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It's an honor to be with you here today.
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And the message I have to deliver
is a simple one,
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which is that clean energy
will win on cost,
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definitively,
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but only if we get out of the way
and allow it to be built.
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Let's focus on that first point.
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Let's look at the cost
of clean energy technology.
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In 1975,
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if you were buying a solar panel
per watt of power that it produced,
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it would cost you 100 US dollars.
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By 2020,
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that cost had declined
to 20 cents per watt of power.
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That's a 500-fold decline.
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This is unlike anything else
ever seen in energy.
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It is unlike anything else ever seen
in physical infrastructure,
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and it continues today,
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and it is likely to continue
for decades to come.
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Now, this has surprised the leading
experts on clean energy
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and even the biggest optimists
on the future of clean energy.
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I should know because I am one
of those leading optimists.
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In 2010, the International Energy Agency,
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the world's foremost
and official experts on energy,
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forecasted that the cost of solar power
would drop like this.
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Now, I came from technology.
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I was a computer scientist,
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and so I looked at the cost of solar
through the lens of Moore’s law,
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exponential decline in cost
as technology scales.
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And so I forecast
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that the cost of solar would drop
at around five times the rate
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that the IEA believed it would.
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Unfortunately or fortunately, I was wrong.
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The cost of solar actually dropped
10 times as fast as the IEA expected
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and twice as fast as I expected.
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Clean energy is a technology.
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This deception in understanding
the pace of cost decline
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has led to a massive underestimation
of the pace of growth.
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Every year, the IEA puts out a forecast
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for how much new solar
will we install per year.
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And you see these colored lines
show you the pace
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at which the IEA believes new solar
will be deployed annually,
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versus the black line, which shows
how fast it's actually been deployed.
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So you see the colored lines
going off to the right,
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those are successive years of forecasts
of annual installations.
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And on the left you have
what amounts to a 30 to 40 percent
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annual growth in installations.
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Note this has happened through
the COVID years,
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note that 2022 will see another
38 to 40 percent growth
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in this market.
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This trend is not limited to just solar.
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It applies to a wide variety
of clean-energy technologies.
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We've seen the price of solar drop
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by a factor of 40
over the last few decades.
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We've seen the cost of wind
drop almost as much,
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and now an accelerating cost decline
in floating offshore wind
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and offshore wind.
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We've seen the cost of batteries
that power our electric vehicles
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and grid energy storage
drop at the same pace
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or faster than the pace of solar.
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And we are just at the very beginning
of an exponential cost decline
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in the cost of using clean
electricity to make hydrogen
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and other fuels that we can use
to power industry,
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to provide weeks or months
of storage on the grid
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and to provide fuels
we can use for aviation,
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for shipping and so on.
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What’s happening here --
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and I won't claim
this is happening quickly enough
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to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius --
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but what's happening here
is that clean energy technologies
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are technologies
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and they drop in cost like technology.
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As they are scaled,
they come down in price.
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Meanwhile, fossil fuels are commodities
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and fossil fuel prices
fluctuate over time.
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This is data from Oxford's Institute
of New Economic Studies,
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which shows the cost of oil,
gas and coal across the bottom there,
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fluctuating over time,
largely remaining flat.
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Whereas here is the cost
of clean energy technologies:
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solar, wind, batteries, power to fuels,
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all of them dropping exponentially.
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In 2010, there was no place on earth
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where clean energy was cheaper
than fossil energy.
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In 2015, we started to see
the first instances of clean energy
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without subsidies being cost-competitive.
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Now we see in more and more
parts of the world
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that it is cheaper to build solar and wind
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than it is to put fuel
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into an already built
and operating coal or gas plant.
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And behind that is the continued
cost decline of batteries and hydrogen,
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which are still expensive
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but will get cheap enough to solve
many of our intermittency issues.
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Now, does that mean we are done
and the problem is solved?
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Not at all.
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We need to go faster.
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And we have a number of barriers.
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Some of these we’ve talked about.
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Critical minerals need to be built out.
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We need a just transition.
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But there's two barriers I want
to talk about in particular,
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which are the reluctance to build --
not in my backyard --
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and the challenges with permitting.
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Because we look at renewables
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and a common complaint
is they take up too much land.
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All of us want clean
energy infrastructure,
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but many of us don't want it
in our backyard.
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Now, solar power is fairly compact.
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Wind power takes more space,
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but that space is co-located
with agriculture.
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Animals graze up to wind turbines,
fields of crops can be grown.
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And yet, despite this,
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in modern nations,
in Europe and North America,
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roughly half of the land in the UK,
in Germany or the US,
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is devoted to agriculture.
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Yet, Germany allows now
two percent of land in Germany
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to be used for wind power.
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The US allows local communities
to block wind power
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even if it's nowhere near them.
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If we want to deploy clean energy,
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we must allow it to actually be built.
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But the even larger problem is this:
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We need to build out the grid.
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We have a perception that clean energy
technologies don't need the grid.
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Solar and wind mean you can be off-grid.
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While that’s easier,
largely the opposite is true.
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Because solar and wind
are weather-dependent,
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they benefit much more
from continent-sized grid
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than do fossil fuels.
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And yet the same NIMBY issues
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and the same permitting issues
plague energy transmission.
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Electricity transmission is ugly,
and why do we need it,
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if we can just go off-grid and local
with these energy technologies?
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Well, here's why we need it.
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This is the sunshine,
the solar resources of Europe.
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The most sun is in the south.
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Of course, the most wind
is in the north, by the way.
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And this is averaged across the year.
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In winter, it is much more dramatic.
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In winter you have one seventh
the solar resource in the UK
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that you have in summer.
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You have one sixth the solar resource
in Germany that you have in summer.
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So every model,
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every simulation of weather
and energy demand shows this.
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It shows that if you want to have
the highest-reliability grid
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at the lowest cost,
with the least carbon emissions
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and the most clean energy deployment,
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you want to build a continent-sized grid.
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In Europe, it would bring wind
from the north,
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primarily the North Sea, but also on land,
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hydro from the Nordics
and solar from the south.
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And these would be countercyclical.
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More sun in the summer,
more wind in the winter.
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This is slightly oversimplified,
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but this is the sort of system
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that would allow Europe
to decarbonize its electricity sector
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with some degree of storage
and hydrogen and so on,
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nearly completely,
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at a lower cost than the system today.
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That same Oxford study I showed you
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says that a rapid transition
to clean energy,
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because the more you deploy,
the cheaper it gets,
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would save us 12 trillion dollars
on the energy system,
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not even counting climate damages.
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Now, could we build such a grid?
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Of course, we have the technology
and the economics.
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In China,
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the bulk of energy demand
is on the East Coast,
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yet, the greatest solar resources
and wind resources are in the interior.
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And China is building literally scores
of high-voltage power lines
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that transmit power
from where the sun and wind are
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to the coasts, where the energy demand is.
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And the longest of these lines right now,
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the Ürümqi to Shanghai line,
is 3,400 kilometers long.
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It is 90 percent efficient,
very low losses,
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and it adds maybe a penny or two
to the cost of electricity.
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That's what's technically feasible
with current technology,
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let alone advances.
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In Europe that would allow us
to transmit electricity
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from Seville to Copenhagen,
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to bring power from the North Sea
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to anywhere in the continent
that needs it.
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In my home country, the United States,
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we could bring power from the sunny,
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wide open areas of New Mexico
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to population and land-dense New York,
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which doesn't get so much sun.
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And we could take wind power
from the Great Plains,
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that are largely devoid of population,
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and bring it to the coasts in winter.
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That is what a modern grid looks like.
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And yet we are not building this.
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Now, let me give you two pieces of data
that will back up my assertions
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about how powerful
these issues of permitting
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and grid build-out are,
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and one more, which is open
competition on cost.
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What state in the United States
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do you believe has the most
combined solar and wind power today
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and has deployed the most solar
over the last year?
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Audience: Texas.
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RN: You are a very smart audience.
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It is the great state of Texas.
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Now, Texas has no
climate policies to speak of.
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It has no incentives
for solar or wind to speak of.
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It does have abundant land
and abundant sun and wind.
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We can't all duplicate that.
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But it has three other things
we should think about.
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One, it has an open market for electricity
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where the cheapest provider wins,
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and that should give us confidence
of what is actually winning.
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Two, permitting in Texas
is relatively easy.
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It's easy to build things,
easy to build fossil infrastructure.
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I don't love that, but it's easy
to build clean infrastructure
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and that's what's winning out.
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And three, Texas is the easiest state
in the United States
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to build electricity transmission.
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Not as easy as I'd like,
but it makes it easy.
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Those last three factors are factors
we can replicate in every nation,
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every state, every geography
on planet Earth.
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And they would accelerate this transition.
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Now, in August of 2022,
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we passed the largest
US climate bill ever,
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Inflation Reduction Act.
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In Europe,
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we have a massive push on clean energy
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as part of the energy crisis
driven by the war on Ukraine.
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Now I want to reveal at the same time
that we failed at something.
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In late September 2022,
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we had a permitting bill
in the United States
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that would have made it
tremendously easier
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to build the continent-sized grid
that we need in the US.
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It also made it easier
to build fossil fuels.
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Yet every analysis showed
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that fundamentally this bill accelerated
the clean energy transition.
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But it was opposed by some people
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because of it making it a bit easier
to build fossil fuels as well.
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The consequence of this
is potentially dire.
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The Princeton REPEAT project,
led by my friend Dr. Jesse Jenkins,
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has analyzed this and said
that up to 80 percent of the benefits
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of the Inflation Reduction Act
may not manifest
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if we can't accelerate the pace
of building transmission.
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That that could amount to
as much as 800 million tons a year
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of carbon emissions in the United States
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that would have been eliminated,
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but that won't be
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because we don't have
the transmission capability
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to bring the cheapest power
to where it's needed
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and boost resilience
and reliability along the way.
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So I believe that a deal
that makes it easier to build,
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even if, to get that bill passed,
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we need to make it a bit easier
to build some fossil infrastructure,
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will win for clean energy
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because clean energy simply wins on cost.
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On a level playing field,
it will dominate the future.
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And so if you have confidence
in this decades-long trend
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that clean energy will economically
disrupt fossil fuels,
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then the logical conclusion
is that we must get out of the way,
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make permitting easier,
and allow it to be built.
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It is time for us to build.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
