Making the case for climate optimism
Kara Miller: I'm Kara Miller.
Robert Stoner: And I'm Rob Stoner.
KM: And this is What if it works?
From the MIT Energy Initiative, this is What If It Works?, a podcast looking at the energy solutions for climate change. I'm Kara Miller and you might know me from the public radio program Innovation Hub, which I hosted, and now I write the Big Idea column for The Boston Globe.
RS: And I'm Robert Stoner, the president of the Kendall Square Project and the former director of the MIT Energy Initiative. Good to see you, Kara.
KM: Good to see you, too. So, let's talk about why we're doing this podcast. And I know you kind of wanted to start off with the story here.
RS: Well, you know, I'm in the business of finding solutions to climate change—finding those low-carbon technologies that are going to enable us to move the economy of the world into a very different place. I'm optimistic about it. I mean, you got to get up in the morning and do this stuff every single day and it's how I feel. But I'm always surprised and disappointed and worried when I see people who, often are young people, are very worried, upset even.
I got into a cab this morning coming back from the airport with a guy who was worried that there wasn't going to be a food if climate change kept on going. Somebody the other day was telling me that they were worried about their house being washed away in a flood. That's not what's going to happen. For one thing, the time frame is a lot longer, and for another thing, we really have a lot of great ideas and technologies that we're moving forward quickly.
KM: So a question about the technology. You're a professional here. I'm not. To what degree do we have the solutions? Are the solutions to climate change still in the labs, still being worked out? Or do they exist, it’s just that people having thrown enough money at the problem and haven't scaled it up?
RS: Yes, yes, and yes. I mean, we have to keep all of these thoughts in our minds, right? Yes, we have maybe not all of the solutions, but we have a lot of solutions and they're good solutions. Yes, people are still in the labs, and they need to be working in the labs. And yes, we're implementing all of these solutions. The problem is that many of them, well, they all require an investment of some kind. Very often they're replacing something that's still perfectly good and we have to throw it away. That has an economic cost. It affects us. It affects how we can live. It affects our ability to apply those resources to other things that would improve our lives in other ways. So, these are nuanced issues, and they have to be approached that way.
In other cases, the technologies are there, but they don't work together well, and we haven't figured out how to put them together in an efficient way. And the obvious example of that is our electricity system where we're trying to add a lot of solar and wind. They don't produce any carbon. They're relatively cheap now and we can put them up everywhere. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, as they say. So, we need batteries and those batteries are too expensive and we need too many of them with the way we operate the system. We're not really adjusting our demand to match that intermittent generation.
KM: So if somebody said to you, you know, here's a bunch of money, but you can only play with the pieces on the chessboard right now, like, we're not going to develop anything more in the lab. We're not going to do any more of the basic research, we’re done with that. Do you think the technology that exists is enough to address climate change?
RS: No.
KM: It’s a big piece of it, but there's a lot more that needs to be done.
RS: Yeah, I mean, I was talking about the electricity system. There's a lot more to the energy system than the electricity system. We use energy in all kinds of ways. We heat our homes with it. You know, I burn natural gas in my apartment in Boston; and in our summer house, we burn wood in the stove. Those things all emit CO2, and they represent a lot more energy than I use, at least in the form of electricity. And so, we have to find ways to replace those, too. So, electrifying everything is a great idea, and at the same time, deploying a lot of zero-carbon electricity generation—solar, wind, nuclear—but we've got to find ways to decarbonize other parts of the transportation system than just personal cars that work pretty well as EVs. We've got to find a way to decarbonize industry. All the things we make that produce CO2, because cement…cement is really a problem, because it not only consumes natural gas to produce the heat that's required, which emits CO2 into the atmosphere, but that chemical reaction that takes place creates CO2. And so we even need a different material in that case.
KM: So I know one of the things we're going to do over the many episodes of this podcast is we're going to look at like all these different technologies, but also funding. But just since you mentioned cement, can we just dive right in? You know, I once had somebody say to me, who invests in green technology, investors like investments they can understand. Something like, you know, electric vehicles are kind of like a sexy technology and like cement, I don't know, not super sexy generally. Do you think that there's a problem where there's a misalignment of what people are throwing money at and what they should be throwing money at?
RS: Absolutely.
KM: Okay, because most of us are just like not there in the backrooms and we don't, I know, people assume that if there's a lot of money being thrown at electric cars, maybe, like that's the problem and that'll solve everything if we switch over.
RS: Well, let me give you a more sophisticated answer than “absolutely.” A lot of the problems that are represented by the things that we need to change right now, like electric cars, are easy to understand. We have cars and we need to not use internal combustion engines anymore and fuel. We need to use electric cars. So, we need batteries. So, an investor can understand that. I have a new battery technology and I want you to invest in it. And they can understand that they can sell those batteries for new cars. But then there are other things that we are going to need in the future for which there aren't currently markets. Things like long duration storage batteries for the grid or, you know, direct air capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Both things we really, really need. But there isn't a big market for them right now.
KM: So the first thing, the long duration storage batteries, is that like a “we captured a whole bunch of solar from this, you know, solar farm in Arizona but we need to put that somewhere so that we can transport it or we can keep it for the nighttime or whatever?” Is that-
RS: Yeah and return it to the grid. Right, exactly, and the more of the grid that is decarbonized with solar and wind, the more storage you need. Now, we're at an early stage though in deploying solar and wind. It's still a relatively small fraction of our total electricity supply. So, we can deal with the intermittency just by turning up and turning down the existing generation systems. We have the gas, and fortunately, with less and less frequency, the coal plants that are still out there.
KM: So just to get back to this hopelessness question. If some of the technology has not been developed, if a lot of it has not been scaled in the way that it should be, if people are not necessarily deploying money towards the right things, and we've already seen these massive heat waves and we've seen the earth heating up, what makes you hopeful? Because that doesn't sound necessarily like a recipe for hope. So, tell me, what makes you…I know you're a very hopeful person, so, what makes you hopeful?
RS: I get up hopeful every day. Well, I think it's a question of thinking about where are we going to get to? I mean, what is the objective here? The bad news is that we're very close to the 1.5-degree threshold that people are concerned about and it's a real threshold. That's not an arbitrary number. It represents a temperature beyond which the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is probably so high that we won't be able to get the temperature back down to where it was earlier in the century. If we go beyond it to two, it kind of hangs around two, and it might float up a little bit and take a long, long time to come back down again. So, this is a sort of a transition that occurs there.
So, what we're trying to do here is stay as close to that threshold as we can, not go far beyond it. And also give ourselves time to adapt to the changes that are going to occur. It's already warmer. It's going to get warmer. Water is going to get higher. People are going to have to move because agricultural productivity is going to shift around. It's not going to go away. And the more time we give ourselves to shift around with that productive capacity and other aspects of the way we live, the less stress there will be on society.
Trying to do it very quickly creates stresses of another kind. And we're all familiar with the life issue that people are confronting in the Midwest that has become a political issue of the decline of industries that use conventional energy. If you push very aggressively to shut those industries down, those people really suffer, and they suffer just exactly in the same way they're going to suffer 100 years in the future as a result of a global temperature rise.
KM: So, you know, one of the big questions I have about this is human behavior and sort of how you innovate around human behavior. It seems like asking people…it's not like vegetarianism is new, for example, and yet when you look at the percentage of Americans that are vegetarian, it's very small. I'm not sure, 5% less, something like that. I also look at the cars around me. I feel like during my lifetime they've gotten really, really big. Now there are just a lot of huge, huge cars. So, I think many people, both who eat meat and who drive big cars, will tell you they do care about the environment. So, I also feel like one of the big questions is, do we have to kind of innovate around human behavior? You know what I mean? Because human behavior seems to be like looking for comfort and looking for what feels good. And it's hard to cut things out of your life.
RS: Yeah, we are the people we are. Somehow, though, we people in North America don't think of things the same way that they do in Europe or in many parts of Asia as well. I mean, they have made choices and we have to make choices, too. It's not necessarily a question of being better. It's a question of being more thoughtful about the choices we have before us and maybe to some extent thinking about our children and their futures.
They don't have to be bad choices, though. It's not like we have to decide to start wearing hairshirts. I mean, EVs are pretty cool. Heat pumps are pretty cool. I mean, energy efficient buildings are pretty cool, and warm, depending on what you need. So, we shouldn't hide from these choices. I mean, society really has to engage with them and get on with it. We develop policy and programs that are, you know, intended to drive people toward these sorts of choices. And you're right, they seem to be kind of ineffective sometimes.
KM: I mean, on the other hand, like when you talk about policies, you think about like the energy saver sticker that you see on washing machines. Like you can also, from a governmental level, I guess, say, California is doing this, “We're only going to sell this kind of car or we're only going to sell cars with this mile per gallon or above. So, whatever you choose, you can choose anything. But 15 miles a gallon you can't choose.”
RS: You're right. You know, President Biden came out recently with a new policy that is trying to constrain car companies to produce cars that are less emitting overall. It's not requiring people to buy electric cars and it's not requiring car companies to make electric cars. It's just saying that, overall, you've got to make cars that have lower emissions as a fleet. You can try to do that and it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It doesn't force people to give up their internal combustion engines. It does sort of push society in a particular direction. And those sorts of standards, which are called “CAFE standards,” have been very effective in cleaning up the American automotive system. We still tend to favor these gigantic cars. You know, the electric Hummer is just sort of a classic example of “what are we thinking?”
KM: So then when you think about human behavior and how science thinks about that and tries to mitigate climate change, when you get together with scientists, what do they say? In terms of…because you actually have to have something for a lot of people, depends on what, if you're a government regulator, it's different, but like if you're creating something that's coming in through the market, you have to have something that people want. So, you're like, “Here, I'm selling this very tiny car,” and people are like, “Yeah, I'm not really that interested.” That's not going to work.
RS: Yeah, but you know, we don't invent cars at MIT. We focus on the technologies that enable cars to run cleaner. And so, we're not trying to make those choices for people. We're in the business of trying to create options for people to be able to choose. But you do have to choose.
I have a colleague—a very close colleague who I won't name—who drove around a Chevy Suburban for many years. An old one, drove it all the way from California to come to MIT to join the faculty. And its license plate was TAXCO2. In other words, I'm not going to make that choice unless there's a policy that forces me to make that choice. And I think the reason is interesting. I'm not going to make that choice myself alone unless I know that everybody else has to make that choice too, and suffer in the same way. And I'm not ready to get rid of my car. My car is not that old. I'm going to hang on to it for a few more years. So, you know, back off about me driving this big car. This is a reality that we live in.
KM: It's interesting about that issue of the carbon tax, because I talked to a couple of economists, a Republican and a Democrat, a few years ago, and what shocked me was that they agreed there should be a carbon tax. And as far as I can tell, there is zero traction on any sort of carbon tax. Like in national politics, I can imagine, people just don't really like taxes. That doesn't seem like an idea that's getting off the ground, but it just shocked me was that people, like academics on either side of the aisle, were like, “Yeah, it's obvious we should totally do that.”
RS: It is obvious. I mean, it's the obvious thing to do. If you tax CO2 emissions, then you know, people will emit less and that's exactly what you should do. We do use the tax system, but we use it to provide tax credits. You know, we've got this system now of carrots, no sticks, as provided by these two major pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which is not bipartisan, and the Inflation Reduction Act isn't very inflationary reduction either.
KM: They're good at naming things in DC. Accurate naming.
RS: You know, the federal government said, that's the way we're going to go. We're going to try to incentivize people to do the right thing. At the state level, we have applied not necessarily taxes, but we've applied mandates that say you got to have this much zero-carbon electricity in your system. And it's possible to trade in renewable energy credits that are created through those mandates to do something like apply a tax to the industry and force it to go in a certain direction. They've been very effective.
The Canadians do have a carbon tax and it's one that's going to wind itself up to something like 170 bucks a ton by 2030. So, it's a very aggressive carbon tax. And I was talking to a Canadian yesterday who was complaining about it, so it must be doing something. The Europeans are about to implement something called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, CBAM, which is going to tax the CO2 associated with products imported into the EU.
KM: Cars or washing machines or whatever?
RS: Yeah, “China, you're going to make that product that we're trying to make in the EU? We're going to tax carbon in the EU. We're going to tax your products as they come into the EU unless you're going to either clean them up so they don't have very much carbon in them or tax them yourselves.” We're going to see more of that. And that kind of thinking, I think, is sort of almost dangerously, but intriguingly aligned with this sort of tariff enthusiasm that certain political candidates have demonstrated.
KM: So, let me ask you a little bit about China and India. Actually, I've been hearing a ton about China making electric cars that are a fraction the price of what we have here, but we don't have them here because of tariffs.
RS: They have them in Europe. They’re showing up.
KM: Yeah, there's just a lot of protectionism, at least with cars here. But I think one thing, you know, we were talking about this question of hope and do you have hope? On the question of climate, I think for a lot of people, China and India loom large in, you know, a lot of people together, almost 3 billion people, and they both have rising middle classes that want things like air conditioners (not surprisingly, it's hot) and washing machines and like the things we have. So, it's hard to say don't have those things because they are very energy hungry while we live in like 3,000 square foot homes and have air conditioners. But like, again, to this question of hope, isn't it kind of worrisome that so many people are sort of moving up to the middle class and wanting energy hungry appliances?
RS: But that's a good thing!
KM: It is good of course!
KM: But it’s sort of like a tension, right?
RS: Yeah, it's a tension. I mean, jeez. I mean, the situations that they're emerging from of grotesque poverty are the sorts of things we fear in our future as a result of climate change. So, trying to persuade them not to economically develop so that we won't have a problem in the future is absurd and it's offensive to them.
KM: And a losing proposition. Probably nobody is holding them by that.
RS: Totally. And we have in large part exported our manufacturing- related emissions to these low-income countries; to at the same time, turn around now and sort of insist that they decarbonize themselves, mindlessly, is unfair. We need to encourage them to decarbonize themselves and develop low-carbon economies, but we're going to have to pay them to do it. We're going to have to either pay more for the products so that they can have carbon taxes within their own borders, or we're going to have to literally make transfers via the multilateral and bilateral development banks, the World Bank, USAID, and other organs of the U.S. government, to make it possible for them to invest in these technologies when they have the option to invest in dirtier technologies that cost less. That's a really hard thing to do and talk about a political problem.
KM: Which of those things, if either or both, do you see happening? You think about Walmart and how many things at Walmart are made in China, and you go in to buy your blender or your bike or whatever, does that mean it's truly going to be more expensive because we're saying like, we have to add on the toll that's taking on the environment? Or are we just going to transfer money to people and say, “here, this is to scale up this technology”?
RS: I think things are going to get more expensive.
KM: Okay. The blender is going to get more expensive.
RS: In the near term, I mean, at very least, even if these new technologies cost less or the same as the technologies they're replacing. Very often those technologies still have a lot of useful life in them.
KM: Which new technologies?
RS: Like a coal generation plant in China, for example, was built ten years ago.
KM: Okay.
RS: That plant should last for 30 or 40 years. For them to turn that plant off means somebody is not going to repay his bank loan that they used to build that plant in the first place. So, who's going to pay it? The government has to pay it? Or somehow people who buy electricity will have to absorb that financial burden through the electricity rates that they pay so that it can be paid off? The debt doesn't go away. And so, this limits it and introduces a sort of viscosity into the rate at which we can we can force these changes to happen. There literally isn't enough money in the world. So, A) make stuff cheaper, B) make choices in society about where we're going to apply the scarce resources that we can muster only to climate change mitigation? What about education and roads? What about health care? What about space exploration? Telecommunications? And all the other things we got to do? They're hard choices.
KM: So if we just go back to the coal-fired power plant in China that's being used to, you know, make our blenders, let's say, and the person who owns it is doing fine, making money, who is going to be the person who says, “I know we can get 20 more years out of this, but it is like ruining the planet. We should not do this.”
RS: Well, it has to be probably the government, and the government has to come to terms with that.
KM: And would they do that?
RS: Maybe.
KM: Or why would they do that?
RS: Well, because they begin to worry about the impact of climate change. And I think maybe they begin to worry about things like CBAM and the fact that they may no longer be able to sell their goods abroad, which would have a tremendously deleterious effect on their economies.
But there are other things they can do as well, and this is the kind of stuff we are working on at MIT and people are working on at other places. You can look at that coal plant and say, well, what else can I do with that coal plant? Maybe I can find a way for it to continue to be a productive asset, but burn something else. Maybe it can burn biomass, and I can grow more biomass, and it will absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and I can use it in that plant. That has happened in a sort of a way in Europe, and it's possible up to some level. There's probably not enough biomass to get very far in dealing with that problem.
You could look at gas plants, you know, which we have a great many of in this country and say, well, maybe we could burn something other than gas in that gas turbine. Maybe we could substitute ammonia, which doesn't contain carbon. And when it burns, it doesn't produce CO2. It produces other stuff that you have to mitigate, but maybe there are other zero-carbon fuels we can find a way to use in those plants and other plants to make those assets work longer and reduce that burden. The Japanese are very, very intent on this. They live in a world where they have basically no primary energy resources other than sun and wind.
KM: Right. They're not going to like drill for oil. They don't live in Texas…
RS: Yeah, they’ve got no oil. Not even that much coal. No natural gas. So, they're importing all these fossil fuels and that's very, very burdensome and very, very different from the situation in this country. We've got enormous amounts of gas. We're the biggest gas producer in the world—biggest exporter of gas in the world now. So, they're very motivated to find other ways to generate power and to use assets.
We're working with one of the Japanese power manufacturers trying to figure out how to retrofit machinery around the world that they make to run on ammonia instead of natural gas. That kind of innovation is really, really important, and it's coming from outside the United States. It's driven by their shortage of options.
The transformation of our energy systems is very, very different in every country. We all have a different set of resources, different sun and wind, different economies, and each will take its own path. The nature of innovation, which is in part new technologies, but also in part systems and how things go together, will be driven by these very local needs and we need to be watching. It's a very important driver of international cooperation.
KM: Let me just go back to this question about India and China. You've been involved so much in international discussions about climate change. I know China is the number one emitter right now, more than twice I think what the U.S. emits, though, I should say, on a per capita basis. We still emit quite a bit.
RS: We win.
KM: Yeah, exactly. If that’s a prize you want to win, then yes. Do you hear from those countries? I mean, you were talking about Japan before and it's just a much richer country, I'm guessing, on a per capita basis than China. What do you hear from those countries? Do they care about climate change? Because there are pressing issues; you have to care if people are going to eat next week before you care if things are going to be too hot five years from now. You know?
RS It depends on the country. I mean, we're talking about rich countries. We're talking about Japan. It's still a very, very large, heavily industrialized economy, very highly educated population, very high standard of living. They are motivated to mitigate climate change.
KM: You think so. Both of those countries?
RS: I mean, they're looking at the temperature increases and they're saying, “Jeez, this is going to cause real disruption in our country if we have to suddenly start shifting things around and people have to relocate and our agricultural system falls apart.” I mean, that's bad.
KM: Oh and people are dying during heat waves.
RS: They’re into it, right? We don't have to persuade countries like Japan that they need to do something about climate change, but their options are very constrained. They not only have very limited primary energy resources, if they decided to continue to burn fossil fuels, they don't have anywhere to put the CO2 if they somehow find a way to capture it and want to, say, sequester it in the ground using a technique called “carbon capture and sequestration,” which we've been developing in America and it's been developed in other countries as well. They'd have to actually pay someone to take their captured CO2 away to another country and put it into a geological formation that would accept it. They’re also anti-nuclear.
So these countries have very, very constrained options and they really do need to be creative, to be innovative, to find new ways to put them together. You know, it's a painful thing in the near term, but in the longer term, it just might turn out to be a driver of innovation that makes them leaders in the world's future economy. And we need to look out for that in America. I mean, it's tempting here to just throw big trade barriers and, you know, keep Chinese products out and raise our tariffs on them, and Japanese products, favor our own car industry.
Last time we favored our own car industry with that sort of policy, we ended up with really lousy, expensive cars and we still haven't even worked our way out of that problem. So, we risk cutting ourselves off from the flow of global innovation. And I have to tell you, there's a lot going on in India as well. I mean, this is a country with very uneven primary energy resources. It's got a lot of coal, very dirty coal, some people call it mud, which they burn and it produces not only a lot of CO2 because it burns inefficiently—you’ve got to burn a lot more of it to get the same amount of energy out—but it also throws out a lot of ash and contributes to a lot of the air pollution problems they have in India.
They don't have any natural gas and not much to speak of. That's all imported. They've got a lot of people and amazingly, over the last ten years, they've managed to connect all of those people to the electricity system. When I was working in India in the mid 2000s, 60% of Indians didn't have access to the grid. And then it became 40% and then 20% and the government got very serious about it. Now everybody's connected, but the system is dominated by coal generation.
So, they've now got growing demand. People are getting richer, accustomed to using electricity for stuff like air conditioning that they didn’t used to have, and they've got to deal with it very urgently. And so, they're also looking at co-firing with zero-carbon fuels in existing facilities, but they're really looking at solar and wind. And here you have a country that's very motivated to do this and a very large, educated engineering workforce, a very large low-cost labor force, and they're finding ways to do solar projects, onshore at least, wind projects that are much less expensive than we know how to do.
KM: That's really interesting.
RS: And so they can begin to do things at a scale that we're unaccustomed to seeing. It’s really interesting to think about that then spilling over into their manufacturing industry and suddenly we've got a country with a growing manufacturing base that's got a clean energy system and they're exporting.
KM: Actually, there was this line that you said just a couple of minutes ago that really caught me and I have to go back to it. I think you said something like, the U.S. risks cutting itself off from global innovation or something? Here we are, 2024. We've had a Democrat in the White House for three years and in general, Democrats are a lot more…care a lot more about climate change or even talk a lot more about climate change…
RS: Some Democrats.
KM: Some Democrats. So, I mean, really? We risk cutting ourselves off from global innovation?
RS: Whenever you start trying to subsidize things, I mean, trying to do even the right thing or throw up trade barriers, you're distorting the economy. You're making it possible to do something that didn't used to be possible. Okay, fine, but that does carry risks, because you're also reducing the competitiveness of the companies that begin doing those things. They’re getting paid to do them. Whereas companies that do the same thing or want to do the same thing in other countries may not be getting paid to do them. So, they've got to really push hard on innovation and finding ways to get the costs down. What tends to happen is the rate of innovation can be faster in those countries, and at the end of the day, you can’t subsidize forever at high rate or the subsidies are simply overwhelmed by the cost advantage that obtains elsewhere. You end up with lousy stuff that costs more.
KM: You mentioned the auto sector. Do you feel we have too much protections in the auto sector?
RS: Well, we have. I think we got over that. But my point was that it just takes a long time to catch up once you, you know, fall behind.
KM: But we're still not getting those like Chinese, I mean, like Europe has these electric cars from China.
RS: BYD
KM: I mean, I think these things are like $12,000 for pretty nice SUVs. They are all electric. I mean, you just could not walk into any auto dealership and get anything close to that price for anything close to that sort of level of quality.
RS: Right. No, you got to, of course, ship those cars over here on a ship and that adds cost. But right, we could manage to make those cars very expensive here to make room for our car industry to develop and thrive and that's fine for a while. But after a while, you're supporting sort of a not very healthy, not very innovative car industry if you aren't careful. My point is not that we shouldn't have these subsidies. We've got to somehow jumpstart this kind of activity, but it does create these sorts of risks.
KM: Let’s just talk about, in some ways we're talking about the future. But part of that future is what's already baked in in terms of climate change. And I know one thing that we'll talk about on future episodes, in addition to like all this green technology—and, you know, we talked about solar panels, wind, how can we make batteries that are better—there's also this whole other category, right, of, “okay, well, things are getting hotter. How do you live with that?” You know, whether it's sea waters rising or whatever. I just wonder how you think about that, because that seems like a pretty real problem, even if like tomorrow we really were able to accomplish a lot.
RS: Yeah, well, these two things are going on at the same time. One is sort of mitigating the risks as best we can by developing low-carbon technologies that will deliver less CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in the near term. But, you know, temperature is rising and it will continue to rise even if we stop emitting CO2 tomorrow because there's this momentum in the atmosphere and in the climate. But that will give us more time, and it’s more time to adapt. So, there's this other force called adaptation that we need to be thinking about increasingly now. Technologies like temperature resistant or drought resistant crops. The ability to engineer waterways so that we can reroute water and try to protect our coasts, dikes, coastal reinforcements.
KM: I mean, I hear people talking about sea wall sometimes. Like you have to choose what parts of New York or Boston or Shanghai or whatever that you need to protect...
RS: Yeah, we see that, you know, and if sea level rises by a meter or two in a year, we couldn't possibly build those dikes fast enough to preserve our environment. If it takes fifty years, we got a shot. And so reducing emissions now, while it might seem sort of hopeless, is really important because it stretches that timeline and it's all about balancing mitigation and adaptation.
KM: I guess a final question about money, I know there are venture capitalists out there who are pouring money into green technologies. Obviously, the government has done this with varying levels of success. I remember times during the Obama administration where people were like, look, this went wrong. And you know, but sometimes it really has been successful. Universities are working on stuff. Is there a huge deficit of money? Is there plenty of money but not enough good stuff to throw it at? Like, give me a sense of what the money situation looks like.
RS: Well, we've gone through a couple of waves of venture capital in renewable energy. The first one was in this sort of mid-2000s through 2010/12 or so on. And a lot of money was thrown at technologies for which there was no demand, or very little demand. And the result was that a lot of those investments were kind of disappointing and that created a lull.
But we're back into a period in which there is a lot of investment and there are a lot of really good ideas emerging and demand is also emerging for those technologies. As we know, we get more sun and wind on the grid. We got more demand for storage all of a sudden as the government begins to subsidize hydrogen production, as they have through the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, suddenly there's a lot more demand for high quality, efficient electrolyzers—the devices that use electricity to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen. So, we're going to this other, this new, I think, very important wave. There's a lot of chaff. There's so many inventions coming at us that sometimes it's hard to know which ones are worth funding. And, you know, may the smartest venture capitalist win in that battle. But a lot of money will get wasted.
KM: Isn’t that how it always works? No, it isn’t? Okay.
RS: The risk return ratio is high in these things but there really are some great ideas and they should give us all hope and we're going to talk about these over the course of the next many episodes. I think one of the most exciting ones is fusion, magnetic fusion, sometimes called nuclear fusion, but it is a different nuclear technology from the one we're all familiar with that uses uranium to generate electricity and also produces a lot of uranium waste in the process that we're not really good about dealing with, in my opinion.
KM: This is the kind of waste that they put in, like Yucca Mountain and Nevada…
RS: Yeah, well, they don't put it in the Yucca Mountain is the problem.
KM: But they’ve discussed putting it in the mountain and probably neighbors are like, “we don't really want to be near this waste.”
RS: Yucca Mountain, in law, is our national repository, but you don't really put stuff there because there's resistance in Nevada to using it for those purposes. There's concern about transporting nuclear waste along railroads and so what we do is we leave it in the parking lots of nuclear power plants or in the cooling pools above nuclear reactors in those power plants without really the near-term intention, at least, to move it away. It's not unsafe, but it doesn't look very tidy and it doesn't make a convincing demonstration that we're kind of on it and I think that probably contributes to public resistance to conventional nuclear power.
We've got to have conventional nuclear power and there's a lot of work that's going on in labs, but in companies as well, that will enable us to have very advanced nuclear reactors that really are very, very safe operationally. We've got to build them, small modular reactors maybe can be built in a factory environment in a much more repeatable way and as a result, maybe a little less expensively, are also emerging and they're being subsidized by the government to push it forward as fast as they can. The Canadians are making, you know, real strides, but we've got to figure out that waste problem.
The Finns have built a repository of a kind that's been suggested for the United States by Americans. It's called mid-term storage. Storage that will be very safe geologically for periods of centuries; it’s not long enough, we need maybe thousands of years, but long enough for us to put it out of harm's way and think about what those multi-thousand-year solutions might be.
So that's great and it's moving and I hope we transition on to that track here, but at the same time, magnetic fusion and other forms of fusion, not fission, which combine light nuclei together to release energy, are advancing rapidly. This is technology that people began working on in the 50s, in the UK and in the U.S. and in Russia.
KM: I think I heard somebody joke that this is the kind of technology that was always thirty years away.
RS: Fifty!
KM: Fifty! Whatever, you know, it was like every time you asked it didn't get any closer, but it seems like now it really is getting closer. Here in Massachusetts, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has taken over an old military base, right?
RS: Yeah, they leveled it and created a new reactor. They are building what I think will be the world's first functioning magnetic fusion reactor.
KM: When do you imagine that it maybe would come into use?
RS: Well, it will be a demonstration initially. In my understanding is that within something like two years, they will have a functioning unit sitting there that will be producing more energy than it consumes from the electric grid. That ratio is called the “Q,” so the amount out divided by the amount in. We've never crossed a Q of one in the world in fusion, yet they're aiming to be able to operate at Qs of between 10 and 20 in the future. And that's all about making these plants work very efficiently, learning how to control the systems that make them work.
These fusion reactors have two major systems. One is a superconducting magnet system that's used to confine the plasma of burning deuterium and tritium, and the other one is a cryogenic system that's used to keep that magnet cold. They're both very expensive systems, and together they constitute the majority of the cost of the fusion reactor. And these things all have to be put together along with the containment system that captures the energetic neutrons released by that reaction, and then the energy has to be transferred somehow through a series of heat exchangers into a power plant that will produce electricity. That's all going to take a lot of time, and the materials problems associated with those subsystems are very complex and they in some measure will gate how quickly we can bring those systems to bear in practice.
We're at the point now where we have demonstrated the magnets we need. And this is a breakthrough that occurred at MIT using high-temperature superconductors for the first time to produce magnets of the size and strength that are required for that confinement. And that's what triggered the massive investment that the fusion industry has received, but Commonwealth Fusion Systems in particular has benefited from this, enabled them to go forward as though this is a venture-fundable business, which is where we started this discussion. So, this is a startup of sort of epic scale.
KM: And is it a game changer? Do you think, in terms of like creating energy in the U.S. or around the world?
RS: Kara, this is the thing that could change everything. If we can really make fusion work, if we think we can make it work affordably and if we can make it safely, we think we can make it work safely—it’s inherently much, much safer than fission—then this could be the technology that enables us to really decarbonize the whole world. It won't happen the day after we get that reactor working in two years. We’ll have a reactor that actually generates electricity—this will only generate heat—but a reactor that generates electricity within about five years after that, and we’ll meter it out onto the grid. That will be another sort of experiment/prototype but then they'll begin developing commercial reactors that will be sold kind of in the middle of the next decade into the next decade and those things could go to scale by the middle of the century.
KM: I guess it speaks to something we were talking about at the very beginning, which is like, putting a lot of bets out there because you don't actually know when you say like, this could be a game changer, but we don't know. And it could really be amazing, but there's stuff that sort of is to be determined still about it and there's probably a bunch of really, really good bets out there and maybe some not so good bets, but you have to kind of go in and start placing them, right?
RS: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, God bless the venture capital community and a lot of established companies that really see themselves having to transition into these new systems, new forms of energy in order to transition their businesses. God bless them for investing the billions they're investing in these technologies. Fusion alone as a class of technologies has attracted over $6 billion worth of investment in the last few years, globally. Two billion of that has gone to Commonwealth Fusion Systems. But there are 40 some, maybe 45, other fusion companies in the world—25 of them in the United States—trying to do fusion in similar ways or in some cases very different ways and it's created a tremendous amount of excitement. And believe it or not, we now don't just have fusion 50 years in the future the way we did, we actually have a competition to be there first.
KM: So, I mean, sort of looking ahead for us: We're going to talk fusion. We're going to talk wind. We're going to talk solar. We're going to talk a whole bunch of different technologies—batteries, obviously. But I think we're also, one of the things I want to dive into a little bit is the economics of this. I mean, sort of looking at all these things like, how do we get from here to there and what technologies are going to take us there? What economic approaches are going to take us there or are holding us back? We kind of talked about the carbon tax and everything and I mean, I think that's our goal, right, is to think, “how do you get there?” and like start breaking that down for people in a way that they can understand.
RS: What if it works?
KM: Yeah, exactly. There we are.
RS: So we have all of these technologies, and they're advancing and they're advancing at different speeds and in different places. We have gaps. We have to figure out how to do stuff with electricity that we don't currently do with electricity—a lot of industrial processes, a lot of transportation processes. You ever see an electric airplane? You ever see an electric jet? No. But they’re starting to be electric freighters out there on the oceans. They're starting to be methanol-powered freighters out there on the oceans. Maybe there'll be ammonia-powered freighters out there on the oceans. Stuff is advancing; we have to figure out how to put it together and make the new economy work with all of these different ingredients. We have to train people and that, unfortunately, is a generational problem and that's, again, an aspect of dealing with it.
KM: Right.
RS: And still being optimistic. One of my sort of rules of thumb is that to replace the energy infrastructure of a country costs about a GDP of that country.
KM: Like a whole year of them earning money, all the stuff.
RS: Like the value of transactions.
KM: Right.
RS: Everything goes into it for a year. Obviously, you can't do that. People can't eat. Nothing else happens. So how fast can you do it? Well, we currently spend something like a couple of percent of GDP on energy infrastructure.
KM: Okay.
RS: So that would be 100% divided by 2% a year. So that's 50 years. And that's kind of the natural rate of turnover of the energy systems infrastructure. And that lesson is pretty much true everywhere. Fifty years is too long. One year is way too short, though. So, the right answer is somewhere in the middle. So how far can we push our economy to make stuff happen sooner? Is the answer 20 years? Maybe it is for the United States. Is it 50 years? Maybe it is for India. What is it for China? I don't know. It's getting to be rich. A lot of industrial capacity there, a lot of motivation to move quickly. We don't know. We need to stretch it and we need to adapt.
KM: Well, I look forward to continuing this conversation and keep asking those questions. And just to ask, “What if it works?” We'll look at all the things that are currently working and may work in future.
RS: It's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it.
KM: What If it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen and remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy Initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I'm Kara Miller.
RS: And I'm Rob Stoner.
KM: Thanks for listening.
