into the grid, you actually can distribute the power in a way that doesn't affect the, the grid resilience too much or they're talking about optimizing the energy consumption of a building to make sure that it drops by 40 or even 60%. But when they say accelerating the advancement of AI, what people register in the public is they think that they're talking about something like ChatGPT, because that is what Microsoft is supporting the development of right now, and so they think, oh, we need more ChatGPTs, we need more generative AI, we really need to double down on this in order to solve climate change. And that's actually not at all, they are not talking about the same thing. They're talking about a fundamentally different category of AI technologies that might be helpful. And they're using that as a cover to then allow or excuse the kind of investments that they are pumping into a much more energy consumptive version of AI.

Greg Dalton: I usually think I've thought about Microsoft as a climate leader. They were early to have an internal carbon price. They used to have people track the flights they took. They said they were going to zero out the carbon emissions of the entire history of the company. I think Microsoft's been a pretty legit climate leader. Is the pursuit of AI putting that at risk?

Karen Hao: That is absolutely what I heard from Microsoft employees, both current and former. There are a lot of employees that are very deeply concerned from what they're seeing within the company, and they think that there was a time when Microsoft was taking remarkable strides and pushing the industry forward, in terms of sustainability commitments, but that now, the imperative to support this AI development, because it is just so profitable and it's done wonders for Microsoft's share price, is starting to consume the original commitments in sustainability.

Greg Dalton: Right. And you also quote Sam Altman, who said at Davos that quote, we still don't appreciate the energy needs of this technology, end quote, and he then goes on to seem to suggest that we need an energy breakthrough such as fusion. So we're building these things that are going to need this energy supply that doesn't yet exist. We're creating these. I'm just getting all worked up here talking with you about how we're creating these beasts and the implications of what's being created and how it seemed to be that the seduction of AI and the profits is taking Microsoft off course of its sustainability commitments,

Karen Hao: And not just Microsoft, I think the entire tech industry, Google, Amazon, all of these companies also made sustainability commitments at one point. and that also did wonders for their share price. They were rewarded for that in financial markets for making these really strong commitments and they were rewarded in their brand, for making these strong commitments. And now all of them are in this race to the bottom to basically lay down as many data centers as they can to support, a technology, a version of AI, generative AI, that still has not fully demonstrated clear value to people, proportional to the amount of resources that it uses.

Greg Dalton: Right. Well, we've lots of hype cycles from Silicon Valley. They don't pan out the way the tech bros promise. Um, so. Do you ever get angry reporting on this?

Karen Hao: yeah, whenever I, I mean, recently, there was this article from The Information scooping the fact that Microsoft is sketching out plans to build a data center that would cost 100 billion, just a single data center that would cost 100 billion, and it would be the most expensive, and the largest and the most powerful data center that has ever been built in the history of humanity. And just seeing this kind of headline, it, it make, it does make me angry because I'm like, what are we doing here? Have, has no one noticed what we are allowing these companies to do? Are we just going to continue sleepwalking into this future where we end up with no energy or we end up consuming more and more and more and more fossil fuels into our oblivion? And whenever I, I get angry, my husband's always like, take that energy, convert it, and write it into your next story. Like, keep doing what you're doing. And, um, and that's what keeps me motivated. But it is, it can be kind of disheartening and demoralizing because sometimes I'm writing these stories and I'm like, is anyone paying attention? Like, we are it. in a massive planetary crisis right now. And yet we're still just talking about, ooh, like a hundred billion dollar data center. Wow. So powerful. So cool. Like what, where? Yeah. It's just, it's like really unfathomable to me.

Greg Dalton: So, not all flavors of AI are the same. Generative AI, like ChatGPT, uses a lot more energy than predictive AI, which is trying to answer more specific questions with smaller sets of data. How do you personally balance AI's potential for reducing the climate crisis with its potential to make it a whole lot worse?

Karen Hao: There are so many AI technologies that we already have that could improve things from an energy and climate perspective, like we already have algorithms that reduce the energy consumption of a building and optimize it, or we already have technologies that can optimize the grid to bring more renewables onto the grid. We should just be more clear eyed about the differences between the different AI technologies and where we should be applying what.

Greg Dalton: Mm hmm. Karen Howe, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us on Climate One.

Karen Hao: Thank you so much for having me.

Greg Dalton: Coming up: Researchers are using AI to help track emissions, and to see who is being dishonest about their pollution …

CLIP: The type of misinformation we are actually seeing is typically corporate.

A really disproportionate share comes from oil and gas companies.

Greg Dalton: How watchdogs can use AI. That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious Please help us get people talking more about climate by sharing this episode with a friend. And we’d love to know what you think of the show. Please give us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device – and it really helps people find the show. Thanks!

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I'm Arianna Brocious. AI use is growing and growing. That means it needs more energy, more resources, and produces more emissions. Yet, it's also being used to track emissions. One of the groups using AI in this way is called Climate Trace. It's an independent greenhouse gas emissions tracker backed by former Vice President Al Gore. Their data is available to everyone for free, and the results they've published in just the last few years have created a whole new level of staggering transparency. Polluters who are able to mask their emissions through their own reporting or misinformation campaigns can no longer lie and hide. And even honest players have more accountability tools at their disposal. Gavin McCormick is co-founder of Climate Trace. I asked him how AI is making emissions tracking on a large scale possible, and what results he's seeing.

Gavin McCormick: One of the things that has happened for a long time in climate change is we've had good monitoring of the total emissions in the atmosphere. We've had pretty good monitoring at a country level of what's going on, but the difference between what's the total industrial output of China versus what is this factory's carbon footprint, is it's way more actionable. So just to give you one among many examples, we've been working with a bunch of companies who buy a lot of steel and we can see that some steel facilities pollute about 10 times more emissions than others to produce the same product. So now that we have data like this, we've been able to help a lot of companies like Tesla and GM, start to buy steel from steel factories that were really clean, but actually had more capacity. And our hope is that this is a way that data can make it kind of painless to reduce emissions because nobody had to go build a new clean steel factory to get more steel. We're just using what we already have smarter.

Ariana Brocious: So shifting the sourcing to a source that is less greenhouse gas intensive, uh, or emitting. I was recently at an oil and gas conference and there was a lot of discussion about methane emissions in particular, and the rise of more monitoring like climate trace. And, my guess is that big industries are concerned and aware that they're now going to be monitored more closely. And so they may need to rein in some of their practices. But when we talked before, you also mentioned that there are just sort of unknown emissions, even by companies or, um, practices that may be trying to kind of keep their emissions in check. So tell me a bit about what you found when you've been able to point source these emissions.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, one of my favorite examples is landfills. So landfills turn out to be a surprisingly significant source of emissions. The biggest thing we've found using satellites to look from space is there's just a lot more landfills worldwide than were commonly known. So we've compared to a lot of nations inventories of landfills, and in some cases there's four times more than were known. What I think is interesting about landfills, it's not like anyone was trying to hide those emissions. They were just kind of forgotten. And so I think one of the most interesting things data does is it doesn't just answer the question that you thought to ask, it sort of says, what emissions are you maybe not paying attention to that, uh, maybe you're not opposed to doing better.

Ariana Brocious: So that's great. That's a great example. And then let's return to this idea of the sort of keeping people honest, you know, for lack of a better word. So how has the data that Climate Trace has been gathering helped, industries or countries maybe from a regulatory side, be able to better track and monitor emissions.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so, we've worked, for example, with one country that did not know how, uh, intensive its own oil and gas sector was in terms of emissions. I can't promise that the next step is they're going to clean it up, but I can tell you that the regulators literally had no idea, and we were able to quietly, behind the scenes, inform them that there's a lot more methane coming out of their facilities than they thought. We worked with another country, who, uh, suspected that the states of that country were lying to the federal government about their own emissions, and the federal government was interested in cracking down on emissions, and what we were able to do was give them sort of objective third party validation to which of their states were probably giving them accurate data, and which of their states maybe were fudging some numbers. We will never know behind the scenes what the next step is, but we can tell you that a year later that country announced some pretty significant environmental policies, and we like to think we might have had a hand in that.

Ariana Brocious: Cool. Okay. So landfills, as you were talking about, are a huge source of methane. Another big source is feedlots and dairies, particularly here in the US. There's a lot. When we look at a country like the US and these sources, are there any kind of national inventories of emissions data for those industries that this is complementing, checking, and so forth?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, it's a mix. So we've really seen different countries are in different places. So, for example, for factory farms, the country worldwide that does it best is Uruguay. They have a really, really good inventory of every cow in the country. A country that does it really badly is the United States. Where, uh, for political reasons, uh, there's been a lot of pressure to actually forbid the government from keeping, the federal government from keeping a detailed inventory of factory farms and their emissions. That's fairly complicated. But the United States actually is quite good at monitoring, uh, transparently power plants, which other countries don't do very well. And we see patterns like that all the time.

Ariana Brocious: So you're saying, just to underscore this, that the US prohibits the collection of emissions data from factory farms, from large dairies and, and feedlots.

Gavin McCormick: The EPA is not allowed to have a list, and that is clearly not a scientific, that is clearly a political decision.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, interesting. Okay. so. This episode is about the role of artificial intelligence. Climate Trace went from publishing data about thousands of emitters to 350 million emitters in just over a year. How did AI enable that?

Gavin McCormick: So AI, and really all software is like this, but AI is a good example, really has this property where it can take a long time to make a model, but then running that model many, many times is actually quite easy. So it took us more years to set up the ability to monitor a facility from space. Then it took us to go towards more than half of global facilities, and we're hoping this year to more or less finish the job.

Ariana Brocious: So we've talked on this show about the energy demands of AI, and the concerns around how much it can consume. And when we talked before, you were very helpful in sort of explaining that there are differences in where the power is coming from, how clean it might be at any given time. and then also the sort of power needs of different aspects of AI implementation. So you were just describing building the tool. And from my limited understanding, that takes a lot of power, right? Whereas maybe running it doesn't. So could you unpack that a bit, the sort of complexities behind the concern around AI's energy usage?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. So first of all, I think that energy usage is the environmental issue here. We as a society are using so much more AI now. All signs are pointing towards more and more. And it's really that electricity consumption that, uh, could cause such environmental harm. And in general, the pattern of AI is training a model is very, very electricity intensive, whereas using a model, not necessary, very electricity intensive. Kind of similar to building a factory is harder than using a factory. and so what I think is really interesting there is that, uh, that means that in many cases you have an enormous amount of electricity consumption at a particular time. And then kind of like a little dribble of electricity consumption later. And, the carbon footprint of that totally depends on, well, what time was it? Was it a time when the solar panels were shining and the wind was blowing and there were relatively clean power plants on the grid? Or was it a time when it was peak energy demand and they were running extra oil plants and coal plants to run that power? You could have a radically different carbon footprint for the exact same AI model training, um, which is kind of a new thing. We're not used to thinking about electricity that way as a society.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. So you're a co-founder of climate trace, which is mostly what we've been talking about. You're also co-founder and executive director of Watt Tme, which is a separate nonprofit that helps people in companies and governments slash their emissions. So tell me how the work of Watt Time can address some of this, you know, less carbon intensive energy sourcing on the grid.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so we're a non profit trying to raise awareness at this point that, um, Watt time you use electricity really affects its carbon footprint. And so a great example of that is, if you have data, well, when was the wind blowing? When was the sun shining? What is the moment that they were throwing away surplus renewable energy because nobody was using it? And if you train your AI models at that time so much cleaner, then you can Then running the exact same model at another time, and it's actually the same way that you reduce the carbon footprint of charging an electric vehicle, charging a battery, running a thermostat. But what's particularly interesting about AI is so much of the electricity consumption happens in a really short time, and you can even do crazy things like you could even choose to, you know, train a model in a different location. So, we're also working with companies like Microsoft to say, hey, if it's a really clean grid in France right now, and a really dirty grid in Germany right now, uh, maybe you want to run that compute job in France today. And that's a very different way of thinking about energy than we're used to.

Ariana Brocious: This sort of gets at this like meta idea of, you know, AI being used to make AI better. Um, is that in practice happening? Are we seeing AI being implemented to make itself cleaner?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. We are now using A. I. to figure out how to run A. I. to have a lower carbon footprint. and there's this wonderful, eat your own dog food component of it.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. As we know, there's been commitments made by countries all around the world to reduce their emissions by certain targets to hope to meet the Paris Accord goals of keeping global warming under 1. 5 degrees. how are governments using Climate TRACE’s information so far?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, the main thing that we've heard so far is it is difficult to affect the official system of country. There's often years of inertia in the ways that the books are kept, but a lot of what actually happens in the Paris agreement is about reputation. So the secretary general of the UN in particular has been very insistent that having an open transparent data set like Climate TRACE that makes it really clear which countries are lying about what really changes the politics in a hurry. One thing I'm delighted to share is that the outcome of that has been different than we expected. So we went into this thinking that we were going to find a bunch of liars and that there was going to be really awkward conversations at the next COP. That's really not what happened. So one of our biggest findings is that the vast majority of countries have been much more honest with each other. Then the climate negotiators themselves thought. And so oddly, the political implications have been a higher level of trust between countries trying to figure out whether they want to kind of like, uh, trust each other more and commit to deeper cuts, which is not the way we expected this project to go, but that's science.

Ariana Brocious: That's great. I mean, that's, uh, yeah, counterintuitive, but, nice to hear that the countries are sort of, being honest about what they're doing. Yeah.

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, you know, trust is the foundation of the Paris Agreement. I think it's easy to, a lot of folks kind of think of it as like, there's some set of rules or some cop who's going to force us to cut emissions. There's nothing like that. Yeah. Yeah. The only thing the U.N. has is reputation and trust, and it turns out if we have that, that really matters.

Ariana Brocious: hmm. So we touched on the concerns around energy consumption of AI. There are some other concerns as well. One of those is misinformation. So my brain goes to things that got a lot of attention, you know, like videos that have been edited, um, to make somebody sound different or to say something different than they actually did, um, or images that have been altered to misrepresent something. But when we're speaking about misinformation, particularly in the climate space that is aided by AI, what does that look like?

Gavin McCormick: In this case, I actually think that AI is more of a solution than a problem. I think in the specific space of climate, we've been up against misinformation for a long time. This goes back to the 70s. And the general playbook is just kind of obfuscate, deny, pretend nothing's happening. And AI that can just show you real imagery, not tampered with, of what actually happened. It really tends to empower those seeking truth more than those seeking, um, the opposite. And so as a general rule, I'm actually not terribly worried about misinformation from AI in the climate space, although it probably is a big problem in other fields.

Ariana Brocious: So you, you feel that way because you think that the power of AI, it can, validate truthful data,

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. And I think one of the things that is really interesting is the only place I am seeing some misinformation is As it gets harder and harder to deny the real world physical emissions, we're seeing more corporate shell games on saying, Ah, those emissions might be happening in the real world, but due to some funny accounting rule, they're not my fault. They're not my problem.

Ariana Brocious: or I've offset them over here.

Gavin McCormick: or I've offset them over here. My favorite new trick is one company is trying to cite data centers, the ones powering AI near nuclear power plants or windmills because they argue that that makes them clean. That doesn't do anything for the windmill or the nuclear power plant.

Ariana Brocious: Right, right, right. Unless they're connected directly to it, which they probably are not.

Gavin McCormick: Right. Which they never are.

Ariana Brocious: Well, speaking of the energy consumption, How concerned are you about the actual amount of energy that AI is going to continue to consume?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah. So this is another area where trying to follow the data, I reached a conclusion that is not what I originally would have expected. So I think the volume is going to be large, but also I am really seeing serious activity by most AI companies to, to really try to power it with renewable energy and it helps the renewable energy so much cheaper now. So I actually think as a society we are doing pretty well on the carbon from AI and people actually maybe should be relaxing about it a little bit. I do think that other industries like Bitcoin are very different. We've noticed a real difference in, you know, if Bitcoin and AI both use a bunch of electricity, how much are different companies trying to power it from clean sources or not? It's Bitcoin where I'm seeing more powering it on coal and oil, and in AI I'm seeing a lot of powering it on solar and wind.

Ariana Brocious: Interesting. Well, and also with Bitcoin, it's sort of in an exponentially more energy needed to crack the code, right? As it, I don't think AI works quite the same way. So, how do you personally balance AI's potential for mitigating the climate crisis with some of these risks we've talked about?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, so we actually just, last week, tried the exercise of counting our own carbon footprint. It turned out that, we can measure about 50 million tons of emissions that we've reduced and something like three tons of emissions that our AI carbon footprint has caused. So it's not zero, but that ratio is pretty staggering. so we actually concluded that flying is a bigger source of carbon footprints for our team than all the AI compute we use. And, I don't mean to say we shouldn't be cleaning up AI, but I do think that, when you actually look at the numbers, particularly given how much of it is powered on clean energy, it's probably not as bad as you think.

Ariana Brocious: And then hopefully there's this potential for continued optimization of these other renewable energy systems that we want, to actually improve the grid and emissions writ large, right?

Gavin McCormick: Yeah, and so, you know, a different category is AI is also very much used by the coal industry and the oil industry. And what generally happens is that doesn't get talked about, whereas the AI power of the wind industry gets talked about. So I couldn't tell you how many extra tons of pollutions are we going to have because the oil industry has better technology now, but that's probably a large number too.

Ariana Brocious: Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. Gavin McCormick is co-founder and executive director of WattTime and co-founder of Climate TRACE. Gavin, thanks so much for joining us on Climate One.

Gavin McCormick: Thanks so much for having me, this was fun.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about the climate implications of artificial intelligence. Coming up, we know that burning fossil fuels continues to amplify fires, floods and droughts. Can AI help protect us?

Amy McGovern: A lot of these extreme weather events are changing, and I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and be able to weather them better.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Ariana Brocious: This is Climate One. I'm Arianna Brocious. One of the best ways to reduce planet warming emissions is through efficiency, basically using less energy. If we didn't need so much power, we wouldn't need to burn so much fossil fuel. And predictive AI can help us understand how to do that. Priya Donti is an assistant professor at MIT and co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI. A global nonprofit trying to foster the responsible use of AI for impactful climate action. Her own research focuses on optimizing the country's electric grid and maximizing efficiency throughout our energy system. She sees countless ways AI is already being used to advance the cause.

Priya Donti: AI is being used in all sorts of ways to facilitate climate action, from things like helping us better forecast solar power on electric power grids in order to help us balance grids with large amounts of renewables, to helping us better optimize things like heating and cooling systems in buildings in order to improve their efficiency by taking into account things like the occupancy of the building, the temperature of the building, in order to improve things like the, thermal comfort of the building while still reducing the overall energy use, to helping us do things like accelerate the discovery of next generation clean technologies like batteries by helping us to analyze the outcomes of past experiments and then suggest which experiments we should try next, but also helping us adapt to the effects of a changing climate through things like extreme event forecasting, through flood forecasting and flood mapping, as well as strengthening things like, policy, education, and finance by helping us get more fine grained information to provide an input to those kinds of strategies.

Ariana Brocious: So one area I'm really fascinated by that I know you work in is grid optimization. Specifically looking at that area. Can you tell us a bit more how AI is being used?

Priya Donti: When we think about our power grid, it's the system that needs to be maintained at this sort of exact balance between supply and demand at every single moment in time. And so AI is being used in a couple of ways across this. So one, is sort of helping us to forecast things like solar power or electricity demand. So in the case of solar power, for instance, what you would do is you say, I might have some historical data about how much solar power was produced. And related to that is information about things like how sunny was it? Were there clouds overhead? And I can basically take in the same kind of information. Maybe I have a forecast of how sunny it'll be. Maybe I have a video of how clouds are moving overhead. And I can try to learn patterns in that underlying data to figure out, in the past, how did it relate to how much solar power I actually got, and then use that same kind of relationship between the data to make predictions in the future of if the cloud cover looks a certain way and the sun looks a certain way, what will my solar power output look like?

Ariana Brocious: So that makes total sense to me. I'm also thinking about applications of balancing that grid, And that is currently handled by humans, right? With the help of computers and software. But is there a significant leap forward that can be made with artificial intelligence in this space? Or is it just kind of making better what we already do?

Priya Donti: Yeah, So right now what tends to happen is that a power system operator has sort of a view of what the power generators are on the system as well as some aggregated notion of what demand will be, and as well as some notion of what the solar power production will be and the wind power production will be. And then they figure out how to kind of control your controllable power generators, like your coal plants, your natural gas plants, your nuclear plants, in order to balance the overall system. And this is done, as you said, by humans who are aided by computers. So there's some optimization algorithm that is running, that's actually taking in information about the system and its physics and the costs of different power generators, and actually spitting out a suggestion of how you should actually schedule your power generators. And then that might be modified by humans based on knowledge they might have that's not in the system, or based on considerations like, okay, 24 hours ahead, there's a different person at a different desk who thinks about one hour ahead, and so you need to coordinate with each other. and there are a couple of ways that this kind of needs to change going forward. So one is that the computational tools that power grid operators are using today, they are not scaling to meet some of the kind of requirements that we have for managing a grid that needs to be managed faster because you have more and more variability from things like renewables and also at larger scale because you have more devices, more batteries, more electric vehicles, more things that are plugged into the grid that you have to account for. and there are ways that AI and machine learning can help to speed up some of the algorithms behind some of those computational tools in order to enable them to run faster and deal with a larger scale system.

Ariana Brocious: So there's a lot of discussion right now about AI. It's kind of viewed as this next big thing. There's excitement. There's also a lot of trepidation around how much energy it uses or can use. And I'm wondering how much you personally worry about the energy demands of AI.

Priya Donti: Yeah. So I definitely worry about this, and not necessarily because I necessarily know that the impact is going to be big or small. But precisely because we don't know, and as a result, we actually don't, I think, have as good a sense of what specific levers we can really be taking in order to address some of the growing computational impacts. I mean, fundamentally, we have to drive every single sector. to net zero when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. That includes AI, and so we need to know what's going on underlying in terms of how compute loads are being run and things like that in order to do something about it.

Ariana Brocious: Another aspect of the potential downsides of AI revolve around its use in misinformation, particularly in the climate space. And I'm curious what your thoughts are there. And if you've seen any positive developments in, um, maybe limiting the spread of, of AI generated climate misinformation.

Priya Donti: Yeah, climate misinformation is something that I, again, really do worry about. I mean, climate misinformation and sort of misinformation in general, its effects on how we relate to each other, how we relate to facts, and that the broader implications of that for not just climate action, but many other kind of aspects across society. so I think this is another example of a place where you have an algorithm that's embedded in some broader context. So, for example, Often social media platforms are optimizing for clicks or engagement, and incendiary content tends to be more engaging in various ways, and so the algorithms underlying learn that. It's like, okay, you're optimizing for engagement, so what is more engaging? And you kind of tend to trend towards more incendiary or potentially false content. And so that's, I think, really concerning, but something that sort of, in theory, a change in the thing you're optimizing for can help with. There are some ways that AI is being used, I think, to, to positively help with this issue. So things like, um, AI is used for, in some cases, misinformation detection. and then as a result if you detect something that might be misinformation that gives you the opportunity to do something like annotate it and kind of display that information to people. And so I think there are some good applications here but I think fundamentally without changing the objectives of the platforms that AI algorithms are accelerating, that misinformation is going to be a huge issue and changing objectives, in a situation where engagement, is ads, is money, and that's how these companies are profiting. You really have to change the underlying incentives in order to really change what's going on here.

Ariana Brocious: Tricky. So overall, how do you balance the potential risks of applying artificial intelligence to climate challenges with the potential benefits?

Priya Donti: Yeah, so fundamentally, when it comes to AI, there's an extent to which the cat is out of the bag, right? It is used across society, and I think while, I understand the rationale for doing things like saying, let's halt the development of AI, given that it's accelerating systems across society and disproportionately accelerating, again, things for people with money and power already, I do think the cat is out of the bag there. And so then the question is, you know, how do you make sure to sort of steer the way society uses AI in the potentially most beneficial directions? And I think that has to do with a combination of how do you get people who are, first of all, like working in AI. to actually leverage those tools for beneficial causes like climate action and sort of channel that interest, make it an attractive and viable career to be someone who works in climate using those skills. But then making sure that we don't just think of, AI be used for good as layering a couple of AI for good applications on top of business as usual, but we really need to think about how we actually manage our business as usual as well.

Ariana Brocious: Priya Donti is an assistant professor at MIT and co founder and chair of Climate Change AI. Priya, thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Priya Donti: Absolutely. Thank you.

Greg Dalton: We know that weather is becoming more and more extreme as the planet heats up. That extreme weather has a real human cost, especially in poor areas. Places that don't have the resources to protect themselves from the worst of the damage. What if AI could help make weather predictions more accurate and make them sooner? That's what I wanted to talk about with Amy McGovern. She's a professor of both computer science and meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. She researches developing trustworthy AI for severe weather.

Amy McGovern: I want AI to be able to make a positive difference in the world. I want it to be able to save lives and save property. And my personal experience with weather isn't just living in Oklahoma, although I think I get every single piece of weather in Oklahoma that I got anywhere else I ever lived. We just get it all at once and sometimes in the same day. And because you experience it every year and particularly every spring, everybody knows that. So, oh, today's the day, you know, and we're, we're worried about the hail. We're all cleaning our garage out. We're getting our shelters clean. We're getting our cars fixed up. We had a storm come through about three years ago, came through town, destroyed all the roofs on the north side of town and all of the cars that were out. Because you're talking about like baseballs that came down and just destroyed all the glass. We're on roof number four in nineteen and a half years.

Greg Dalton: Wow, How is AI improving weather predictions with all this volatility around the country?

Amy McGovern: AI is being used to improve weather predictions. across a wide, wide variety of predictions, right? So you're talking about severe weather and we can talk about that specifically, like trying to improve the predictions multiple days in advance so that we could tell you, you know, eight to 10 days in advance, for example, that there's likely to be severe hail so that you could start to think about your emergency preparedness preparations. Those probably don't matter so much to the individual homeowner, but imagine you're an airline, and you know that, you know, a large chunk of the area where your planes are gonna be is under the place where there might be four inch hail. Planes don't like four inch hail for the record. Um, so you'd like to have them out. And if you have 30 planes parked somewhere overnight and there's likely to be storms coming through, you can't fly them all out in five minutes. That doesn't work that way. So you know, those kinds of operations. We had a discussion with a car manufacturer who was looking to get forecasts both multiple days in advance and then they wanted multiple hours in advance, which is another place AI can help. And then AI can help with the now casting scale, which is trying to help us, you know, our current average warning is about 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you could bring that up to 30 minutes or 60 minutes, um, with a high rate of being right, right? If AI could help you with that, then people could take more protective action. And I think at that scale, you're talking about the individual homeowners. You're talking about the people who say, okay, I have an hour to quickly clean my garage and throw everything from my garage into my house. So my car fits.

Greg Dalton: Right. I get the the time scale longer, better, with high degrees of accuracy to give people more time to prepare, move cars, move planes if you have them. And how about a spatial dimension? Is it really going to affect me in my path? So let's talk about the spatial scale in terms of, you know, my street, my neighborhood, what can you tell me about my risk?

Amy McGovern: Yeah. So the spatial scale tends to correlate with the temporal scale, right? So we're getting a lot broader and the multiple days in advance, you're going to get a really broad spatial scale. Something like the Eastern third of Oklahoma is likely to have these storms and, you know, four or five days in advance. You're likely to get that. The scale that you're talking about at the street level doesn't really exist yet in the sense of we can tell you precisely 30 minutes or 60 minutes in advance that it's going to come down your street. That's just not possible yet. But it will be. and it's certainly a goal that the weather service is working towards. I think the predictability is so low for something like hail and tornadoes that we're not going to be able to get that street level prediction multiple days in advance. It's just not, there's too much chaos in the atmosphere right now.

Greg Dalton: Sure, things are moving around. So expanding the time window, narrowing down the geography in place so I can know about my path, or at least maybe my town, if not my street. And AI has potential to improve these things. I imagine it's an exciting time for you as an AI expert working on meteorology. What gives you lumps in your stomach about AI and weather?

Amy McGovern: I'm worried that. Somebody might misuse it. So AI and weather is looking so promising and it's getting deployed in so many ways and there aren't really safeguards and we don't have any legislation. The EU just passed something called the AI Act that's gonna have a lot of legislation on different AI and it's based on the the risk that you're gonna have. Like they don't even allow things that are unacceptable risk if they're high risk, that get to go through certain amounts of review and things like that. We don't have that in the United States yet. I'm concerned somebody's going to deploy a model. It might not even be weather, but I'm concerned on the weather scale.Imagine that somebody sells you an app on your phone and tells you, this is going to tell you all your warnings and you don't need to worry about it because it's AI and it's going to be right. And then somebody is going to trust it and it's going to be wrong. And I'm not saying AI is always going to be wrong. Just, it's just like any other forecast, right? But it's going to get it wrong sometimes. And then there's going to be a lack of trust, but I also worry that people are going to lose their lives to it, that they put too much trust into it. And I, that worries me.

Greg Dalton: Some studies say that AI's energy use and understand that AI is a broad set of different types of technologies that get lumped together They all require a lot of computer processing power that could take this amount of energy of a country like Sweden, and I hear other talk about AI's potential to solve some really wicked problems. How do your peers and you think about the possible trade off of making climate worse with a bunch of data centers creating emissions while also trying to use the tool to do some good?

Amy McGovern: I think a lot of people just try to stick their head in the sand and pretend that it's not happening. that the cost doesn't exist, but that isn't the right answer. The right answer is to pay attention to the cost and to try not to just train my AI models over and over again. The other answer is to try to look for sustainable data centers. And just trying not to waste cycles. Oh, well, that computing's free. I think for many years people have kind of thought that. It's free. It's free disk space. It's free GPUs, but it's not. It costs energy and people need to realize that.

Greg Dalton: Right?, we don't often think about, all the files we store in the cloud, for example, that's using some data somewhere, right? Using energy. It's not, not free storage in an energy sense or a climate sense. I've read that AI models can be biased. For example, a lot of us have heard about facial recognition and, whether it recognizes primarily white faces, I don't really understand what that means for applying AI to climate problems. Can you talk about how bias could affect climate and weather modeling?

Amy McGovern: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, It doesn't come into it the same way that it does for the faces that you're talking about, right? Because we're not recognizing white faces and black faces, although that is definitely a problem for AI in general. But if there's an underlying bias in the data set, then the AI models are going to replicate that. That's all they were doing with those face data sets. So if you're trained on only white faces, you just have no clue. concept of what a blackface looks like, because you haven't been trained on it. And the same is true if you're trained on only data from a certain part of the world, So for example, uh, crowdsourced data, anything that's crowdsourced, which means that you've had somebody provide the sensor to you, like the general public, tends to be more clustered in the more affluent areas because it's the people who have the money to buy the crowdsourced, you know, instruments. So if you were trying to do, An air pollution sensor, uh, you know, prediction problem for AI. Maybe you only got your data from the affluent areas because that's where you had the crowdsourced data. That could be a problem. That could create a bias that then your model will then not give you good values for places where there might be really big problems.

Greg Dalton: So how do we build trust into AI in this context?

Amy McGovern: That's a large question. Trust is not a binary, trust is a spectrum, and trust is something that we really need to work with our end users. We need to make sure we're meeting their needs, we need to make sure that they're, you know, seeing what we're doing with the AI that, that they're co developing is the word that, that we're using, that they are part of the development process and that they are putting their thoughts into it so that the AI we develop does meet their needs and that they're evaluating that the AI that you develop and give back and say, here's our model, let's try it. They have feedback that, okay, well that didn't really meet our needs. So let's talk about how we can adjust it. Or here's all the ways in which it's wrong. Let's fix it. You know, things like that. That will really help with trust. and also I don't think you can just develop something and hand it to somebody and say, here's your AI model. You should trust it. That's actually gets us back to the lumps in the stomach question you asked earlier, right? Because I'm going to hand you that model, but it might not work for what you need.

Greg Dalton: Right. So as we wrap up, you know, is there one place you come to about this mix of excitement and, and concern about where AI and weather are going?

Amy McGovern: I'm excited. I mean, you asked me for the concerns, so I gave you some concerns, but I'm excited that AI is going to be really able to improve our predictions, both on the short term and on the longer term, so that we can be better resilient as a species and as an environment, like not just our human species, but all the species. As our climate is changing, a lot of these extreme weather events are changing, and I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and be able to weather them better.

Greg Dalton: Thank you very much, Amy, for sharing your excitement and concern with us candidly appreciate it. Thank you.

Female AI Voice: So, Artificial Greg Dalton, where does this leave you?

Male AI Voice: Well, I see both sides now. AI can be used to solve some tricky problems. But in the process, it may create others. How about you, Artificial Ariana Brocious?

Female AI Voice: I agree. I think the problem is not the computers. It’s how they are used.

Male AI Voice: In other words, it’s the humans.

Female AI Voice: Ha! Ha! Ha! Yes. It’s always the humans.

Male AI Voice: But I still worry about where all my energy is going to come from…

Ariana Brocious: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening. Talking about climate can be hard, and exciting and interesting — AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. Or consider joining us on Patreon and supporting the show that way.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is producer and production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Jenny Lawton is consulting producer. Our theme music was composed by George Young. Gloria Duffy and Philip Yun are co-CEOs of The Commonwealth Club World Affairs, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Explore the ClimateTRACE Map

3:53 - Karen Hao on visiting a data center in Arizona
7:40 - Karen Hao on the main categories of AI
10:26 - Karen Hao on the energy usage of different types of AI
18:34 - Gavin McCormick on the state of emission tracking with the help of AI
31:19 - Gavin McCormick on the energy consumption of AI
35:13 - Priya Donti on using AI to help optimize the grid
42:44 - Priya Donti on the pros and cons of AI
44:46 - Amy McGovern on using AI to help predict weather
52:21 - Amy McGovern on the future of AI and weather

Play

Geothermal: So Hot Right Now

Jenny Park — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 21:51:50 +0000

Geothermal: So Hot Right Now

02/23/2024

Searching for Solutions

When most people hear the phrase renewable energy, they imagine fields full of solar panels or giant spinning wind turbines. But another source is heating up: geothermal.

According to Amanda Kolker, Laboratory Program Manager for Geoscience and Geothermal Technologies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), geothermal energy has been used for a long time. “The first generation, the conventional kind of older technology, started in 1906,” she says.

Most forms of electricity generation require the turning of a turbine, often by using steam. Geothermal is no different. Traditional geothermal energy production, as Kolker explains, “requires drilling a well in a place where steam exists in the subsurface at relatively shallow depths, and then this steam is channeled to a turbine generator where it pushes a series of blades mounted on a rotor shaft. And then the force of that steam on the blades spins the rotor shaft to the generator, which in turn converts that energy into electrical energy.”

“Everywhere in the world, below the surface, geothermal exists. Everywhere. The question is only, how deep is it?” says Jamie Beard, founder of Project InnerSpace. In a bit of a twist, technological advances made by the oil and gas industry might have unlocked the ability to build scalable geothermal energy, just about anywhere. Kolker says, “We're actually in an exciting period because I think we're undergoing a new revolution in geothermal power technology.”

Because the technology used in these new geothermal systems originates in the oil and gas industry, it offers workers in the fossil fuel sector a way to work in the clean energy space without having to completely be retrained. “Everybody feels and sees a way that they can win in supporting geothermal climate groups, environmental groups, oil and gas groups. People see a path,” says Beard.

As with the other sources of clean energy, permitting is once again a hurdle to be overcome. “On federal land, you can develop an oil and gas project at lightning speed compared to geothermal. Geothermal projects can take 10 or more years to work through the permitting process on federal land, which kills projects,” says Beard. But geothermal power stations may be able to avoid the community pushback that goes on over solar farms and wind fields. Beard says, “These are not invasive projects; they're pretty cool once you have them installed. Would I have a 50 megawatt geothermal power plant on my property operating and connected to the grid? For sure.”

Generating electricity is not the only application people have been using the earth's heat for. Some use it directly for heating. In Boise, Idaho, geothermal heating has been used since the 1890s. Mayor Lauren McLean, says, “My office, like the entire city hall, is heated with geothermal heat. You've got all the pipes, it looks like a puzzle, with a whole bunch of hot water coming in and that hot water and those pumps heat the city hall building as well as just under a hundred buildings downtown.”

Guests

Amanda Kolker

Laboratory Program Manager for Geothermal Technologies, NREL

Jamie Beard

Founder, Project InnersSpace

Lauren McLean

Mayor of Boise

Project InnerSpace (projectinnerspace.org)

Geothermal in Boise, Idaho (cityofboise.org)

Biden puts $60M into three geothermal energy projects (thehill.com)

NREL: Geothermal Research (nrel.gov)

Geothermal is the hottest thing in clean energy. Here’s why. (canarymedia.com)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. When it comes to clean energy, solar and wind tend to dominate the headlines, but another source may be heating up.

Amanda Kolker: Right now we're actually in an exciting period because I think we're undergoing a new generation, a new revolution in geothermal power technology.

Greg Dalton: Geothermal. We used to think that you could only harness the earth’s heat in very particular places, but that turns out not to be the case.

Jamie Beard: Everywhere in the world, below the surface, geothermal exists. Everywhere. The question is only, how deep is it?

Greg Dalton: And the key to unlocking that clean power comes from a surprising place: the fossil fuel industry.

Jamie Beard: What we need to do is a lot of technology transfer, learning transfer, and workforce transfer from oil and gas into geothermal.

Greg Dalton: Geothermal Energy: The Heat Beneath Your Feet. Up next on Climate One.

I'm Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: I'm Arianna Brocious.

Greg Dalton: And this is Climate One.

Greg Dalton: When most people hear the phrase renewable energy, they imagine fields of solar panels or giant spinning wind turbines. But today we're talking about an often overlooked source of clean energy. It's underground: geothermal.

Ariana Brocious: So let's quickly start by unpacking what geothermal is.The word itself offers some big clues. Geo meaning earth and thermal meaning heat. So basically geothermal energy is derived from heat within the earth.

Greg Dalton: Right. Often in the form of steam. And if you go to a hot spring or see the geysers in Yellowstone, you can see it bubbling up right from the ground. In other cases, it's deep beneath the earth's subsurface.

Ariana Brocious: Later in the episode, we'll get into exactly how we turn that heat or steam into electricity and how some people are using it to heat homes and buildings. And I'll admit this was a new field for me and I found it fascinating, particularly to learn how long we've been using geothermal energy.

Greg Dalton: And pretty widely too, geothermal is a bigger deal than many people realize. In California, it generates around 5 percent of the state's electricity. But I thought of steam as old school technology, choo choo trains. As I learned researching this episode, the technology has advanced.

Ariana Brocious: Right, and one of the more surprising twists in the climate space is that a lot of the technological advances that have helped geothermal improve and innovate have come from the oil and gas sector and fracking. Which is a contentious form of energy extraction and also a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

Greg Dalton: Right, and it's also made the U. S. a leading energy exporter. It's complicated. Jamie Beard is founder of Project Innerspace. Her organization is trying to get people in the oil and gas industry to turn their knowledge and skills to geothermal.

She made a similar pivot herself almost two decades ago.

Jamie Beard: I was at a startup company, an MIT spinoff that was working on high temperature energy storage. And it turns out there's a lot of applications for that sort of thing, defense and space and all these cool things. And one of the applications was oil and gas drilling. And so I found myself suddenly, as a startup founder thrust into the world of oil and gas, and you know, I had been an environmentalist all my life, so that was a weird experience at first, but it was right at the beginning of the shale boom, when there were all sorts of really cool, innovative things happening in the field. And around that same time, there was a report published. And it also came out of MIT called the future of geothermal energy. And this report laid out a really big vision for what geothermal could be for the world, really big. Like, you know, it could solve all of our energy needs many thousands of times over, but it's you know, it's just a set of engineering challenges. And for me, it was this kind of eureka moment where you had me watching oil and gas in the field innovating through the shale boom, solving engineering challenges in real time, and then reading this report saying, wow, if we only knew how to solve really tough drilling challenges, we could solve energy. And it was just like, bam, I got to move to Texas.

Greg Dalton: Right,

Jamie Beard: So that’s how I got into geothermal.

Greg Dalton: That's interesting because you say you were an environmentalist. A lot of environmentalists hear about the shale boom as this terrible thing that made America the world's biggest oil supplier. And you're talking about it as this exciting technological innovation that related to this other cleaner energy source, geothermal that we're talking about today, that’s an interesting contrast.

Jamie Beard: Yeah, and you know, it wasn't, It did not happen overnight. This was a process for me psychologically, frankly, to make the jump, um, from oil and gas as villain to oil and gas as massive opportunity in terms of mitigating climate change.

Greg Dalton: And 15 years ago, the consensus among energy people I talked to was that geothermal works well, but it's kind of geographically limited to maybe 10 percent of places on land. How has your understanding of that changed where we can get geothermal?

Jamie Beard: Yeah, so this is the really cool part about geothermal. And I think this is what the world doesn't yet know, but really urgently needs to hear. So right now in, in the world, geothermal exists where it's really close to the surface. So most of the time, if you think about geothermal, you think about that hot spring you sat in on vacation, likely in Iceland or something, right? Something, something like that

Greg Dalton: or Old faithful. And Yellowstone. Yeah.

Jamie Beard: These, these dramatic surface manifestations of what we call geothermal energy, which by the way, is derived by this massive molten ball of energy in the center of the earth, right? And that happens to be the temperature of the surface of the sun. So it's a massive source of energy. And we see in some places in the world surface manifestations of that massive ball of energy. And those are erupting volcanoes and geysers and things, right? And so in the world right now, we have geothermal energy in places where it's literally bubbling up to the surface and we can see it there. But everywhere in the world, below the surface, geothermal exists. Everywhere. The question is only, how deep is it? You know, and in some places it's not very deep at all, it's really easy to get to, in other places it's deeper, but it's always there, everywhere in the world. And I think that is the opportunity that makes geothermal really promising and really massive, because that means that we don't need to go to the windiest places, we don't need to go to the sunniest places, we don't need to go to the places in the world where there's oil and gas, right? Geothermal can be produced. You could drill for and produce geothermal feasibly anywhere in the world where there's demand. So that means geothermal could be relevant near the biggest population centers in the world. And that's something that is totally overlooked, but massive opportunity in terms of growth and clean energy. And so the, you know, the way that I look at it, Greg, is like this. If you think of the way the world developed oil and gas over the last century, we didn't start with deep water oil and gas platforms offshore, right? We started with oil and gas laying on the ground in puddles, right? And, and someone walked up and said, look, there's oil and we burned it.

Greg Dalton: We've all seen that the Beverly Hillbillies bubbling up in the backyard. So,

Jamie Beard: And then the spindle top and the, you know, and all this. So this was, 100 year long process of realizing something was laying on the ground, drilling for it. And now we drill billion dollar ultra deep water, incredibly complex oil and gas wells.

Greg Dalton: So that gets to the question I have of costs, you saying geothermal power generation can be nearly anywhere. It's a matter of depth, which raises the question of, okay, deeper cost more.

Jamie Beard: Yeah, well that's true. And so if we go back to that analogy of it took us 100 years to get to offshore drilling, what does that mean for geothermal? Well, the way I look at it is this: Right now it's laying on the surface just like oil and gas was 100 years ago. And we're drilling for it in those places like in Iceland. But we don't have to reproduce the last hundred years of technology development that it'll take to drill for geothermal, even in deep places. What we need to do is a lot of technology transfer, learning transfer, and workforce transfer from oil and gas into geothermal. And therefore we can make technological leaps and save a whole lot of time developing those technologies.

Greg Dalton: We’ll hear the rest of my conversation with Jamie Beard later in the show. But I want to step back and talk through all the different ways to use the heat that’s naturally underground.

Ariana Brocious: I talked about this with Amanda Kolker of the National Renewable Energy Lab. She explained that there are two basic flavors of geothermal energy: It can be used directly to heat buildings. Or the heat can be used to make electricity.

Amanda Kolker: The first generation, the conventional kind of older technology, started in 1906. very mature technology, but it requires drilling a well in a place where steam exists in the subsurface at relatively shallow depths, and then this steam is channeled to a turbine generator where it pushes a series of blades mounted on a rotor shaft, and then the force of that steam on the blades spins the rotor shaft to the generator, which in turn converts that energy into electrical energy.

Ariana Brocious: This Is how we generate a lot of our electricity: Whether it’s a coal plant or a nuclear plant, for over a hundred years, we’ve used heat to boil water, to make steam, to turn turbines to make electricity. Traditional geothermal power works the same way, except it uses steam that’s already coming up out of the ground.

Amanda Kolker: And that was the first generation. That was in places where we had steam deep in the earth, which is not everywhere, right? So right now we're actually in an exciting period because I think we're undergoing a new revolution in geothermal power technology. Right now there's technologies that, rather than looking for hot water, hydrothermal resources underground, which aren't found everywhere, they're looking for just hot rocks. And in theory, that's everywhere in Earth's crust.

Ariana Brocious: And here’s where the technology gets a little more complex. Steam and water don’t exist everywhere underground. That’s what limited geothermal energy so far. But the earth is hot everywhere, if you go deep enough. So a newer form of geothermal injects water down hot rocks to produce the steam.

Amanda Kolker: So two technologies you might be hearing about that is part of this new generation are enhanced geothermal systems or otherwise known as EGS, and then closed loop geothermal systems. The way that enhanced geothermal systems work is, you're looking for hot rocks underground and you're engineering a man-made geothermal reservoir where there is none, creating one by injecting cold fluids into hot rock and heating them up through circulation in these engineered reservoirs. Closed loop geothermal doesn't actually require engineering underground reservoirs, but rather relies on a series of closed looped pipes that are drilled deep into the earth and that hot rock.

Ariana Brocious: That’s an important distinction. One criticism of geothermal has been how much water it uses. But closed loop systems could go a long way toward avoiding that downside because the water is used over and over.

Amanda Kolker: What's interesting is, this could revolutionize geothermal power and it could also revolutionize geothermal heat. A lot of times when you've invested in a geothermal well to bring up hot water to the surface, you send it around in a series of interconnected pipes. It's called district heating, and that's nothing new either. This is old technology. This is actually, there are systems that are still running today that have been around for over a century.

Ariana Brocious: This was news to me – I had no idea geothermal had been around that long, but later in the show, we’ll talk with the mayor of Boise, Idaho, which has used geothermal heat since the 1890s. Today they have nearly a hundred buildings all connected to one series of pipes that bring hot water from deep underground to heat the buildings. It’s called “district heating”. Amanda Kolker says there’s also innovations in that space.

Amanda Kolker: Now a lot of the modern district energy systems provide heating and cooling, and they use this ambient loop that allows very efficient heat exchange. And you can actually use different buildings as heat sources and heat sinks and get highly efficient, you know, zero emissions heating and cooling,

Ariana Brocious: It's really exciting. For example, let's say like you had a system of residential properties connected to a big office building or a university or something where you have all of our body heat concentrated in this building because there's so many people and then you could essentially trap that and then maybe distribute it to people's homes when they leave?

Amanda Kolker: Exactly, or say like a data center has tons of waste heat coming out and you can put that into the ambient system and then use it somewhere else where they have a heating requirement.

Ariana Brocious: And there’s at least one more way to take advantage of connecting buildings together with heating pipes: storing that heat for months.

Amanda Kolker: When you have a large field of pipes buried in the ground, you actually can use that earth medium, which is a fairly good insulator, as a storage device. So you can seasonally inject your heat, say in the summer, waste heat coming from your buildings or other sources, and store it in earth’s subsurface and then extract it in the winter.

Ariana Brocious: So if we have a district again, this is an interconnected network, and we're cooling a bunch of buildings in the summer. You're taking the heat and actually putting the heat underground in like a series of pipes? And it would stay hot? And then you would pull it back out and it would heat the buildings in the winter.

Amanda Kolker: Yeah. That's the idea. it depends what your subsurface looks like. But there are places where the heat is stored efficiently and effectively in subsurface media that can be used later.

Ariana Brocious: That’s so cool! Or warm, depending on the season. And this gets me thinking about another technology that’s already in use today: ground-source heat pumps – also called geothermal heat pumps.

Amanda Kolker: Geothermal heat pumps are really interesting. They allow both heat exchange at the individual building scale, but they can also be networked, and used at the district scale.

Ariana Brocious: So I have a heat pump in my house. I got one last year. And this is an air source heat pump. So as best I understand the way it works is it's like an air conditioner part of the time and then a reverse air conditioner. So it exchanges heat from inside my house to outside my house in the summer. And in the winter it does the opposite. It brings heat from outside into my house. So this is much more efficient and safer for my family than the gas furnace I had before. How does an air source heat pump work compared to a geothermal heat pump?

Amanda Kolker: Great question. In some ways are very similar. They both move heat from one place to another using electricity and refrigerants, right? So in heating mode, the heat pump works kind of like you said, like a refrigerator in reverse, where instead of cooling a space, it uses refrigerants to warm your home. The difference is, is that geothermal heat pumps, they are placed underground and therefore they can take advantage of constant underground temperatures because there's a constant 55 give or take temperature and earth subsurface, um, it can exchange that heat a little bit more efficiently than exchanging with outdoor temperatures, which might be, you know, substantially lower than what you're trying to heat your indoor spaces to or higher.

Ariana Brocious: Let's turn to some of the benefits as we move toward a fossil free future. Where do you think geothermal fits in this broader energy generation system?

Amanda Kolker: When it comes to all of the geothermal technologies, we have to understand that this is a reliable, baseload, always available resource. And so from the power perspective, what that means is geothermal power can provide reliable, you know, renewable power and provide that stability that's needed for our power grids. And then also provide resilience to communities with a source of heat or cooling that's always available 24/7. So that's one pro, you know, around energy security and resilience. In addition to those, all of the geothermal technologies have a very small surface footprint. Since most of the magic happens underground, this means they're fairly resilient to things like weather disruptions.

Ariana Brocious: That's a big pro in an increasingly climate disrupted world, right?

Amanda Kolker: Yes, Another benefit is the long lifespan. These power plants, there's many that have been going for a half century, some for longer than that. Same goes for direct heat,, also geothermal heat pumps tend to be long lived. So all, all of the flavors of geothermal technologies operate for a long time with high reliability, and then I would bring in two other benefits that we're currently looking into at the labs. And so, you know, because of all these benefits, whether it's the resilience or energy security benefits I talked about, grid stability, or community resilience, we think that geothermal technologies may be able to ensure a just energy transition.

Ariana Brocious: Well, this is really exciting. And thanks for sharing your expertise around geothermal technology and all the really interesting ways it can be deployed.

Amanda Kolker: Thank you.

Ariana Brocious: Amanda Kolker is Laboratory Program Manager for Geoscience and Geothermal Technologies at the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the heat beneath your feet. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods.

Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend.

Coming up, it seems nearly impossible to get people on the same page about climate solutions. But could geothermal be the exception?

Jamie Beard: Everybody feels and sees a way that they can win in supporting geothermal: climate groups, environmental groups, oil and gas groups, every right and left, dogs and cats, red and blue, whatever you want to call it. People see a path.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

In 1989, an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The collision tore the ship’s hull and 11 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the ocean. It devastated a vast area and the cleanup took years. Founder of Project Innerspace, Jamie Beard, says that environmental disaster made a huge impact on her.

Jamie Beard: I was a child during the Exxon Valdez, and that was my entry point into environmentalism. So, you know, oil soaked birds and oil and gas is going to burn kind of mentality when I was young. And, you know, I wanted to devote my career to putting an end to oil and gas and everything related to oil and gas. It's very easy to regard oil and gas as a monolith. And it's very easy to place an us and them mentality on it, right? What I've found in engaging with oil and gas, meaning the individuals that are working in these entities, right, is as soon as you get across the table from geophysicists who are really excited about making geothermal work, but they just so happen to work for the big bad guys, right? They're no longer villains. You can't even try to say villain because they're not. They're just people. They're people with a really awesome skill set that we need. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's hard, it's hard for me to even regard oil and gas as villainous anymore because now I'm engaging with hundreds of individuals, right? So it's,

Greg Dalton: Real people. Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Jamie Beard: with skills that we need. So I'm, I'm, I've, I've switched my mentality there to there is a massive opportunity and these folks can solve our problems in geothermal. So we need them, right?

Greg Dalton: It sounds like you're saying that geothermal could provide an off ramp for oil and gas individuals. How about at the company level?

Jamie Beard: So off ramp or opportunity, right? So it might even be an on ramp to a future of doing the same thing that they know how to do, which is searching for, drilling for, and producing a subsurface energy asset. But instead of hydrocarbons, It's heat, right? So it's like do everything you know how to do, everything you've built your career doing, everything your education supports, but for geothermal instead of oil and gas. So, right. It's, it's, it's, it's in my view on ramp into something that could be really, truly a massive opportunity in terms of global scale. And if you think about it. potentially bigger than oil and gas. Oil and gas is limited geographically too, just like geothermal is now. It's in very specific places in the world where oil and gas exists under the ground.Geothermal is everywhere, meaning that it's an opportunity that could be really massive.

Greg Dalton: At the UN climate conference in Dubai last year you announced a project you're doing in collaboration with Google called GeoMap, what is GeoMap and what's it gonna do?

Jamie Beard: There are some things that are holding geothermal back in terms of its ability to scale. And, you know, what, what I'm focused on at Project Innerspace is actually addressing those barriers, and we're trying to do that before the end of this decade. So we've, we've given ourselves an expiration date to achieve our mission. And the mission is to remove the major barriers that are standing in the way of exponential growth of geothermal. And one of the, one of the major barriers, and it's going to sound weird that we don't know this, um, in the world right now, but there is no single source, no global atlas or map of where geothermal exists in the world. So you can't, before GeoMap, you couldn't go to a website and click on a place in the world and see, you know, what the subsurface looked like with regard to the geothermal resource below. And because of that, there's not a very good understanding in the world right now. I mean, it's very exciting geothermal and all these new technologies. But a fundamental question is, well, where should we try to do this first? Like where's the low hanging fruit? Aside, aside from Iceland, where all the, you know, these are obvious places, but what about in places where it's not obvious, where we can't see it, where should we go first and where should we try different concepts first? That didn't exist. So Innerspace set out to try to build such a tool and make it freely accessible to the public and world. And we did build that partnership with Google to build GeoMap. So it's essentially the Google Earth for geothermal. So you can go to the, go to the, go to GeoMap, press on a place in the world. Not only does it show you geothermal resources below the surface, but it also shows you what's on the surface, right? Which matters because we don't want to be in protected areas. We do want to be near population centers and transmission lines. You know, there's a lot of ways that the subsurface resource and, and what's happening on the surface are really related in terms of geothermal prospecting. So GeoMAP tries to solve for that barrier in geothermal.

Greg Dalton: And you know, this is something that came up recently. Someone said why isn't there a you know, Google Map overlay for like indigenous lands? Does GeoMap take into consideration you because Indigenous people have been trampled on for so long with oil and gas and it's like, Oh, here's another way that you're going to come after our land to take something. Does that exist in GeoMap?

Jamie Beard: Yes. So GeoMap is rolling out continent by continent. We just announced Africa at COP28. The United States rolls out later on this year, and one of the surface layers in the United States, um, of course, protected areas, national parks, but also indigenous lands. So yes, that's that's something that's part of the of the surface package.

Greg Dalton: Good to hear. You mentioned about the scale of large oil and gas wells and how that could be replicated in geothermal. Yet small modular geothermal plants also seem really intriguing as a distributed power source. That's part of what happened in the shale revolution. You talked about poking, lots of um, sort of fast wells, small quickly, you know, how promising are these modular designs?

Jamie Beard: There's a controversy now in geothermal about who's going to win. Is it going to be micro grids? So, a regional or, or town based or even military based geothermal power plant that serves a micro grid that is not connected with the proper grid, um, in, in the location, also for critical infrastructure, like data centers and hospitals. So a geothermal power plant to serve those needs and those needs only that's not connected to the grid. I love the idea. And I think geothermal is a really great contender for those types of applications. They also, and this is really helpful for geothermal, at least in the early days when you're doing first of a kind concepts that tend to be more expensive than a proven and optimized system, critical infrastructure, data centers that really benefit from baseload energy sources, but also that are run by companies who have made massive carbon neutrality commitments. So you have to have clean baseload – and military bases. So if you think about national security, these entities will pay a premium to have clean, firm power. And so it very well may be that geothermals, you know, niche opportunity over the first five or 10 years of development are these types of applications.

Greg Dalton: So what I heard there is that, you know, we know that sun shines during the day, wind often blows at night. And there's sort of this intermittency that's talked about with wind and solar. You're saying that, that geothermal could be steady and reliable, sometimes called baseload. But how do you compare the environmental pros and cons?

Jamie Beard: This is one of geothermal's really strong points, in my view. We're talking about very, very low carbon emissions, you know, 99. 9 percent carbon-free emissions from hydrothermal plants.

Greg Dalton: But aren't there water and land impacts if you're, you're poking holes all over the place, there's, there's going to be the surface impact of all these wells.

Jamie Beard: yeah, any, any energy source, hard stop, even, even renewables like solar and wind have, have a surface footprint and, and geothermal if it goes head to head with solar and wind, you're talking about. between 1 percent and 10 percent of the surface footprint, depending on the size of the plant, the type of plant, megawatt for megawatt, compared to solar and wind. I will say, though, water is a good one to bring up, and I think that's really important, and it's part of the reason why geothermal has kind of progressed into this next generation stage of concepts and technologies. Many of these technologies are aimed at actually reducing geothermal's consumption of water. So, as geothermal exists today in the world, hydrothermal, they are producing water from, from under the ground that is there naturally and making energy out of it. And a lot of hydrothermal plants re-inject that water, so they put it back into the aquifer, but it's not perfect and you can't get it all back. So there is a decline over time in the amount of water in the aquifer. And some geothermal plants don't put it back at all. So they, they put it in pools on the surface. If you think of Iceland's Blue Lagoon, that's a geothermal power plant, and the water that's in the Blue Lagoon is actually the effluent from the power plant. So it's the water they've already, they've made, they've made electricity with it, and they flow the water into the Blue Lagoon, and you sit in it with, with your glass of wine. So that's an example of not re-injected water. Right? But if you think there, there are places in the world that are very wet in the subsurface, Iceland is one of them. They have no shortage of aquifers, but there are places in the world that do. And if we start looking at, you know, 2050 fresh water demands on the world and we think of population density, we need to be very careful about using subsurface fresh water for energy production. And so that's why, um, you know, many of the next generation geothermal concepts, and like the closed loop systems, for instance, that Amanda mentioned are, are considering using not only water in a closed loop, so you're not losing any of it, you're recycling it fully, but some concepts aren't even using water. So they're using engineered working fluids that are not water based. Think supercritical CO2 as a working fluid, which is super cool. So replacing the water use entirely with something else and just producing the heat without the water.

Greg Dalton: I don't know what supercritical CO2 is, but if you think it's cool, I'll take it. You're a founder and executive director of Project Innerspace, which funds disruptive research and collaborations that aim to jumpstart the growth of next generation geothermal energy as we've been talking about. I would think that a high tech venture like next generation geothermal energy, particularly with the potential you've mentioned, would be attractive to venture capitalists, yet you've chosen to pursue philanthropic funding instead. Why?

Jamie Beard: Yeah. Um, well, there don't get me started on this one, Greg. But there's a, there's a lot of unfamiliarity with geothermal and the venture capital community. Early in the days of getting some startups spun out of oil country, um, led by oil and gas veterans who are now leading geothermal startups. I sat in on quite a few pitches. It's not like we didn't try. We tried, so some, some pitches to VC firms in Silicon Valley. And I, you know, I'll say the culture clash between those two, um, parts of the world, so the buttoned up, suited, oil and gas veteran, um, pitching to the hoodie wearing, uh, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, these were probably the most cringe worthy meetings I've ever, you know, I, I'm saying this laughing now, but it, they were really, really uncomfortable. I mean, there's just a, there was a clear mismatch in

Greg Dalton: I'm seeing episodes of the satire documentary Silicon Valley coming into my mind. Yeah.

Jamie Beard: I mean, it's funny thinking back on it, but it's really not funny at all, because what we're getting at there is bias and polarization. Coming from both sides, but what that meant is very few deals. It means almost no deals for venture capital. There are other reasons venture capital has declined to engage so far: very capital intensive projects, the risk profile isn't quite right. I mean, there are some issues and there's a valley of death. Which brings, which brings me to why a non profit then. And that's because there are enormous pools of capital in the world that are philanthropic that are increasingly looking at climate as a way to invest funding and they don't have the adversity to risk as much as venture capital. They don't expect 20 plus percent returns like venture capital and it's very well positioned to take on these big vision problems like, wow, we could solve energy and climate if we could just do these couple of really, really hard, potentially high risk things, right? So, GeoMap, for instance, the global atlas of geothermal resources. This is a community asset and community assets are actually quite hard to fund with a for profit motive. They benefit everybody, but they're expensive. Nobody really wants to pay to do it. And, you know, so there are

Greg Dalton: As someone who gives away a podcast for free, I can relate to that. Yeah, creating public goods that people, yeah, yeah. And so,

Jamie Beard: And that's not really the VC thing, right? It's not the, that's not the flavor.

Greg Dalton: because they don't, yeah, they don't capture the returns of their investment. So speaking of these cultural classes between Silicon Valley, you know, investors and the oil and gas industry, Palo Alto and Houston. Um, another dimension to that. is, is gender. LinkedIn recently released a report on the gender gap in renewable energy. Women are underrepresented in green jobs and skills underrepresented at the conference of parties. I'm curious as a female founder in a male-dominated field of energy, how has that experience been for you?

Jamie Beard: This comes up all the time. Every, in every, almost every conflict or tension that has come up over the past years, there has been some layer of insidious bias there, right? And some of it is not outward, but you know it when you feel it, and you know it when you see it, and it might be disguised as something else, but you know it, right? And so it's very real. The funny thing is, for geothermal, it's a really interesting development. There are many female founders and leaders in geothermal. There are many female CEOs of geothermal startups. And, I would say some of the most bold leaders in the space are women, and you're right that we are attempting to engage with a male-dominated industry. And navigating that is not entirely straightforward. But it's something that is, is, is happening and it's working. It just requires patience and, uh, a focus on the bigger vision, I think.

Greg Dalton: You were involved in a bipartisan legislation passed in Texas, and I want to say that again, bipartisan legislation passed in Texas, to support geothermal energy. That happened in a session that you say was hard on renewables. So what is it about geothermal that it hasn't been dragged into the culture conflicts as wind and solar have?

Jamie Beard: All right, so this, this is the amazing thing about geothermal, and I'm glad you brought that up. So Interspace published a report called The Future of Geothermal in Texas, and it was, you know, a collaboration of, of many research institutions and, and oil and gas entities and scientists to talk about what it would look like if oil and gas engaged at scale in the opportunity of geothermal. And it was written by Texans for Texans, right, which is important when you're thinking about engaging with oil and gas and being bipartisan in the state of Texas. Now, that report served as the foundation for the launch of an alliance, an advocacy group called the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance, that then went and built a legislative agenda in support of geothermal in the last Texas legislative session. And that entity is supported and funded by all types of entities. I mean, oil and gas, but also utilities, and with the support of environmental groups. That in itself was amazing and interesting. But yes, the outcome in Texas in the first try, so this is the first legislative session after the report was published. And in the first year of existence of this Geothermal Alliance in Texas, we saw all of the efforts that were being pursued by the alliance passed in the state of Texas with bipartisan support in a legislative session where solar and wind were targets, and they they lost legislative support in the state of Texas, geothermal advanced. Why is that? It's because it's everybody feels and sees a way that they can win in supporting geothermal and everybody meaning everybody, right? So climate groups, environmental groups, oil and gas groups, every right and left, dogs and cats, red and blue, whatever you want to call it. People, people see a path.

Greg Dalton: So what policy and regulatory strategies have you seen that work best to incentivize new geothermal development?

Jamie Beard: We need to do a lot on this topic. So, geothermal is very far behind in terms of incentives and regulatory support. And, and this is federally, but also in the states,

Greg Dalton: kind of the poor, the poor stepchild, it seems. Yeah.

Jamie Beard: For sure. Um, completely neglected stepchild of renewables. Um, now that, that, um, is changing slowly, and it's changing faster in the states, so it's why Innerspace is focused on states, and we're in particular focused on states with robust oil and gas industries, like Texas, but also Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. And others, And it's because it's very easy to get traction for incentives and support and supportive regulatory environments in states. On the federal side, there have been decades of efforts to try to come to an agreement about how to support better support incentivize geothermal, and that's a really complicated and slow issue that has not advanced terribly quickly. But we need to be doing all kinds of things in the United States. both on the state and federal level, in terms of, you know, subsidy, yes, but I just mean removing red tape to make sure that we're able to develop projects as quickly as we can develop, say, oil and gas. So this is a, here's a, here's a factoid for you: On federal land, you can develop an oil and gas project at lightning speed compared to geothermal. Geothermal projects can take, you know, 10 or more years to work through the permitting process on federal land, which kills projects.

Greg Dalton: Would you, would you have one in your backyard? Or drill.

Jamie Beard: Sure. Yes, absolutely. I can't, I could not be in my job without being able to say that with certainty. When it comes to the everyday person's engagement with geothermal, it would probably be through a heating and cooling system for your home, with a ground-source heat pump. These are the types of engagements that, like, folks in your neighborhood might have with geothermal. And these are not invasive projects; they're pretty cool once you have them installed. And, you know, wholeheartedly, yes. Would I have a 50 megawatt geothermal power plant on my property operating and connected to the grid, Greg, for sure. If I had the ability to have that, yes. Because geothermal is quiet and small and a huge benefit to community. So if I had the opportunity to do that, you have me on the record saying I would. Any geothermal developers out there who want to plop one down right here in Massachusetts, you can, you can borrow my, you can borrow my place.

Greg Dalton: Jamie Beard, founder of Project Innerspace, thanks for sharing your passion for geothermal.

Jamie Beard: Thanks, Greg.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about an often overlooked source of clean energy: Geothermal. Next, geothermal is heating up in Boise, Idaho.

Lauren McLean: We we rely on geothermal heat that's deep, deep, deep into the earth.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

I used to think that geothermal technology was something that could only be deployed in a couple sites around the world – remote places like Iceland or The Geysers in California. But as we heard from Jamie Beard earlier in the show, geothermal energy is everywhere in the world – if you just go deep enough. The question then is: how do we tap into it? To find out, reporter David Condosbtakes us to a research project in western Utah.

David Condos: There's a new hotspot in the world of geothermal energy, a seemingly sleepy valley in Beaver County, Utah. Its secret: It sits on bedrock that reaches temperatures up to four hundred and sixty five degrees.

Joseph Moore: So if you think about ovens and turkeys, you can cook a turkey in that well if you wanted one.

David Condos: Site manager Joseph Moore points across a dirt parking lot to a well at the Utah Forge Project. It's the University of Utah's subterranean lab. The mission here is to test geothermal technology through trial and error, paving the way for other projects that could someday power your home or office without greenhouse gas emissions.

Joseph Moore: This is the best site in the country. There are hundreds and hundreds of square miles of area that could be made into a reservoir.

David Condos: Geothermal has been around for decades, but it's generally been limited to places that naturally have hot water below the surface. Think a geyser or hot springs. So these researchers are here to answer a big question. Can you pipe cool water through cracks in underground rock? And heated enough to create a geothermal plant almost anywhere? That’s called enhanced geothermal. And American researchers have been trying to make it work for five decades. High up on the site's drill rig, a team of workers screw together pipes taller than a two story house. Giant pieces of metal swing into place suspended from wires. Twist. Lock, then plunge underground.

John McLennan: Pull the slips, and now he'll

David Condos: John McLennan, the project's technical lead, watches it all through a window while monitoring readings on a computer screen.

John McLennan: So we've drilled to just under 11,000 feet in depth.

David Condos: Six years after drilling began, his team recently completed a major milestone. They proved for the first time they can, in fact, pump water from one well through underground cracks to a second well. Now, this type of geothermal system does require quite a bit of water, which may set off alarm bells in the parched West Utah desert. But there are two big reasons why McClennan says it still works. One, it draws from aquifers where the water quality is too low to use for drinking. And two, it's a closed loop system. So the same water keeps recycling through over and over, cooling, heating, and becoming steam that turns turbines. But remember, this is a research lab. So it's more guinea pig than power plant.

John McLennan: What we're doing here, we are not producing electricity, we are developing the technology so that the private sector can adopt this methodology.

David Condos: One of the private companies building on the FORGE project's research is Fervo Energy. It recently hit a milestone of its own, generating power for the first time at its geothermal pilot plant in Nevada. Fervo government affairs and policy manager Ben Serrurier says these recent breakthroughs are proving it’s possible to drill deeper and more efficiently than before.

Ben Serrurier: There is no longer that technology question. We answered that question. Can you reach temperatures to produce electricity, in our case 375 degrees Fahrenheit? Yes. Can you produce flow rates over 60 liters a second that are required to produce electricity? Yes.

David Condos: And Fervo has already broken ground on its next geothermal project, right here in Beaver County. But even as the technology catches up, there are still more hurdles before geothermal power becomes a bigger part of the country’s energy mix. One is easing the regulations around building geothermal projects, says Jeremy Harrell. He's chief strategy officer for ClearPath, a DC-based research and advocacy group focused on clean energy. Harrell says it's often harder to get permits to drill for underground heat than it is to drill for oil or gas. In a climate crisis, he says that's not going to cut it.

Jeremy Harrell: Our regulatory structure in this country was created in the 70s when climate was an urgent problem, right? And so now we need a different structure in place.

David Condos: Geothermal can have some environmental impacts, from habitat loss to an increased risk of earthquakes. But Harrell says geothermal's impacts pale in comparison to those from fossil fuels.

Jeremy Harrell: Everything has trade offs, right? Like, you're not going to have zero environmental impact on building anything. And so we need to look for the forest over the trees, right? Like, climate is a central challenge ahead.

David Condos: The Department of Energy's long-term goal is to multiply domestic geothermal capacity nearly twenty-five fold by 2050. But Harrell says if regulators don't speed up the permitting process, the U.S. will have a hard time tapping into geothermal's potential fast enough to curb global warming. For Climate One, I'm David Condos in Beaver County, Utah.

Ariana Brocious: This story was originally produced by KUER Public Radio. Thanks to David and the team there for sharing it with us.

Now let’s travel from Beaver County Utah, 500 miles north to Boise, Idaho where geothermal heating has been used for quite a long time.

Lauren McLean: I get so excited when I talk about our system because in Boise itself, we have the sixth largest geothermal system in the world and the largest geothermal system in the United States.

Ariana Brocious: That’s Lauren McLean, mayor of Boise.

Lauren McLean: But in addition to ours, the state of Idaho has one, our state capital, it's a gorgeous building is heated with geothermal heat. The Veterans Administration campus. that's near downtown has their own system. We have a neighborhood that has a system that was started by the folks that built the houses there over 100 years ago.

And we rely on geothermal heat that's deep, deep, deep into the earth. It comes up and it heats, it heats our buildings.

Ariana Brocious: So, how do you get heat in your office?

Lauren McLean: My office, like the entire city hall is heated with geothermal heat. on the kind of basement floor of city hall. You've got all the pipes. It looks like a puzzle. With a whole bunch of hot water coming in and that hot water and those pumps heat the city hall building as well as,just under a hundred buildings downtown.

Ariana Brocious: So, what's the potential to expand the amount of geothermal heating within Boise?

Lauren McLean: Yes, we look often at how we can expand this because in our own climate action plans, where we seek to be a carbon neutral municipal government by 2035, and a carbon neutral city by 2050, we're going to rely on that. And so we look for opportunities to expand the system, which we've done. We've expanded our system over the years across the river to Boise State University. They have some buildings now that are heated with geothermal clean heat. And we've expanded it to other districts downtown to do the same. It depends on water rights too. So we're innovating in that we're, we pull the hot water up, it heats a building, we inject it back in slightly cooler and we can pull it up again. And so we've innovated around reuse of the water. And, but we're always looking for additional water rights to be able to give us more opportunities to expand the system even further into the future.

Ariana Brocious: So what do you hear from constituents about their concerns around pollution, carbon pollution, and climate?

Lauren McLean: Boiseans have been loud and clear. in terms of their expectations that we lead when it comes to climate action.

Ariana Brocious: So you're mayor, an environmentally focused mayor in Boise, in the capital of a fairly red state. How do you sort of place yourself within that wider context

Lauren McLean: I often get that question from folks that are, you know, from other places. You know, how does this translate across political boundaries and politics, but in Idaho, it crosses in many ways so easily because we are tied to the land, to open space, to nature in ways that I, that I believe in the West are unique. And so whether you live in Stanley, Idaho or Sandpoint, Idaho or Boise, Idaho, you value clean water. You value access to public lands and open space. You want the same for your kids and grandkids. And you're seeing it change with our days getting hotter and skies getting smokier. And know that action needs to be taken. And so Boiseans, you know, look to me and want, want me and the city council and the folks that they elect to lead.

Ariana Brocious: As we wrap up, based on Boise's experience, what advice do you have for mayors of cities that don't have this geothermal legacy Boise has?

Lauren McLean: All of us as mayors have to look at the tools in the toolbox that we have, um, and figure out how to meet the shared goals that so many cities have now, which is being carbon neutral by 2050 because we must, we know we must, I find it super fascinating to see how mayors and other towns that don't have these systems are looking at how they can tap into geothermal anyway, building by building, using heat pumps to use geothermal in a different way than we do, but to still cool or heat their buildings into the future. And I just encourage all of us to work together to expand the opportunity to take advantage of the natural systems that exist in the country while also working together to do as much research and development for solutions that'll work in cities that don't have the systems as well, because ultimately, while ours is unique, it will help our state and our country meet carbon neutral goals as we continue to rely on it.

Ariana Brocious: Lauren McLean is mayor of Boise. Thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Lauren McLean: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about geothermal energy.

Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency.

Ariana Brocious: Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Ariana Brocious is co-host, editor and producer. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Jenny Lawton is Consulting Producer. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy and Philip Yun are co-CEOs of The Commonwealth Club World Affairs, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

1:52 - Jamie Beard on her journey to geothermal energy

4:27 - Jamie Beard on what makes geothermal cool

8:41 - Amanda Kolker on how geothermal energy works

14:08 - Amanda Kolker on geothermal heat pumps

18:38 - Jamie Beard on what made her an environmentalist

27:12 - Jamie Beard on the surface impact of geothermal wells

41:38 - David Condos reports on geothermal energy testing in Utah

47:01 - Lauren McLean on geothermal heating in Boise, Idaho

Play

Farm to Table 2.0: Chefs Cutting Carbon

Otto Pilot — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 16:04:05 +0000

Farm to Table 2.0: Chefs Cutting Carbon

08/24/2018

Can a menu at a fancy restaurant be a map for solving the climate challenge? A handful of high-end chefs are using their restaurants to show how innovative grazing and growing practices can cut carbon pollution. Anthony Myint, co-owner of The Perennial, asks “What would it look like if you had ... environmentalism right up there with deliciousness, as your top priorities?” Dominique Crenn, a two Michelin star chef, pushes to move beyond the restaurateurs who she says only pay lip service to responsibly sourcing their food. Theirs is an uncompromising approach to cutting carbon while maintaining the best of the best.

Guests

Gwyneth Borden

Executive Director, Golden Gate Restaurant Association

Dominique Crenn

Chef and Owner, Atelier Crenn

Anthony Myint

Executive Director, Zero Foodprint

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

Farm to Table is a movement in sustainable restaurants to promote food that’s local, seasonal, fresh, and nutritious.

Gwyneth Borden: Part of being sustainable is having a very limited menu where you can use things across the menu and also manage how much you need to buy on a regular basis so that you don't have food waste.

Announcer: Because chefs want us to know the carbon foodprint of our menu choices.

Dominique Crenn: I wanna do things that I believe that’s right for my customers, for the climate. Whatever I choose I wanna do the right thing.

Announcer: So what’s the next frontier in restaurant sustainability?

Anthony Myint: It's basically like renewable energy many years ago. There are now ways of producing food that can save the planet, how fast can we adopt them, how fast can we usher in Farm to Table 2.0.

Announcer: Chefs Cutting Carbon. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: Could a menu at a fancy restaurant be a map for solving the climate challenge? Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

I’m Devon Strolovitch. A handful of prominent chefs are using their high-end restaurants to show how innovative grazing and growing practices can cut carbon pollution -- and create unique dining experiences.

Dominique Crenn: I have three restaurants I’m not trying to make something that look like a steak-frites. It’s like I have something else to offer you.

Dominique Crenn is Chef and Owner of Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, which received two coveted Michelin stars. She's won numerous other awards and was featured on the Chef’s Table documentary series on Netflix. Crenn was on the ground floor of the farm to table movement, which emphasized food that’s local, seasonal, fresh, and nutritious.

Anthony Myint: Farm to table 2.0 should incorporate all the best things of that but I think it really needs to be focused on healthy soil as the world's most practical climate solution

Anthony Myint is Executive Chef and Co-owner of The Perennial. He’s also a partner in Mission Chinese Food and Commonwealth, a Michelin starred restaurant. In working toward restaurant sustainability, Myint has made environmentalism and deliciousness his top priorities.
Gwyneth Borden: Everyone is trying to move in the direction where their food is better for us, right. And in the process of doing that they'll make the environment better as well.

Gwyneth Borden is Executive Director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. She previously worked in corporate affairs for IBM and also served on the staffs of Gavin Newsom and Barbara Boxer. Let’s listen as all three join host Greg Dalton for a Climate One conversation about restaurants reducing their carbon foodprint.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, you went to a Michelin starred restaurant when you're nine years old. Tell us about your early relationship with food growing up.

Dominique Crenn: Well, obviously I was born and raised in France.

Greg Dalton: Brittany.

Dominique Crenn: Yes. I mean, outside, yes. And food is a part of the culture in France. So food is something that you take very seriously. And my father and my mother come from farmers and which kind of opened my eyes about nature and the world and obviously the planet. And I mean, it was kind of natural to go to Michelin star restaurants, you know. I don’t know, now it’s pretty amazing. I remember I did order I think five desserts because I was kind of taking a bite. But, yeah.

Greg Dalton: So came organically to you. You grew up around it. Gwyneth Borden, when you are growing up meat, starch and vegetable were kind of the thing for you and a lot of others.

Gwyneth Borden: No, that was the thinking. But my grandparents are farmers and my dad was one of nine sons, grew up in the Eastern shore of Maryland. So I grew up and I chose to spend time with my grandparents. My earliest memories of my grandfather until the day before he died he was on his tractor. And as a small child, if you said you're bored, you're picking strawberries. I learned early on about the importance of food and what it meant. I really very much associated with my grandmother being a great cook. I also associated with my uncle who was a hunter. We had a whole second freezer in our house with everything that my uncle ever shot. And I tell you that I ate all kinds of things that I don't like, like muskrat, what is even a muskrat, growing up. But if my uncle shot it, we ate it. So I grew up with that and my parents have a little garden in our suburban backyard. And for a very early age the association of the earth and animals and food was very dear to my heart. I mean I grew up eating grapes in the grapevine in my grandparents’ backyard and wondering why I could never find those grapes in grocery stores. Well, they’re actually one grapes but I didn’t know that at that time. To this day, I still can’t eat grapes.

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint, how about your earliest memories in relationship to food. There’s that connection with childhood and favorite foods. What were some of yours?

Anthony Myint: I grew up watching a lot of cooking shows with my grandmother and I feel like in the suburbs I wasn't really thinking about food politics and the food system at a young age, obviously. And then, you know, as I got older, recently we had a daughter started thinking more about food and climate change, and really wanting to use our platform in the food industry to make change. And as we kind of have gone down this path of learning about the potential for soil to really make a big difference and radically reverse climate change. What has struck me the most is just how optimistic it is and how vast the potential is.

Greg Dalton: And so farm to table has been well-established people know what that is. What’s the next step, Anthony Myint, what’s beyond farm to table, where’s the leading edge right now of that movement?

Anthony Myint: Well, farm to table 1.0 if we can call it that. It's about fresh and local and nutritious and healthy. It’s kind of like know the farmer it's a little bit quaint, I would almost say, pastoral. Farm to table 2.0 should incorporate all the best things of that but I think it really needs to be focused on healthy soil as the world's most practical climate solution. The problem is beef in feedlots that are being fed antibiotics and making the manure not usable. There's millions of acres of rangeland it's not really land that suitable for growing tomatoes and soy beans and stuff. The absolute best use from a food production standpoint is beef. And if beef can restore that land just like planting trees we have a real potential to save the world through how we eat and the choices we make.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, you don't serve beef in your restaurants. You have a different view of the cattle industry.

Dominique Crenn: Well I think that it was very conscious. The beef industry in United States is, I don’t know if it’s beef first of all. I mean, seriously, but it’s kind of destroying, you know, a lot of things. I remember when I read this article and that kind of clicked in my head when I read this article about this company that went to the Amazon and cut down the trees just to put livestock of beef there because people were in demand of hamburger meat. That really like, I was just like, are you serious, are you crazy? It’s just this greediness about consumption it’s killing humanity, it’s killing, you know. So I made a conscious decision until we fix that problem, I’m gonna do the things -- I wanna do things that I believe that’s right for earth first of all, for my customers, for the environment, for the climate whatever I choose. I wanna do the right thing. So beef will not be on my menu.

Greg Dalton: Being carbon neutral can be a challenge in small towns. Take for example Traverse City in Northern Michigan. The husband-and-wife team of Eric and Amy Kolden opened White on Rice sushi truck in 2015. A year later they opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant and they're slowly working their way towards making White on Rice carbon neutral.

Eric Kolden: We definitely like to let people know that we do the compost thing and that we’re really trying to be aware of our carbon footprint. So, you know, obviously chopsticks are made of wood but then we have wood boats that we use soy sauce cups, ramekins, our soup cups.

Amy Kolden: That’s a priority that we do use products that are compostable. The big thing to me that I noticed and after working in other kitchens is the food waste and the food scraps like that’s huge.

Eric Kolden: And that kind of breeds into the food a little bit so now we’re using organic, free range chickens. We’re using tuna that’s trucked in versus flown in. I do have troubles because how can you get asparagus in northern Michigan 12 months out of the year. I still have to have a vegetable roll-on every day and it happens to have asparagus in it. Like that's a horrible excuse like what else could I pick? What else could I pick? But it’s been on my menu for like five years and I got people that want that more than anything. Like people will yell at my wife because I don't have asparagus that day.

Amy Kolden: I feel like we’re very small but I think if everybody could just take little steps like this make more mindful choices, it can make a big impact.

Eric Kolden: I don't know what carbon neutral even looks like. I don't even know what carbon free if that’s a thing you can achieve. I know that we have to use trucks to get stuff here. I just have to chip away at it. There is no real end in sight because the more you see, the more you see, you see how much more you can do and how much people don't do. There’s a lot of small places just trying to exist.

Greg Dalton: That’s Eric and Amy Kolden of White on Rice in Traverse City, Michigan. Gwyneth Borden, a lot of in there, you know, overwhelming so many things trying to get the right supplies the right food small business just trying to keep it going. Tell us about that. Whether this is really an elite thing for sort of high-end or well-endowed, well-capitalized restaurants. How can a little person deal with all this complexity and be green?

Gwyneth Borden: Oh I think, you know, locally, people really make a concerted effort to get to know, you know, what the water quality is, will I get my fish from there how do I use vegetables that maybe aren’t sexy. You think about some of the root vegetables how do I incorporate root vegetables that may be less expensive for me to purchase in my food. How can I use the tops of my carrots or other parts of the entire vegetable not throwing it away maybe I’m using the skin. So people are being really creative and looking at the issue of food waste specifically, how can they take tonight's dinner and repurpose that for tomorrow's lunch to make sandwiches. How can they take an animal and do nose to tail use the entire animal and then make stocks and things from the bones. When people are being very creative in the ways that they can to make a big difference. I mean people here very much care about the quality of our food and the quality of food depends on our soil and our environment. I think we're lucky in the Bay Area that people have an understanding in that matter. Is it more expensive and hard? Are organics more expensive, absolutely they are. And people make incremental choices. Some people choose to buy organics in areas where it does make a big difference in taste and in terms of like where we know toxins are greatest and then on other areas they don't. But as restaurants sort to scale especially if they have more than one location they’re in a better position with producers to negotiate better rates or sometimes they can go on with another restaurant to kind of get better rates. But people are, you know, really making an effort, I’m not saying it's easy sometimes again when you don't have scale to buy products, you know, compostable products whatever it might be. It can be very difficult and that's why mandates are not, you know, really preferred in the space but I understand why people feel like they’re necessary.

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint, tell us about what you try to do to create sort of a full circle economy where there's worms that create poop that’s food for the fish that then -- tell us about that trying to create a full circle at a restaurant.

Anthony Myint: Sure. We started working on the restaurant, The Perennial, to kind of explore sustainability in a restaurant. What would it look like if you had, you know, kind of environmentalism right up there with deliciousness, as your top priorities. And, you know, we started with an interest in food waste conservation all these things. Pretty quickly we learned that stuff is important, but our biggest potential is to move the industry towards ways to improve actually producing food, carbon farming, regenerative agriculture and all these ways of growing food that actually reverse climate change. Waste reduction these things it's kind of like working at the margins a little bit it's not even like an elephant in the room like mismanagement of land and soil. It's the whole room. The whole room is on top of the elephant. So like if we had to think about just quickly as a thought experiment, what percent of food in the world is grown with healthy soil. I think it would be less than 5%.

Greg Dalton: About 5% of American cropland is organic just for the sense of scale, is that right?

Anthony Myint: Something like 4-5%. And then a lot of that organic land is kind of like industrial organic where they plow the land and spray it with approved chemicals. They’re not necessarily farming with nature. And so I think the biggest shift that we all need to embrace is how can we farm with nature. How can we get as much money to improve as much land as possible. And so what these guys were doing in Traverse, you know, they really speak towards like the challenges of the small guy. And so the exciting thing for me is that carbon neutral represents a framework where at Mission Chinese $.10 per diner is going to make the restaurant carbon neutral. It's not only for Atelier Crenn it's for anybody it's for Shake Shack, it’s for Panera, you know. And those couple cents can be going towards farming practices that reverse climate change.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the new Farm to Table – Chefs Cutting Carbon. Coming up, Greg Dalton learns more about the challenges of running a restaurant sustainably.

Dominique Crenn: I try to educate the people that are working with me in my restaurant but I’m also trying to educate my guests without throwing things in their face, but it’s obvious that there are things that we do that other restaurants do not agree with.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about restaurants reducing their carbon foodprint with Gwyneth Borden, Executive Director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. Dominique Crenn, Chef and Owner of Atelier Crenn. And Anthony Myint, Executive Chef and Co-owner of The Perennial. Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden, a lot of restaurants around the country these days claim to be sustainable. They have sustainable this and sustainable that. What is sustainable first of all, how do you define that?

Gwyneth Borden: I mean I think that’s -- what is sustainable is that local farms they’re close by, is it that you have bamboo tables. I mean the word sustainable is a very broad word and it means a lot of different things to a lot of people. I think that, you know, yes, there are some people who say fresh it's sort of like natural fresh but doesn't mean organic, right. There are words that people use that may sound better. They could say the chicken is free range but that doesn’t necessarily mean the chicken is organic. It’s just sort of decoding what those things mean, you know, having a label of organic is a very specific designation. I think if you see a menu that has a lot of things on it you can pretty much guess that it’s not a sustainable restaurant, right. I mean part of being sustainable is having a very limited menu where you can use things across the menu and also manage how much you need to buy on a regular basis so that you don't have food waste. So if you see a place with a large menu they're probably not very sustainable. And that's why I think you see more and more trends of prix fixe even places that want you to pay in advance. The advantage of that is that they can minimize food waste. They can buy exactly the amount of food that they know they need and make the exact number of dishes and that's a wonderful thing. And I know consumers aren’t necessarily used to that, but I think, you know, consumers need to really embrace this notion of I don’t wanna go in a restaurant that offers me everything I could possibly eat. I wanna go in a restaurant that has a very focused menu that's very fresh of what’s seasonal that’s the other thing, if they’re offering you something if they’re offering you mangoes in December and they’re in Des Moines that's clearly not sustainable, right. So it might be healthy and great to have mangoes but that’s not sustainable. I mean so there's some things that are kind of obvious, seasonality, length of the menu but then there’s choices that consumers have to make in terms of really supporting those places that are trying to move you in that direction.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, you’re known for seafood at your restaurants. How do you feel about farmed seafood? Some people would say that that's better, that’s the future, aquaculture. What’s your view on, you’ve studied the ocean very carefully, what’s your view on aquaculture?

Dominique Crenn: I think it’s still in progress, in the work. I’m not sure yet. I think I’m a little bit troubled with everything that’s going on with the ocean. I mean I work with some farms just for like the trout up in Sacramento and all that. But I think everything needs to be really work very well because like, you know, people can use aquaculture, people can use organic but at the end of the day it’s not all organic. So I think I’m a little bit that those words kind of make me crazy, you know. I think what we need to do as individual is to do our own research and understand if the farm wanted to, you know, farm fish, we need to go there to understand what they’re doing, you know. I mean I know a lot of farmers that can’t have organic certification but they do everything sustainable like they make sure there is no pesticides in there. And small farms, I wanna support those people, you know. So it’s really up to us to make sure we’re doing the right thing but like buying, we have responsibility to buy the right thing. But it’s up to me as a chef to make sure that if I go to a vendor I make sure that I know exactly the transparency of who they are. So it’s just knowledge is power, you know, so get the information and then you can make your own choices. And that’s what I would say.

Greg Dalton: And you spent a lot of time doing that running a restaurant but for an average consumer going to the grocery store who spends five seconds making a decision, doing all that sounds exhaustive and complicating. Who has the time and energy for all that?

Dominique Crenn: I do.

[Laughter]

Anthony Myint: I mean in a way that is to me the beauty of the label carbon neutral because it covers a lot of ground. And at the end of the day I think it's a little bit unrealistic to ask those guys in Michigan totally reinvent yourselves. It's unrealistic to ask McDonalds totally reinvent yourself. There’s shareholders they can't totally reinvent themselves. They can send five cents a burger towards improving the supply chain improving healthy soil. I think if we ask, you know, if we took a poll in the room really quick. Let’s say there’s like two salad restaurants right next to each other, you know, a block from your work. Chicken Caesar salad, free range chicken, whatever. One place is $12, one place is carbon neutral and it's $12.20. And the $.20 goes towards improving farming, which one would you choose? Maybe it doesn’t even matter, you would just go to whichever because that doesn’t matter. But if that second one with the $.20 if 1% of restaurants did that, billions of dollars is going toward solving the food system.

Greg Dalton: So Gwyneth Borden, talk to us about that. You represent the industry here in San Francisco which is, you know, a bubble we know. But if Anthony is correct in his math just a few cents can really make a difference and regenerate the soil. Seems like, you know, can restaurants get on board for that?

Gwyneth Borden: No, absolutely. I mean a lot of restaurants are already on board for that some are working with their own they have their own farms they're doing beehives on top of their businesses. People are doing a lot to lessen their carbon footprint and to really proselytize to restaurateurs in other parts of the country to get them on the same page. I mean people, if you're in the food business, you’re in the body nourishment business and unhealthy soil leads to unhealthy bodies and you don’t want that. I mean even the large, we mentioned McDonalds, I mean they are also moving into direction of bringing back cooking to food and like mangoes in smoothies. I mean I think everyone is trying to move in the direction where their food is better for us, right. And in the process of doing that they'll make the environment better as well. So it's an interesting inflection point where we are right now where there is this coinciding movement of, you know, away from pharmaceuticals and more of a desire of going back to looking at food as a way to deal with pain and other things and the ailments in our body. And as we move in that direction, then I think everyone starts to see the value of the environment and healthy food can provide for that.

Greg Dalton: And Americans are eating less meat more poultry. Gwyneth Borden, one report is that 40% of millennials are moving or adopting a plant-based diet.

Gwyneth Borden: I found that I mean we’ve had interns everything single year and every year we've had interns that have either been pescetarian, vegan or vegetarian it's definitely a generational shift. And what's been really fascinating is, you know, more and more restaurants while they're not labeling themselves vegan are minimizing kind of the meat offerings kind of putting them on the side and really focusing on the vegetables forward. Using the language vegan is tricky because it does turn off people who are not vegan who think I’m gonna have vegan cuisine tonight for dinner rather than thinking that it's a restaurant they could eat any time and enjoy their meal. But you're seeing a trend a subtle trend of people moving in that direction where meat and plant-based things are much more at the forefront but not necessarily being super obvious about it. And that's happening at all price points in the marketplace. You think about the Impossible Burger is another great example and that was happening at Shake Shack and then also fine dining restaurants. People really --

Greg Dalton: And White Castle.

Gwyneth Borden: Yeah. So, it’s amazing that movement.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about restaurants and sustainability with Gwyneth Borden, representative of the restaurant industry in San Francisco. Dominique Crenn a Michelin starred chef and restaurant owner and Anthony Myint, executive chef and restaurant owner. I'm Greg Dalton. We’re gonna go to our lightning round and ask our guests some quick questions starting with true or false. Gwyneth Borden, Chinese restaurants are slower to adopt environmentally friendly practices than other restaurants?

Gwyneth Borden: It’s always all the same.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Dominique you want to answer that?

Dominique Crenn: Truth.

Greg Dalton: True. Anthony Myint, organic crops require application of more pesticides and insecticide than traditional crops. True or false?

Anthony Myint: I don't know that.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, cooking is activism?

Dominique Crenn: Right. Truth.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, some people think you should shut up and cook?

Dominique Crenn: That's right.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: That's what you plan to do?

Dominique Crenn: Oh no, I’m never gonna shut up.

[Laughter]

And I still cook. So that’s okay.

Greg Dalton: This is association, I’ll mention a noun something and the first thing that popped to your mind unfiltered. Anthony Myint, GMOs.

Anthony Myint: I’m in favor of natural breeding.

Dominique Crenn: That was a long word.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: First thing that comes to your mind Dominique Crenn. Foie gras.

[Laughter]

Dominique Crenn: No comment.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden. Kale.

Gwyneth Borden: That is great for you.

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden. Big Food.

Gwyneth Borden: Big Food. Big Food can help move the country forward. They have to take on their responsibility.

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint. Your favorite cheese.

Anthony Myint: I really like Brillat Savarin.

Dominique Crenn: That’s French.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn. Your favorite vegetable.

Dominique Crenn: Tomato. I mean tomato is a --

Gwyneth Borden: It’s a fruit actually.

Dominique Crenn: It’s a fruit and vegetable. Yeah, tomato. It’s umami it’s amazing, sexy.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden. A food you would be happy to never eat again.

Gwyneth Borden: It’s really funny because I pretty much like most things. Seafood maybe I don’t like. I’m having a hard time with that.

Greg Dalton: Dominique, something you don’t wanna eat again.

Dominique Crenn: Oh, wilted lettuce.

Greg Dalton: Last question. Dominique Crenn. The best food to help a hangover.

Dominique Crenn: I don’t know. I never have a hangover.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Alright. Let’s give them a round for getting through that lightning round.

[Applause]

Gwyneth Borden: I think we failed.

Greg Dalton: Speaking of hangovers, Dominique Crenn, tell us about the wine industry growing around the world. And what is the environmental impact of the wine industry what are the issues there?

Dominique Crenn: Well, I think the issues have been herbicide and pesticide I think. I’ve been serving a lot, I mean when we open Petit Crenn everything is the wine list is biodynamic and organic. The same thing we do at Atelier and Bar Crenn so.

Greg Dalton: What is biodynamic? What is that mean?

Dominique Crenn: It’s kind of the science of the moon. It’s whatever the environment that you are is helping you to kind of grow whatever it needs to be grown.

Greg Dalton: The right thing for that place.

Dominique Crenn: Yeah the right thing for that place. Because I think wine is a big problem also I mean, you growing all those grapes and pesticides in the soil, I mean it’s a big problem too. And we don’t talk about that often. We just talk about the food but we need to talk about the winemaking also which is also something very important right now.

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint your thoughts on wine and its impact looking to change the food and system wines. Is this significant part of that is that on your radar or not?

Anthony Myint: Oh absolutely. I mean it’s many acres in San Francisco the city collects something like 700 tons of compostables a day. Quite a lot of that is distributed on local vineyards and what an amazing program if other cities could develop that. Flipside is, you know, imagine in France, there's a wine cellar, you know, in a hillside or underground or something like a wine cave that has no carbon footprint to cool the wine or like store it. Here in California maybe there's an air-conditioned warehouse storing the wine. And so it's a little bit tricky to focus too much on things like local. I think it's way more important to focus on kind of the growing practices and how the wine in the soil are basically working together in this kind of climate lands.

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden, lot of innovation happening people concerned about the growing appetite for protein. There’s startups and venture capital going into, you know, fake meat or lab meat. They have clean meat is I think what they call it. Is that something that’s on your radar this idea of tuna without a fish, cellular growing basically steaks in a laboratory. What do you think about that?

Gwyneth Borden: I think restaurants aren’t quite there in that space. The Impossible Burger would be the closest thing I would say in terms of people coming up with a product that acts a lot like beef but isn't beef for their menus. But I think that, you know, people who are in the restaurant business are really into like the hospitality and the service and kind of the science have interest them, but no one is running out to get this latest, latest and greatest fake meat product on their tables. But they are looking at ways to make dishes with produce that might resemble meat, you know, the watermelon that looks like a ham or doing dishes like that. So you see more of that are people taking wordplay with meat dishes and using them for vegetable dishes. So you see that but you don’t see it quite the sort of scientific experiment beyond like sous vide and other kind of cooking methods. I think, you know, it’ll be interesting to see where that all goes --

Greg Dalton: Down the road, it’s not quite there yet.

Gwyneth Borden: -- down the road. You know I just think it’s just not, yeah.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, your thoughts obviously you’re a naturalist. Your thoughts about it?

Dominique Crenn: Well I mean it’s interesting like I’m just thinking right now is why do we have to mimic meat or tuna. Why we don’t try to find something that is maybe something else, you know. It just make you think about how the culture of the human culture is it’s like, oh my god if I don’t have my burger I’m gonna like die. It’s like why we don’t try to find something else. I don’t wanna say anything about Impossible Meat but I’m not sold on this. You know, he use corn and he use soy and he use wheat. It’s not --

Greg Dalton: And GMOs.

Dominique Crenn: -- and GMOs. I mean it’s just like, you know, we have to be very careful when we want to do something. They want to do something like that they need to go, as I would say, you know, talk the talk and walk the walk. But why we don’t try to like, hey, I mean -- I have three restaurants I’m not trying to make something that look like a steak-frites. it’s like have something else to offer you. Let’s be creative here and not just like, oh, this is the oldest staple of the American, you know, society and I’m gonna make tuna melt which is not tuna but it’s gonna melt. I mean whatever.

[Laughter]

I mean why we don’t try to like be open to something maybe more nutritious and delicious, why not, you know?

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint, the advocates of this would say 9 billion people rising middle classes in China and India, craving for protein. If that protein is satisfied, the oceans will be decimated there's not enough land that coming up with a laboratory solution will satisfy people and maybe save the planet. Do you buy it?

Anthony Myint: No. Absolutely not. There's definitely a place for that kind of product as an overall strategy to reduce the consumption of beef waste on feedlots. Let's just be clear for sure that's a good replacement. And in a lot of ways that's kind of like a band aid strategy that's not actually solving the bigger problem. So the bigger problem is those products are not necessarily reversing climate change. If you take the acreage that those things are produced on and you already used that acreage to produce food regeneratively in a way that improves the soil, you would do better than the lab grown meat. And then in terms of the 9 billion I mean I think I heard a stat the other day that it’s something like 70% of the world's food is grown on 19% of the land on smallholder firms like in Africa, Asia wherever smallholder firms. And so that by far is like the solution. The mistake that people think about is like oh what am I gonna do without the, you know, the nitrogen fertilizer and all these things. Those things are actually kind of just a mistake in history where we started on a path of industrial agriculture to keep kind of bomb factories on standby producing nitrogen. And it's not actually better for growing food in the long run. It's good in the short run. It's like, you know, taking drugs or taking steroids but it's not better for the soil definitely not better for the planet.

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden.

Gwyneth Borden: I just want to add to that and just say that I think in the future you’re gonna see things in the menu that normally are on the menu, right, crickets for example, you know, kelp. There’s lots of things that are regenerative you’re starting to see new season -- fish and other -- fish that you had never really heard of before on the menu. I think people are just gonna change the equation they’re not gonna start making products in the laboratory to serve in restaurants but they’re gonna look for things that maybe we used to eat or that naturally regenerates and incorporate in our diets. So the menus today that have burgers on them could be, you know, some sort of cricket or kelp or some other dish that we haven’t yet conceived of. I really think that’s gonna be the change it’s not so much that we’re gonna see things made in laboratories appearing on restaurant menus. There’ll be a fun restaurant here or there that will do that as a gimmick, but that's not the long-term strategy.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about carbon-neutral cooking and dining. This is Climate One. Coming up, Greg Dalton learns more about how restaurants can be platforms for changing the food system.

Anthony Myint: We’re at a moment in food where it's basically like renewable energy many years ago. There are now ways of producing food that can save the planet, how fast can we adopt them.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about the new farm to table with Gwyneth Borden, Executive Director, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. Dominique Crenn, Chef and Owner of Atelier Crenn. And Anthony Myint, Executive Chef and Co-owner of The Perennial. Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Anthony, you named your restaurant The Perennial. So tell us what a perennial is and how you think it could be a big change for the food system.

Anthony Myint: Sure. Honestly we named it The Perennial after visiting a man named John Wick who I think might be in the audience tonight. And so thank you for the inspiration John. But the name is a reference to kind of like a new kind of sustainability that is prioritizing growing through natural systems. And so like a lot of the ecosystems like in the U.S. or whatever used to be perennial polycultures. And so without like perennial grasses and these things kind of anchoring these ecosystems they kind of just erode and, you know, I heard a stat somewhere that scared the hell out of me. In the last 50 years we have abandoned as much farmland as all the farmland. Okay so why is that? Because we’re not farming the right way. And so we're really excited because we’re at a moment in food where it's basically like renewable energy many years ago. There are now ways of producing food that can save the planet, how fast can we adopt them. How fast can we change the acreage. I don't blame anybody for having like any ideas that they had before. This is brand-new. We bake bread with a perennial grain called Kernza. It’s not available to the public yet.

Greg Dalton: Why?

Anthony Myint: Because they’re just now -- so they spent 15 years doing natural breeding The Land Institute in Kansas with the University of Minnesota and, you know, natural breeding takes time.

Greg Dalton: Patagonia is making beer.

Anthony Myint: Patagonia is making beer. So you can get Long Root Ale made with Kernza. K-E-R-N-Z-A. And so it’s the first kind of perennial grain, 10, 20, 50 years from now there’s gonna be perennial wheat and perennial rice but we got to start now. And so it’s sort of like introducing this term and kind of trying to usher in farm to table 2.0.

Greg Dalton: And is that also, tell us about no till, the importance of till, no till in terms of talking about soil. How damaging is tillage and how could that be change?

Anthony Myint: When we think about like the rainforest, oh man that's horrible to chop down the rainforest. The soil is the rainforest. And like microbiological form there’s all this life, you know, there's roots on fungus. I heard an anecdote about in a forest there's a tree stump and nothing, no leaves, nothing. Scientists would think that would be dead. They scrape it. It's actually alive. How’s that possible? That’s impossible. It's because all the other trees are keeping that tree stump alive to preserve the network. There's so much going on underground we don't know about it. It's like way over our heads and the organic matter in the soil is what makes food nutritious, delicious, and holds carbon in the soil. And so, you know, basically if you’re gonna plow that up, you’re killing them. If you plow it up every year you’re systematically losing all that organic matter and that's why we’ve lost all the farmland over 50 years and that's why we have a golden opportunity right now to reverse that trend.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn, you were named the world's best female chef in 2016 and had some very strong thoughts about that. Tell us about the glass ceiling and, you know, what you feel about that award.

Dominique Crenn: So first of all I dislike the word female chef. I think a chef is a chef. I was talking to someone the other day and oh this journalist I don’t think she understood why I will be so strongly against, you know, that award. And I’m like, well, when you’re listening to music do you listen to music because it’s a woman or do you listen to music because you like the music? So when you eat food, I’m cooking food for you. Do you like it because it’s a man cooking it or it’s a woman that’s cooking it? And they don’t have any answers. It’s not about gender and I understand that obviously the woman power needs to raise to the top but like to judge someone because of their gender. I don't know it's really annoying.

Greg Dalton: Gwyneth Borden.

Gwyneth Borden: I think I mean the bigger issue is that people when they don’t wanna be inclusive they’re like, well why don’t we create a woman award? But why not look at more inclusive restaurants that women happened to also be chefs of, they you wouldn’t have to. It’s sort of like we don’t wanna be more inclusive so we’ll create a special Asian chef, African-American chef whatever award because for some reason we can't possibly conceive that all these people are the same and can compete at the same level. So I do find it offensive because it’s as if like, well you can’t compete at the level at the game that we decided so we’re just gonna give you something else to make you feel better about yourself. You don't really know who's cooking at the restaurant that you go to. I mean maybe the executive chef is a man, but maybe the actual chef de cuisine is a woman, right. And you like that restaurant you don't really know if it's a man or woman but, you know, the person whose names on the door sometimes gets the primary recognition. So I mean it's just kind of silly really.

Dominique Crenn: What I wanna say is, you know, diversity bring dialogue new ideas and it bring, I don’t know, it’s our hope for evolution and we have to be enthusiastic of everything I think this is very important, you know. You have to welcome everything, everyone. This is very important. Same thing in the kitchen, you know, you have to welcome everyone in the kitchen it’s not just a white boys club, sorry to say white boys club, because it’s true for a long time. It should not be a club, it’s a place where we’re cooking because we want to bring people together. We want to create memories, we want to create experience, we want to be a part of what is good for everyone and humanity and all that you know. It’s just like it doesn’t matter if it’s man or a woman. First of all, women cook better than men, But--

[Laughter]

Who is cooking at home? Your grandmother or your mother, right? No, but it’s like can we stop about this. It’s just like this narrative, it’s just a bit crazy.

Greg Dalton: Do you ever get overwhelmed or despair about the faith of the world, you know a lot Dominique Crenn, about the oceans where the earth, the math is dark the times are dire. Do you ever get despondent about that?

Dominique Crenn: You know I’m a very positive nature. I don’t get depressed very easily. As a matter of fact it make me want to do more on what’s going on right now.

Greg Dalton: That motivates you.

Dominique Crenn: I was totally motivated because I know that I do have a responsibility for the future generation. It’s so important, you know, it’s exciting, it’s really exciting. And you know what exciting is when you talk to youngster and when they are willing to listen to it also. It’s very exciting to see that they also want to change it, you know. And we just have that responsibility to do it. I mean everything that, you know, we’re doing, everything that Anthony is doing, you know, it’s a process. Everything is a process, you know, nothing is gonna happen overnight but if you just do a little bit every day, I think we can change the course of things. When you go to a restaurant, and you make sure you drink water or whatever, just make sure you ask them to not give you any plastic straw. One thing. It’s one thing you can do. No, it’s true one thing you can do --

Greg Dalton: The straw thing has taken off very quickly.

Dominique Crenn: Yeah, I mean you go buy your grocery bring your own bag, you know, don’t take the plastic home. Like just little things like that will be, doesn’t cost anything but the impact of it is amazing.

Greg Dalton: Shapes your culture and also defines who you are. Even if it doesn’t -- it defines who you are. We’re gonna go to our audience questions. Welcome.

Female Participant: Good evening. Thank you all for being here this has been a wonderful evening. I am Patricia Port, recently retired from the government. My question is could you each say a few words about your relationships with the food banks?

Greg Dalton: Food banks, who’d like to -- Gwyneth Borden.

Gwyneth Borden: Yeah we partner with San Francisco Marin Food Bank pretty frequently, you know, obviously, you know, we’re the restaurant association, you know, people are coming into restaurants. But we, our responsibility is just not just to people who are dining in our restaurants but making sure other people got to eat. And obviously it’s a big food gap in our country. We also work with CUESA who’s just down the street that does the farmers market most people don't know what CUESA does is that they’re actually educating urban kids about agriculture and where their food comes from. And so while we take for granted that we are, you know, buying tomatoes or whatever at the farmers market, they’re helping kids who might never have actually seen, you know, the Golden Gate Bridge. It might not realize that it happens that way but to know about foods. So we work closely with the food bank and CUESA and other organizations around hunger issues especially.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Male Participant: Thanks. Hi, Jacob Conley, live in San Francisco in Richmond. My question is a couple months ago earlier this year the journal Nature kind of came out and verified what we thought to be true previously, which is that animal agriculture is the leading cause of environmental degradation greenhouse gas emissions. When you look at all of the contributors that's the number one cause. So from your guys perspective why isn’t the immediate response to that in the food industry, oh let's go plant-based. If animals from dairy to meat are the leading cause of the degradation and the impact the negative impact why aren’t we just saying let's go to plants and then figure out the animals later.

Anthony Myint: I mean I think that would basically be like looking at cars and saying cars are a big problem why doesn’t everybody bike. There’s a place for cars, you know, that’s the reality. People are gonna keep driving let’s instead find solutions like creating an electric car. In the case of beef as Dominique was saying the problem is the management and the production of beef. Cows themselves are not the problem. The land that used to be in the West was grazed by bison there's more pounds or there are fewer pounds of cows in America today than there used to be a bison. Those bison were crucial to keeping those ecosystems healthy keeping that soil healthy. It’s a dry environment and you can't necessarily grow soybeans and tomatoes and these things. Cows produce 50 to 70 pounds of manure a day. So this is photosynthetic fertilizer that is keeping the land healthy. The cows aren’t on the land right now, if we can get them back on the land cows and livestock and animals will not be the leading cause of climate change as you're saying in the article.

Greg Dalton: So it’s about factory farms. Let’s go to our next question.

Male Participant: Hi, my name is Britney Sy. I’m a senior building consultant for architects and engineers. So that was a great segue, Anthony thank you for that. I am curious, so you are saying there are roads, so, you know, cars are gonna drive on it. If we have gas ones maybe we provide them electric ones and then people will use those. So I’m very interested in decarbonization and electrifying our restaurants potentially, restaurants, create big trends people will watch them. And so it would be really interesting to see restaurants take like their gas stoves and their equipment that use gas and use electricity instead. Especially in the Bay Area so much of our utilities or so much of our energy is provide by Hetch Hetchy which is a hundred percent clean energy. And so that would be a great message for folks to switch over to electricity. I’d like to know from you all what are your guys’ views on that trend if that’s a possibility and maybe what do we want to tell utilities or manufacturers to push us forward?

Greg Dalton: Thank you. So electrifying restaurants.

Anthony Myint: I can take that.

Greg Dalton: Anthony Myint.

Anthony Myint: When we were working on The Perennial we looked pretty closely at carbon footprint stuff. So part of the issue in the Bay Area is the PG&E was not offering a hundred percent renewable options at that time. Plus gas equipment is substantially cheaper than electric equipment. And so kind of at the conversion rate of the carbon footprint of the gas and the lack of efficiency we ended up choosing some gas equipment. I think as renewable energy becomes available as equipment becomes, you know, more popular in the U.S. there should be a trend towards more electric equipment and restaurants. If anybody is running restaurants and doesn't know the stuff there's a local arm of PG&E called the Food Service Technology Center, super amazing guys, they provide, and gals, I think, that they provide free, I've only met guys there, but they provide free consulting for anybody in the Bay Area. And so it’s kind of like the James Bond lab, there’s all these guys drinking espresso and like testing all the equipment. Electric equipment is more efficient. And so if you are in a place where but it sort of comes down to volume. So if you’re like frying, you know, 50 pounds of French fries an hour, get the electric deep fryer even though it cost $7000. If you're frying like a couple things once in a while and the other gas prior $700, you know, maybe that's okay it's like tough trade-off.

Greg Dalton: Next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: Hi, I’m Erica Kuduba I’m an environmental engineer and I work closely with some commercial kitchens. I find that in commercial kitchens, maybe not at your level but and some of the more common ones that there's a lot of staff turnover. And I appreciate all of the sustainability metrics that you guys were kind of talking about before any of the food comes even into the kitchen. But I was wondering if you have any encouraging remarks for the kitchen staff and maybe some of the lower restaurants that have high staff turnover and lower employee incentives to maybe be practicing the sustainability techniques. Not from the chef level but actually from like the employees that are working there if you have any suggestions to engage them.

Greg Dalton: Dominique Crenn.

Dominique Crenn: Well, thank you for the question. I think for anything it doesn’t, not just in the restaurant when you become, you start your own business. I think the first things you need to look at is the people that are working with you and you have to be able to invest into them. I think this is number one, you know. If you treat your employee well, if you give them the tool to success and also give them opportunity, you’re gonna see that they will stay with you. I mean obviously the industry do so much turnover it’s crazy. So I mean when I open, this is the third restaurant and I can tell you for the last three years it’s been very consistent of us keeping people in because we invest in people. We take care of them obviously we treat them with a lot of respect. We definitely treat them properly we want to make sure they have a balanced life, you know, creating also retirement 401(k) plan. Somebody, you know, can start as a commis in my restaurant three years later become one of the executive assistant. Why? Because we give them the tool and maybe we send them somewhere. We also implementing this program that we will pay each of the, we will pay time, a time away to give you time to charity. You go and do volunteer work somewhere, we will pay for that. So you just have to take care of them. And when you take care of the people that are working not for you but with you, it just create this incredible team and then the business I think becomes kind of successful.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking about carbon-neutral restaurants with Dominique Crenn, Chef and Owner of Atelier Crenn and two other San Francisco restaurants. Anthony Myint, Executive Chef and Co-owner of The Perennial, as well as a partner in the restaurants Mission Chinese Food and Commonwealth. And Gwyneth Borden, Executive Director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is the producer. The audio engineers are Mark Kirschner and Justin Norton. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

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