They’re at it again. Two years after they last teamed up for a Volts/Catalyst crossover episode, David Roberts joins Shayle for another far-ranging conversation exploring the future of energy. Their prompt was simple: Each host brought three critical questions they want to see answered in the next decade.
From “data center fever” to closed-loop critical mineral economics, Shayle and David take the opportunity to dive deep into a myriad of second-order effects of the clean energy transition.
In the hour-long conversation, the two hosts cover topics including:
- The coming explosion of self-driving cars, and whether it will fuel urban sprawl
- The feasibility of “electrifying everything” and whether a proliferation of “micro-DERs” in home devices will create create a more efficient grid or a software-fueled dystopia
- The future of off-grid data centers
- Whether the pros of geoengineering and solar radiation modification, or SRM, outweigh the potential moral hazards
Resources
- Catalyst: The Volts crossover episode
- Catalyst: The plug-in DER case for small businesses
- Catalyst: AMA: Geoengineering, nuclear, power prices, and more
- Open Circuit: Tesla’s fork in the road
- Latitude Media: The growing free-market push to let data centers go off grid
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by Uplight. Uplight activates energy customers and their connected devices to generate, shift, and save energy—improving grid resilience and energy affordability while accelerating decarbonization. Learn how Uplight is helping utilities unlock flexible load at scale at uplight.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate, energy, and infrastructure leaders. If you’re a startup, investor, or global corporation that’s looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group’s team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.
Transcript
Shayle Kann: David, nice to be back with you.
David Roberts: Awesome. Glad to be doing this again.
Shayle Kann: All right, so we gave ourselves a prompt here, which is that each of us have come prepared with three questions we are eager to see answered in the next five to 10 years. I assume we both came with backups as well, in case we overlap. I don’t think, I bet you we’re not gonna overlap.
David Roberts: I tried not to overlap with you, so I think we will, it’ll be funny if we both tried so hard that we’re gonna like, leave some very obvious questions
Shayle Kann: We probably will. Yeah. I didn’t try to go super esoteric, but I at least —
David Roberts: I tried to get like, medium esoteric, so, we’ll, we’ll see. We’ll see. You want me to go first?
Shayle Kann: Yeah. You go first.
David Roberts: Okay, so, so just to, just to, to review for, for listeners, the prompt here is questions, important questions facing the clean energy world that you might reasonably think will get some kind of answer.
In the next five to 10 years. And that turned out to be really interesting, really difficult because I kept thinking of questions that I was like, well, will we really know in 10 years? You know, there are lots of big questions where I don’t think we’ll really know until like 20 or 30 years out.
So that was sort of, sort of interesting as a way of bracketing my thinking about this. So anyway, long story short, my first one is so self-driving cars are here, which is puzzling in itself since there was all this chatter and talk for years in anticipation of their arrival. And then they arrived and like nobody talks about it.
Like they’re operating in several cities now and nobody talks about it like, so it’s a little weird. So, but there are lots of really, I think, interesting questions about. The macro effects of self-driving vehicles that I think we will get answers to pretty soon. Because you know now that San Francisco has been doing it a while and it seems to be working basically, and I think Seattle’s starting a pilot.
There’s like pilots starting in a bunch of cities. We’re very close, I think, to basically widespread adoption. And then we’ll start to get answers to some of these questions. Like, you know, the fear that I have that I think that I think a lot of people sort of climate people have greenies have is that making it easier to take a car around is going to result in a lot more people taking a lot more cars around.
Basically. Like even though. Even though people might not necessarily own their own vehicle, even if they’re shared vehicles, just the level of the level of use of cars is going to rise sharply when it becomes so easy and so convenient, which will translate mathematically into greater congestion.
So like you could see like deaths going down, as I think we’re already seeing in San Francisco, you could see noise going down if they’re all electric. You could see pollution going down if they’re all electric. But on the core issue of urbanism, they are gonna, the fear is that they’re gonna work against density basically.
They’re gonna make it easier to live far out. They’re gonna make it easier to commute. Like a commute. You’re not gonna dread. An hour long commute if you can just chill and like read and tap on your phone and or watch a TV show or something. So that’s just gonna make it a lot easier to decide to live an hour outside of town.
So anyway, I think within five to 10 years we will at least see cities where these things become ubiquitous. And then I think at the very least we’ll have directionally answers to some of these things. I’m very curious, shale, from your perspective, what your level like of anticipation versus dread versus, you know, now that it’s here, it’s just not that big of a deal either way.
I’m curious what your disposition is on self-driving cars.
Shayle Kann: Good question and so many things to say about it. Okay. Let me offer you a few bits of exposition first. So I live in the Bay Area as I think you know, I don’t live in San Francisco, but I live outside the city and I have an —
David Roberts: You’ve taken, you’ve taken —
Shayle Kann: Of course, I Waymo as a regular, I use Waymo as a verb regularly.
Yeah, of course. And, and you’re right that like, it’s just not a thing in San Francisco anymore. Not a thing in the sense that like one out of every three cars in the city is a Waymo. And, and that’s just how it is and it’s become pretty normalized to anybody who’s not a tourist. And I agree with you. It’s coming everywhere.
And I think five to 10 years is also, it’s kind of the right timeframe for this. I, the, my other, tidbit for you. I have a 4-year-old son and I’ve been making bets about his future with anybody who wants to take them with me since he was born. And the one of the bets is that he will never drive a car.
He’ll never get a driver’s license. I mean, he’s growing up, you know, in kind of suburban Bay Area, California. So take that into account. ’cause this is specific to my son. But you know, I think 12 years from now when it would be time for him to get his driver’s license
David Roberts: Oh yeah,
Shayle Kann: He’s not gonna need to. Right. And already lots of kids are just Ubering around
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Shayle Kann: That said with your question, it’s interesting the framing of it to me because I had anticipated you were gonna raise a climate concern, which you’re not. Right. Like
David Roberts: Well, I, it’s a second order. I, I think, I think urbanism and density are climate related. Like I think if you, if you lose density, even if the cars aren’t polluting, you’re still gonna get greater pollution and greater impact. Like, I think there are second order climate effects,
Shayle Kann: Probably, but I would bet I don’t have data on this, but I would bet that those effects, one of the main reasons why density is lower emissions per capita is transportation. That’s a big part of it. And so if it is true, the benefit of self-driving vehicles from a climate perspective is that it is, it makes a lot more sense for them to be electric, right? Like the, the, the, utilization pattern
David Roberts: They’re all electric. Like all the, all the, all the ex extent, all the extant self-driving cars on the road are electric
Shayle Kann: They’re pure EVs. And it just makes more sense, right? You drive high utilization, you pay back the added CapEx, the EV, much faster. It’s better for a bunch of reasons. So I, you know, I think if you assume that our self-driving future actually accelerates vehicle electrification than to a first order from a climate perspective, it’s not inherently a bad thing.
Now that would be weighed against your question, which is I think a question of like. Will there be more vehicle miles traveled total? And so those kind of weigh against each other to some extent. But it’s not obvious to me that a transition to autonomous vehicles is bad from a climate perspective. It might
David Roberts: No, no. I would not have the arrogance to put my flag on either side of that. I think we just genuinely don’t know. I think that’s right. That it’s going to eliminate a huge chunk of emissions. The question is all these second order effects and how you even really trace them.
But like, I do think that continuing to sprawl outwards is bad for a number of reasons. Extraneous to climate.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I guess I don’t really have an opinion on that. I’m not an urbanist, I guess I would say it that way. And so I don’t have strong opinions on whether adding more sprawl is bad. I could see it happening. I actually have a friend who’s a long-term real estate investor who is amassing a portfolio of land in the exurbs of certain cities under the bet, you know, under like a multi-decade, decade bet of exactly what you’re describing.
So I totally could see that happening. I guess I just don’t inherently see it as a bad thing.
David Roberts: Oh, the question of whether exurbs are bad or not, it’s a large question that we don’t have time to address here. So, you know, I think this would just reinforce the worries of the urbanists, which is that they see the tech guys pushing this, and I don’t see any sign from the tech guys that the tech guys care about this.
They drive themselves everywhere. They drive themselves everywhere. They don’t live in walkable places. I don’t like Silicon Valley. The physical form of Silicon Valley is so gross. It’s so gross and deadening. But I guess that all they know anyway, so. But at the very least, like, we’ll be able to see if that sprawl happens and then I guess we’ll be able to, you know, answer the question of whether, whether we like the effects or not.
Shayle Kann: I think what we can measure, to answer your question of will we know in five to 10 years, is in the cities where there is high proliferation of autonomous vehicles. So San Francisco and five to 10 years from now, probably a bunch of other cities will total VMT have gone up over that period —
David Roberts: ’cause they are pushing in the other direction. In California with policy, they are trying to restrain sprawl with a lot of other policies. So how will that balance out? And, or, or it might even be more interesting to see like what would happen to a city, like, you know, Cleveland or whatever, if they get a bunch of EVs, ’cause they do not have a strong overlay of other laws restraining them. So it’d be more of, I guess, like a clean experiment. And we’ll probably —
Shayle Kann: Phoenix is where, Phoenix has been the test bed for —
David Roberts: Yeah, oh, are they a thing there now?
Shayle Kann: Oh yeah. That’s where, that’s where a lot of the early testing was in some ways because it’s, it’s obvious Phoenix is a, a simple grid. It’s not hilly. The weather’s good. Yeah. So it, it’s kind of the opposite of San Francisco. San Francisco was like trial by fire for Waymo, but Phoenix
David Roberts: Yeah. Phoenix is already sprawling, like crazy, so it’s a little tricky to separate the signal from the noise. But
Shayle Kann: Yeah. Okay. Can I give you my first question? Okay. So I think the obvious question that of course I’m gonna ask, I’ll try to ask a different version of the obvious question that I’m gonna ask is, how hot will data center fever get and will it break? In the next five to 10 years.
Five to 10 years is, is probably the right timeframe to ask that question.
David Roberts: I was wondering
Shayle Kann: Could argue it could be sooner, but, who knows, right? But within the next 10 years, will we, we’ll see some directional thing here. And so, but instead of asking the question of how hot will he, the data center fever get and will it break, I’ll ask a different question, which I think is like a second order effect of that, which is how much large load goes off grid in the next five to 10 years.
Because to walk through the chain of logic, the kind of going assumption right now of what’s happening is that there is so much demand for new data center capacity that we are going to be bursting at the seams on the grid in any market that has. Demand for data centers, we’re basically gonna tap out everything we could possibly do on the grid, and so much so that maybe we need to go to space.
Right. But I think before we go to space in significant volume, there would be a good chance we would go off grid. We’ve never seen a lot of large industrial loads go off grid, apart from like mining and things like that. We’re starting to see glimmers of it right now in data center
David Roberts: Are we not saying law? Like didn’t either someone just proposed or passed a law that basically said you have to
Shayle Kann: Josh Hawley in the, in the Senate and somebody else, I think, introduced a bill that would essentially mandate data centers to go off grid. I, my presumption is that doesn’t pass.
David Roberts: like I’ve said several times, like there’s a a world of difference between bring some generation and bring enough generation to cover yourself. If you go off grid entirely, that’s a very, you know what I mean?
Shayle Kann: Like no, no question about that one. That’s an answered question. The question that has not been answered is, and, and actually to add to that, there’s also an enormous number of projects that are saying, okay, we’ll do bridge power.
So we are gonna be off grid until we get the grid connection, and that’s gonna be a year, three years, five years, whatever it might be. I’m saying forget the grid. W how, how many large loads will just be fully off grid with no intent to get a grid connection? Will that happen in significant volume? That is an interesting question.
David Roberts: I, it is interesting I’ll just say my gut instinct strongly says no. I, I just think like the arguments for a grid, like a grid is handy, you know what I mean? Like, grids are extremely useful and like a lot of, a lot of policy discussion right now is, is being forced into weird.
Shapes because it’s trying to work around the fact that we can’t do the obvious thing, which is just build more grid, right? Like that’s like that would solve all the problems. That’s what everybody wants. That’s what everybody needs beyond data centers, even like for the future, period. We just need to do that.
And we’re like torn between trying to make that happen and then trying to sort of weasel our way around it. You know what I mean? And so I guess how
Shayle Kann: You’re making the case, right? Like the fact that we’re not solving that. I mean, you could make a case that we will solve it, but if we don’t solve it, then what happens?
David Roberts: Yeah. Well, I mean this, this, that’s an interesting, even broader question. Like what could it, I could, I could imagine a story where our sort of social and political dysfunction, our inability to build quickly forces these weird around the edges solutions that end up like growing and developing. In ways that we can’t anticipate now and like bringing new things into the world.
You know what I mean? Like it will spa, it will spawn invention and innovation. I think even though like if you had your druthers, you would not choose this situation, but I do think it will. It will. It will force some very creative thinking.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I mean, I think to me it really comes down to this question of is it, is it really true that for an extended period of time into the future, we’re gonna have dramatically more demand for data center capacity than we have ability to serve it on the grid, with money attached to that demand. That is willing to take some risks that maybe hyperscalers wouldn’t have taken in the past, for example.
And if those things are true, then it is kind of inevitable to me that some amount of it, and I don’t know how much is going to, is gonna take the one risk that is introduced by not being on the grid, which is largely reliability, right? You, you don’t, you know, you don’t have as many nines of reliability unless you really overbuild a bunch of onsite stuff.
But what you get in exchange is you get unleashed from a sighting perspective. I mean, imagine how easy it is to cite something if you remove the constraint of the
David Roberts: But you are, I take it imagining very large gas plants.
Shayle Kann: I’m not imagining. I’m watching them get built
David Roberts: I have not, accommodated myself to that yet. I, I don’t want that to happen. You know what
Shayle Kann: But that’s happening,
David Roberts: I know, I know. It’s already happening.
Shayle Kann: And by the way, it doesn’t inherently have to be gas, right? Like there’s a good study that, uh, paces and scale microgrids put out a while ago. That was, that was, you know, what would it, can you actually run at high utilization, a, a data center fully off grid with, with mostly solar and storage?
You generally do need a little bit of dispatchable generation.
David Roberts: It’s just a microgrid, right? It’s the same question. It’s the same question that faces any microgrid. Like you, you, same question that faces any grid really. Like you can do X amount with variable and you need some marginal amount of dispatchable to to, to firm up. Like it’s gonna be
Shayle Kann: Or, or more batteries.
David Roberts: That’s what I want to see. Like that’s what I think could straightforwardly more straightforwardly substitute for, for natural gas is more in bigger batteries, but they’re like, as, as you know, because like half of your shows and my shows are about this now, but like this question, the way you ask it is also tied up intimately with a bunch of other super fascinating questions.
Like, are data centers gonna continue evolving in the direction of tism or is there a serious prospect for. Distributed, more distributed, more modular, more grid edge data centers. That’s a super interesting question. Then there’s the sort of just the bigger question of like, will there be radical efficiencies in chip design that mean we don’t need the sheer quantity we think now?
Or will the bubble pop or something? You know what I mean? Like the, the question of how many data centers there will be is, is everybody, lot, lots of people want to know the answer to that question. Not just the, not just the power people and the grid people, but, but, but so how do you think about, and this is something I, and we can move on to the next one.
This is something I try to think about how I talk about, like I, what I want to say or, or here’s another note I would put before they take the extraordinary step of trying to build own. I mean, if you’ve got a gigawatt, gigawatt data center and you’re trying to go off grid, you’re basically building like.
A pretty large grid, like you’re building like a city’s worth of like electrical infrastructure. It’s a pretty extreme step. I would like to see them because they can’t get nuclear plants quickly or coal plants quickly, or natural gas plants quickly. I would like to see them get serious about exploiting distributed capacity.
I think that’s faster and cheaper than onsite generation. If we can get the, the, the financial and institutional arrangements lined up the right way.
Shayle Kann: I think you, I think this is all, the whole, scenario here is all a yes. Like the presump, the presumption is there will be enough demand. We’re gonna tap out every available possibility we’re gonna do gets, and we’re gonna get more on existing lines. We’re gonna do some distributed capacity aggregation, which is, all these things are starting to happen.
I think they’re gonna continue to happen, and yet, in the absence of building out like a entirely new transmission system on top of our existing transmission system, we’re gonna hit a ceiling basically, or at least we’re gonna hit a ceiling from a time to power –
David Roberts: Yeah. And I guess the fact that all these forecasts are saying we’re gonna build more data centers than we could conceivably power, like, is just good evidence that it’s not, not gonna happen. Like I’m, I’m just very skeptical. Like what? I guess I, I, I would just ask you the central question. Do what do you think?
Like, do you, do you think demand is going to get even close to the sort of higher end projections or are you kind of a deflationists on this?
Shayle Kann: I don’t think I am smart enough to know the answer to that question. I don’t think anybody really knows the answer to that question. I do think that it’s, there is pretty universal agreement amongst people who are building these models that we’re gonna need. To your point on sort of the, like, will it shift to the edge?
Yes. Inference might, and that’s like an open question. There is going to be for some period of time in the future, demand for more and more and more powerful models. Those require the centralized, big, big ass data centers. We are already starting to have a harder time to find sites on the grid to power those in, in the time period that people want.
And so I think there’s going to be some period of time where we are bursting at the seams from an electricity perspective. I don’t know how long it lasts. And I don’t know whether it gets to the point where like, Elon wants to put a hundred gigawatts a year of orbital data centers in space. You know, maybe
David Roberts: You think there are gonna be space-based data centers? You did a, you did a pot on it, didn’t you? You, you talked.
Shayle Kann: We’ve talked about it a bunch. I’m doing more on it. I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time now like understanding the economics. It, it’s sort of, to me, the answer to that question is the answer to the question you asked me because, I think that orbital data, I mean, Elon says he thinks that they will be the cheapest way to get new compute in like three to five years.
I do not think that is possible. Not in that time period, right?
But, if you do think that there is gonna be this insatiable appetite and we’re gonna need to scale to hundreds of gigawatts a year, and we are not gonna have the ability to do that on the grid, then I think the interesting question is, your options are kind of off grid or off world, and.
And then it’s a different comparison. And you know, it’s interesting to think about. We should get off of the data center thing
David Roberts: Yeah. The, the final thing I would say about it, and this is the note I wanted to say earlier, it’s just, it’s when I talk to people who are, as you know, there’s a very loud constituency. To the left that hates data centers, hates ai, hates the whole discussion. All I would say as a final note is even if you think that data, short-term data center demand is, is radically overstated and that these data centers are not gonna, you’re not gonna end up with many as as currently forecast, it is nonetheless the case that we’re electrifying transportation and we’re electrifying heat and cooling and we’re electrifying industry and we’re just gonna need lots, lots, lots more electricity and a much stronger, better grid in the future, regardless of what happens with data centers.
So I just think like that should be, I don’t want those two questions to start to be conflated in people’s minds, basically.
Shayle Kann: Actually, I Okay. Put a pin in that when we get back to my next question.
David Roberts: Oh, interesting. Okay. So we’re. I’m on my second. Is that where we are? Oh, okay. This is another one that I sort of brought because I don’t think tech people are thinking about it enough or taking it seriously.
Shayle Kann: I love that. I, I represent tech people.
David Roberts: I’m sorry, I’ve, I’m sorry I’ve drafted you into this un unenviable, spokesperson job. So, here’s, here’s my thought.
Basically, you and I know that the way the long-term evolution is that basically everything that is plugged in is gonna become a resource eventually. Like the notion of DERs as a kind of distinct category, I think is just gonna kind of fade away. ’cause eventually, like everything that plugs in is going to be managed by software.
That is in communication with larger grids, basically that’s just gonna become kind of the default on some time horizon. We can talk about how fast we think that’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna happen basically. So to me what that means is that a lot of things that we have held as distinct from software are going to become software like driving in cars and living and homes.
And on the one hand I think that’s immense. I think there’s immense potential there. As I’ve done a Cajillion podcasts on, I, I think it’s gonna be extraordinary, gonna have a much more stronger grid. We’re gonna make each electron go further. We’re gonna utilize our grid better. We’re gonna, like, everything’s gonna, we’re gonna have a more small D, democratic grid, et cetera, et cetera.
On the, for the most part, I love this. Trend, and I’m very hopeful for it, the ification of, of, of the, of the grid, but capital B. But when I think about software as it exists today, it’s awful. You know, the situation is awful. I think, and I’m, you know, I’m not far from the only person saying this, like it feels these days like tech, the tech sector, which is basically we think of as the software sector in, in, in public, is kind of exploitative out of touch.
You know, like kind of getting increasingly deranged talking about their bunkers on their islands, talking about the antichrist like. All fucked up on ketamine, just off in la la land. And basically software feels exploitative these days almost everywhere You encounter it in enshittification, you know, I did a whole pod on enshittification.
Basically platforms enter what seems like this inexorable cycle where they inify and so this trend of, of your house in your car becoming software. I don’t see enough people raising red flags saying, do we want intrusive ad-based, ad supported subscription begging different tiers, you know, real time variable pricing, all these sort of exploitative things that we’re running into.
Do we want that in our cars and in our homes? Are we gonna end up within enshittified homes? Is the promise basically of coordinated, distributed energy going to manifest in reality, like just another chapter of sort of chintzy, exploitative, and ified software that ends up exploiting the people who get stuck with it.
I worry about that and I don’t hear any hardly anybody else worrying about that. Do you worry about that?
Shayle Kann: Do you have a Nest thermostat?
David Roberts: I do not. My house is so analog and primitive. My current house.
Shayle Kann: I guess I don’t see, so if I think of like what are the things in the home that tie to electricity that have been software applied? Thermostats are the obvious one to me via Nest and Eco B and other companies like that. You know, people who have EVs have an EV charger and then they have a software platform that goes on top of that.
So they’re EV owners. I have an, I drive an EV nine. I’m sure you’re an EV driver.
David Roberts: A Kia. The big one. The big one. Is it nice? Is it super nice?
Shayle Kann: It’s the best. Yeah. So there’s the, there’s the vehicle, there’s the thermostat. I mean, if you wanna go newer, newer age, I am an owner of a Quilt, which is a
David Roberts: You got one of those?
Shayle Kann: EIP is an investor, so I was actually customer number seven of Quilts.
David Roberts: You have one of the newer, because didn’t they just sort of like refresh the look of their, of their, of their wall units?
Shayle Kann: But it is what you’re saying, right? It’s like software verification. It’s got an app. It’s much more controllable. I mean, my personal experience with all those things is that they’re better. And I don’t know that anybody, I’ve heard anybody saying like, oh, nest and shit, the thermostat or, or the Tesla app and shit.
David Roberts: if you’re familiar with Cory’s work, you know. Always stage one on the platforms is that they’re good to users and that they offer genuine value to users. That is step one of this process is you attract the users with genuine value and then over time work to make leaving the platform difficult.
And then when people are locked in, that’s when you start exploiting them. And like I will, I will happily agree that all of this is so nascent and new and, and barely there that we’re just on the front end of this. So a lot of this is speculative, but like it sure seems like that is the direction everything travels.
And, and like, one way I think about this and this, this is probably something you’ve heard me talk about before, like one thing that I’m just waiting for is if, if, if the self-driving cars become ubiquitous, what is to stop them from? Offering a free tier that is ad supported, which everybody then chooses ’cause nobody wants to pay up front.
And then that’s one more little area of our lives where we are constantly beset with customized advertising. Like, that’s one way
Shayle Kann: Well, this is where, yeah, maybe I’m gonna, okay. I’m gonna own, I’m gonna own my, my tech bros. I, if I decide to choose to take, to get free rides around in my future, Waymo or whatever it is, in exchange for being served ads. That’s a trade I make deliberately and happily. Right. And I get free rides, and that’s worth it to me.
I don’t, I don’t see that as being inherently a bad thing. I mean, I think the, the, there are challenges, obviously to the ad ecosystem, but
David Roberts: you, you recognizing enshittification as a thing that happens on other platforms or are you skeptical more broadly about Cory’s work?
Shayle Kann: I don’t know Cory’s work. So, let me preface with that. But I would say, I think I see what you’re talking about and I think I can come up with examples of it. I don’t know that I see it as like the inexorable direction of travel when things become soft, wy, particularly as it pertains to me,
David Roberts: less softwarey than platform. It’s the platforms. So this is like, this is why I want, if you’re on, like if your water heater’s signed up to some VPP and your thermostats signed up to another one, they’re both on different platforms. I want interoperability and I want the ability to move from one platform to the other without penalty.
Basically. I don’t want lock-in, like that’s what leads to platform and enshittification is lock-in and I think we could, I think we could avoid a lot of that upfront if we just went in with some clear privacy laws and some clear. Rules and regulations about interoperability and transparency?
Shayle Kann: I guess I don’t, I don’t just, I don’t disagree with that. I think that’s a pretty innocuous statement to make. To me, I guess at the high level, the things that I actually think about that are in our homes, I’ll just focus on the home for now, that like are hopefully going to be transformed such that, as you said, eventually all of them.
Our software enabled, interact with the grid, enable the them to be responsive to the needs of the grid, but also have more capabilities for the customer. Like when I think about them one by one and what I think the future of those things are gonna be, I generally think it will be better. And certainly the ones that I can think of today that have already started to be that way feel better to me.
I can see how it could go off the rails like I’ve watched Idiocracy, but as where we stand today, I don’t see evidence of that.
David Roberts: Yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess. It’s early enough now that I don’t have a lot of concrete examples to hang this on. So mostly it is just a generalized fear, but I look at the exploitation and the crappiness around us in every other area, and I just don’t want that coming into my home and hearth.
Shayle Kann: Okay. Can I come back to the last statement you made in the last question to ask? My next
David Roberts: yes, segue me.
Shayle Kann: You said you didn’t want to see you, you wanted to be careful to separate out the, we need to improve the grid because we’re gonna be electrifying all these other loads, from the, like, you know, some people just don’t like data centers thing.
And I, and I sort of agree with that generally, but here’s my question that I, here’s my concerning question. I will say that I think we may or may not have fully answered in the next five to 10 years, but we will know the direction of travel, which is, is electrification dead or will electrification be dead as a pathway for industrial emissions reduction? So just to walk through the logic
David Roberts: Will, will it be dead? When, for what reason?
Shayle Kann: Well, when I mean, will it, will it appear dead over the next five to 10 years? And for what reason? Is because you have two things happening in my mind right now that are pushing against it. By the way, for a long time, I’ve always said like to a first order, the simplest way to solve climate change is, clean up electricity, electrify everything that you possibly can, and then go like, fill in all the pieces of the stuff that you just can’t possibly electrify.
So that implies electrifying a big portion of heavy industry, for example, okay, if you are trying to electrify something in heavy industry right now, you’re trying to build, or even not, not something that hasn’t been electrified but is already electrified. Take an aluminum smelter, right? You just wanna build new aluminum smelter uses hundreds of megawatts of electricity.
You can’t find a site ’cause every site is being taken up by a data center and your prices are higher and you’re super sensitive to electricity prices,
David Roberts: I see where you’re going with this.
Shayle Kann: So if you, so the, the premise of industrial electrification is you get cheaper, you know, operating costs because it is electrified. You’re gonna get probably higher capital costs.
This is the trade with everything that you electrify and then you save money over time because it’s so much more efficient and that, that is a function of the spark spread. It’s the difference between the price of electricity and the price of natural
David Roberts: And I also think less waste and less regulatory, compliance and
Shayle Kann: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Per easier to permit. But, but in a world where you have a really, really hard time citing, because there are not that many places to put a hundred megawatt, multi a hundred megawatt loads, and where there is inflationary price pressure on electricity, which there certainly is today, that value proposition is eroded. And so I wonder what happens.
David Roberts: Yeah, I mean, more broadly, both of us wanting to electrify everything I think naturally leads to both of us being daunted at the fact that electricity prices are high and rising. Those are very, obviously, at odds on every level in industry particularly, but also residential, also, transportation, also everything else, which gets us, of course to the, the question of the day, the political question of the day of the decade really, which is how you bring down electricity prices while continuing to rapidly and aggressively Yeah, and and another question I had about industry that I almost brought, I’ll just throw in. Here. One, one is, does it in fact start electrifying in this circumstance where electricity is expensive and data centers are bullying them out of the way and grabbing all the, and grabbing all the electricity.
Yeah. Yeah. And then another, another question is that I have that, that I didn’t bring today because it’s definitely like a 20 year plus question is when we say electrify everything, do we mean industry two? And by that I mean how much faith do we have in electrochemistry to replace, like right now you can make steel with zero emissions, electrochemically, it’s just wildly expensive.
Same thing with, you know, the concrete or concrete. You can do same thing like electrochemically, you can do it with zero emissions. It’s just much more expensive. So is electrochemistry, is electrochemistry gonna come along enough fast enough? We could really electrify everything, everything. The reason I didn’t bring that question along is it’s definitely like a 20 plus year.
I think that’s a 20 plus year question, but, but I think hope, think slash hope, let’s call it a 50 50 split that in the long, long term. I really think we’re gonna try everything. I’m a, I’m, I’m a, I’m an absolutist. I don’t think, I think once you’ve built a single unified system that is providing power to 98% of stuff, whatever that 2% is, the, the, the benefits of just being able to hook into that system are so immense that it’s just gonna overcome whatever, whatever barriers they are.
Shayle Kann: I mean, I think I agree with you in the long term. I mean, right now we’re at 25% in the us right? Like 25% of final energy consumption is electricity. 75% is not worth remembering that. But yeah, yeah, it’s a long way to go. And for a long time I think people who were seeking to electrify, particularly industry, sort of rested on this belief that the marginal price of electricity was plummeting towards zero.
David Roberts: Yes. Electoral chemistry in particular very much depends on copious cheap electricity.
Shayle Kann: And, and that is not the world we’re living in right now. And it’s probably not the world we’re gonna live in for the next few years. Now it may, it may turn back, right? This could be cyclical and five years from now it’ll turn back. But like the current state of affairs is electricity, prices are going up, not down.
David Roberts: I mean, one thing that might be answered in the next 10 years is everybody’s freaked out about electricity prices now. Right. The entire Democratic party is seized with seized with this, so will we be. Will we actually be able to pass policies that reduce the prices price of electricity in an enduring way?
Like, you know, reform utilities and like infrastructural
Shayle Kann: permitting reform, build more
David Roberts: reform, stuff like that. Like, will we be able to actually, will we be able to do that? That’s a, that’s an open question.
Shayle Kann: Yes. I don’t know. And maybe, right. And so I think five to 10 years is an interesting timeframe under which to think about this question. But, I could tell you, I think over the next three years, you know, electricity prices are probably going up, not down, and that’s gonna just make that value proposition
David Roberts: and that’s bad. So I think everybody in our world really needs to uprate the question of making electricity cheaper. It really is kind of a pivot on which everything else turns. And that alone could screw us. It could screw everything else. If we can’t, if we can’t deal
Shayle Kann: your, I agree with you, but to your, to your point, I think actually a glimmer of hope here is that there is alignment. Everybody, everybody, the word affordability is going to be the key word in many, many, many circles for the next couple of years. It has become, as you set a political hot button thing, it’s the word of the day amongst utilities, amongst data center companies and amongst everybody else.
David Roberts: And we are in the lucky position that the kinds of energy we favor are the cheap ones. So like, you know, like you can, you can take climate out of the, take climate out of the picture. There’s still gonna be a lot of moneyed interests, pushing for lots more clean energy and batteries for reasons having nothing to do with the environment.
Okay. So I’m on my third one. Yes.
Shayle Kann: I think so.
David Roberts: Okay. My third and final one. This is something I’ve been think about. So here’s how I’d phrase it. Is JB struggle gonna turn out to be as or more significant to the long term? Fortunes of clean energy than Elon Musk. By which I mean, you know, JB Strobel’s set up this big recycling company, this big battery recycling company.
Set it up, Redwood set it up, arguably before there were many batteries. They were like scrambling to like collect, you know, old vacuum cleaner batteries and double As and stuff just to keep going long enough for the batteries to show up. But now I think we’re just on the cusp of the first kind of wave of, of used up batteries coming in.
And the reason I raise all this is that, is that, you know, there’s the whole, there’s this whole question about critical minerals, about materials. About who dominates supply chains. As you know, everybody in the world is freaked out because China dominates all the supply chains. They mine all the critical minerals, do all the processing, et cetera.
And so we’re very dependent on them. And so there’s been a lot of talk about how the US can sort of stand up a supply chain of its own. And so there’s been lots of talk about mining and stuff like that. In the U.S., although not a ton of action, but I think we should start viewing electronics themselves, clean tech itself as a, like a, a source to mine.
Do you know what I mean? Like if, if we can capture those materials and reuse them effectively, infinitely, then when you buy a solar panel from China, it is as though you, you are both. Buying a solar panel and mining a certain quantity of materials that will be available after the solar panel is dead. Do you know what I mean?
So like recycling is a, is a source of critical minerals, basically, like it is a strategic source of critical minerals. And I think once you, you know, if you take the sort of growth numbers of EVs and solar panels and all the rest of it, seriously, it’s gonna be a very large source of minerals. So large source of raw minerals and raw materials, which means all, all of which is just means that I think that recycling is going to go from a sort of like environmental nice to have.
Which is what, which is kind of how I think people are thinking about it now to something like a national security energy security. Imperative. In other words, like if you get your hands on some of these materials, it is absolutely in your interest to make sure that you keep recycling those materials through your economy forever, basically.
I just think so. I think recycling in the next five to 10 years is going to A take off and B, just become much, much more, I think viewed as much, much more strategically. Important wonder whether you think so? Wonder whether you agree?
Shayle Kann: I do agree generally, I mean, and I think it’s not just EV batteries either, right? So there’s, so redwood is, is recycling ev batteries and a bunch of other old batteries and getting out of it, the lithium nickel, cobalt, stuff like that. We invest in a company called Cyclic Materials that’s doing recycling for rare earth elements.
Rare earth elements are like the least recycled critical mineral, which is crazy.
David Roberts: Coal piles or is that a
Shayle Kann: No, no, no. Not not tailings or coal piles or anything like
David Roberts: I saw a different company doing that.
Shayle Kann: Motors and magnets and, and stuff like that. There are companies that are now doing solar panel recycling.
Yeah, I mean I think that, where I agree with you is I’m like a recycling maximalist. We should re recycle all this stuff. It has. High value at end of life, and we should take advantage of that value and that should mitigate the amount of, of New Virgin mine stuff that we need in any category where we possibly can, particularly in those where there is a geopolitical reason that we wanna have our own sovereign supply.
The only thing I would push back against, I guess, is just that the challenge, let’s just take battery recycling. If you believe that we are on a steep upward trajectory of demand for new batteries, then you’re forever gonna be in a position where the amount of supply that you have to recycle is the amount of demand that there was 10 years ago.
David Roberts: Well, not, not forever, but until you hit the top of the S curve.
Shayle Kann: that’s what I mean until, right. So, so unless you think we’re already at the top of the S-curve. Which I, I don’t think either of us do think then it will matter some, but it is not a solution to our sovereign mineral supply problems.
David Roberts: I would just say that my, I guess my prediction would be that in 10 years, maybe in, or in 20, that just a unit of critical minerals drawn from recycling will be cheaper than a unit mind. I think. I think eventually, like, I think it will end up being our primary and cheapest source of those. Like I, we’re never, I don’t think we’re ever gonna, I mean, maybe you, maybe you disagree, but I don’t think we’re ever.
Really going to be in a position where we’re fully like aar, where we fully have a, a, a, a contained and complete supply chain. I think mostly this is just about having a little bit of a buffer, but like, I just think people need to start rethinking, thinking of recycling, like they think of mining basically like as a source of, as a, a large and probably the cheapest source of those materials.
Shayle Kann: Yes, I agree. I agree with that. And I think to, to the point on it should be cheaper. I mean, I’ll give you a specific example in the rare earth context, right, which is that, there are actually 16 rare earth elements, that are grouped together. We really only use four of ’em, actually, like we only care about four of ’em out of the 16.
If you’re doing mining, virgin mining, you get this like basket of all
David Roberts: Yeah. Yeah,
Shayle Kann: like complicated separations process to get the stuff you want. If you’re doing recycling, you’re only getting the stuff we were using in the first place already. So you’ve already cut out a bunch of expensive separation steps in the value chain there.
So there’s a bunch of reasons why, like fundamentally, I, I think it should be cheaper.
David Roberts: And again, I think it’ll be such a economic, such an economic push on that, that again, there’ll be tons of innovation and we’ll get something closer to an actual closed loop. We’ll be moving. ’cause this is like, to me, this is like, like 50% of the, of, of future sustainability. You know, we, we focus so much on the energy part, but also the closed physical loop, the, the reducing physical waste and physical throughput I think is like the other half of the.
The other half of the equation. And this is, you know, so like cre creating something like a closed loop of minerals where you’re, because the one thing that offsets that, that, that, that, dynamic that you very accurately lay out, right? Like the demand is going up faster. So sort of by definition, you’re recycling is behind your new demand.
One force does slightly offset that, which is the lithium you get out of the old batteries will go farther in the new batteries than it went in the old batteries, just because batteries are always constantly improving. So you, you will actually get more, you, I don’t think you’ll catch up to demand, but you’ll get more, let’s say than, you know, it’s not, it’s not a, a fungible,
Shayle Kann: Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think, I think the place you wanna end up in all these other critical minerals is kind of where we are maybe a little better than where we are today in, in more mature supply chains where like aluminum, copper, we actually do recycle a lot of that stuff. That doesn’t mean we don’t still need a lot more.
So it doesn’t solve your problem, but it’s meaningful. Alright. Can we, can I do the last one? I think this is the last one. Question to answer in the next five to 10 years. Maybe not next five to 10 years, to be honest. Like maybe this is a question that gets answered in, in 20 years, but nonetheless, I’m curious, will we see a meaningful scaled geoengineering demo?I was thought for sure you were gonna go geothermal.
Shayle Kann: geothermal? Oh, all right. That better get answered in the next
David Roberts: I know that’s, that’s, I, that one I think will be, I think in 10 years will know whether geothermal is going to pay off the promise.
Shayle Kann: We’ll know. We’ll know. Yeah. I mean, at least like traditional for sure. Traditional hydrothermal, probably EGS who knows about, you know, super hot rock. Anyway, I, I’m not asking about geothermal, I’m asking about geoengineering. Will we see somebody go do like a big solar radiation management
David Roberts: Yeah. I have a, I have a solar radiation expert coming on the pod, in, in, in a couple of weeks to talk about just this, I’m so torn on this question. Like, you know, there are, there are like a bunch of cowboy jerk offs in Silicon Valley doing this already. Like they’re doing little, I mean, I don’t know what counts as like a, a scale test in your
Shayle Kann: I just wanna to defend my, apparently my people in Silicon Valley. It’s, I would not say that the group you are referring to is not of Silicon Valley. They’re not,
David Roberts: And that’s just like one balloon at a time or whatever. I’m not super clear what they’re, what they’re doing. So I guess I don’t know if that counts as a test at scale. Like, I do wonder, I’m so torn about this and I’m so curious what your thoughts are on the moral hazard side of things. Because like, you know, like depending on what side of the bed I wake up, I can take different sides of this argument.
Like on one side, and this I suspect is, is is your side and a lot of people’s side, which is just, this is pretty cheap. Somebody’s gonna do it. You know, climate change is gonna get so bad, somebody’s gonna do it. So we might as well do it in a conscious, planned, controlled way. The other side is just you, you know, in a sense the whole field is protected by being kind of obscure and not a lot of people know about it.
Like what happens if you start doing high profile tests and experiments and make this a real thing suddenly then everybody around the world is gonna be told, Hey, you could like, you know, with like 150 bucks, you could go fiddle with the climate and then you’re like, got a whole Pandora’s box thing going because you really.
This is the scary thing about solar radiation management. You could stand up and do a reasonably large scale test on your own without a ton of money, arguably without being detected doing so by the world. You know what I mean? And the fact that no one’s doing that. Yeah, it’s, I just think they don’t know they can yet, so like I kind of don’t want ’em to find out like, what do you think about the, what do you think about that aspect?
The moral hazard part of it?
Shayle Kann: It’s so tricky, right? I mean, to, to, to, to fear monger you a little bit more, I’m gonna use a dirty word to you, I suspect, which is that a billionaire could probably get us half a degree c of cooling globally, personally. Like the, the, that’s the crazy thing about SRM is that the estimates, like, we don’t really know, we don’t exactly know efficacy, blah, blah, blah, but the, but the rough estimates just to an order of magnitude.
Are that at least what I’ve seen, it might cost a couple billion dollars to, to deliver something like a half a degree of cooling, half a degree centigrade of cooling.
David Roberts: Yes. But as you know, I’m sure if you follow the literature is the, the, the, the cloud of uncertainties around all of this, like unanticipated effects and second order effects and like, like things could go so horribly wrong. And that is, I mean that is precisely, precisely the kind of question I don’t want random individual billionaires answering, you know what I mean? This is, to me, argues for really wrapping our heads around it and doing it explicitly just ’cause somebody needs to wrap their hands around it and start controlling.
Shayle Kann: It’s the kind of thing where like you want the equivalent of the. International Atomic Energy Agency, like you want, you want like the UN to take charge of this and say, look, for the sake of the world, we need to explore this, but it, it should only be done in a coordinated fashion or
David Roberts: Yeah. But think about the difficulty that nuclear arms, like, you know, regimes have had ferreting out and finding out whether a country is actually doing a nuclear program and a nuclear program is big and expensive and requires very specialized knowledge. It’s very difficult to do that without being noticed and people are pulling that off.
Like, I can’t imagine an international enforcement regime that could, that could, that could enforce this. Like, it’s so easy to do. Like, and then if like a billionaire does it and another billionaire doesn’t like the way the billionaire does it and decides to. Undo it or do it a different way or redo it.
You know what I mean? Like, do we want billionaires getting the idea that they should be involved in this field?
Shayle Kann: I, I’m well, yeah. I knew I was gonna, I was gonna trigger you with billionaires, but I, but I, I don’t know, like, I think we have to, the problem is, I think the solution is not to put our heads in the sand because the, the more we collectively put our heads in the sand about it, the more likely it is that that’s the way it gets developed. Ultimately.
David Roberts: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, yeah, I mean, I, I guess trying to do it on purpose and with eyes wide open is the best, is the best we can do. But boy, boy, am I nervous about, about how that plays out? I guess there’s no, I mean, you can’t, you can’t not do it. You can’t put a lid back on it. You can’t unknow what we know about it now.
So like, I guess the only way out is through. But, anyway, so. We have three minutes left. You wanna toss out one of your spares just to, to, just to intrigue the audience, just to tate an audience with a, with a question we didn’t get to.
Shayle Kann: My spares weren’t great. Actually. I
David Roberts: I had some really good
Shayle Kann: Yeah, you hit hit me with some spares.
David Roberts: Well, one of my spares, I was surprised you didn’t bring up, I almost brought up, which is what’s going to happen with permissionless DERs.
Shayle Kann: I just did an episode.
David Roberts: I know. I listened to it. I listened to it and, and I, and I, you know, I did, I did one on the, on the balcony solar, not long before that.
So people know this as balcony solar. Basically it’s any distributed, you know, generation or, or, or, or battery that you can plug in without getting permission from a utility or from anybody really. You can just plug in. So 20 last I heard, and this literally changes week to week, but last I heard 25 states had laws either proposed or.
Announced to be proposed to legalize balcony solar in 20, that’s, that’s half the country right there. That’s 25 6. That’s probably pretty soon. And I’m sure many more will follow in the wake. And I just think this, so like, I’m just fascinated by what effect it’s gonna have. I think you and I probably agree that the net megawatts produced by this stuff is probably not going to be, you know, it’s not going to be huge.
The question is like, will the ability to put your hands on it and fiddle with it and play with it in a DIY way, like Legos in your backyard, is that gonna spark a kind of subculture? Is that gonna spark lot more people to care and get involved? And just be aware, just be aware of solar. I’m curious what you think the, how you think that’s gonna play out.
Shayle Kann: Balcony. Solar, punk. I don’t know. I need to learn more about Germany. Like I, I haven’t spent enough time understanding like what Balcony solar is a huge thing.
David Roberts: gigawatt. Yeah, they got like a gigawatt. So I guess it’s not that small of a, of an, of a net amount. They have like 400 million or something like, or 4 million, I shouldn’t say 400 million. That’s ridiculous. 4 million, something like that. Systems installed from like three years of it being legalized.
So clearly like people like it. So I’m just curious like what the sort of distributed social effects will be of that. I know both of us will be translating and my other backup, which I thought was good, but which you and I are probably not the people to discuss but is China is an over a state of overproduction of batteries and solar panels, which means they’re selling solar panels to their neighbors at just ludicrously low prices, which means countries like Pakistan and Vietnam are just being flooded.
With cheap solar like Pakistan went like, and I think it was like two years or three years, 40% of its total load. Now it has imported solar panels equivalent to 40% of its total load. Give that another two, three years. So I’m very curious. So we’re gonna see what happens when a massive spontaneous upwelling of distributed solar energy meets rickety developing world grids.
How does that resolve itself? Like what happens when Pakistan has enough solar panels that like it’s more than 100% of its total load. You’re gonna get all these problems that grids get with lots of solar, right? Like balance and. Frequency management and inertia and all this stuff. But if all of this is be, is unplanned, like the leaders of Pakistan did not arrange this, they didn’t have anything to do with it.
Same, it’s happening in Africa, it’s happening in Vietnam. So I’m just curious, like what is the spontaneous, unplanned profusion of solar at the ground level due to a country’s electricity system, physically and also just politically, like that’s just a very big change happening very rapidly and we have no idea yet what’s gonna come out of it.
Shayle Kann: Great question. Not one we have time to answer.
David Roberts:We’ll leave you listeners to ponder what’s gonna happen in Vietnam.
Shayle Kann: There we go. David, this was fun. Thanks for doing it again.
David Roberts: Awesome. We’ll do it again, next year.
