Episode 180: The Clean Energy Transition & How We Get There with Google's Ross Koningstein
Today's guest is Ross Koningstein, Director Emeritus at Google. We cover many climate topics in this discussion, from nuclear energy as a climate solution to carbon offsets and the role of the oil & gas industry in the clean energy future to mobilizing folks to care about climate. We also explore Ross's role at Google and why he is a techno-optimist.
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Why is it that people that grow up in close proximity to nuclear, why do some of them go to the direction of being acclimated and being comfortable and being used to it and being excited by it and then others of them grow up so allergic to it when the proximity is the same?
Well, I don't know. I mean, fear works in interesting ways, but I'm speaking with some of my colleagues here in the US who have never been to a nuclear power plant. You can only imagine what goes on in there. And the media keeps repeating that it's scary and that it's terrible. And you just don't have any positive evidence really that you could say, "Oh, well, I've spoken with the people who operate these plants, or these plants are the cleanest power plants I've ever seen."
And you know, it's like, okay, waste is bad, but you know, if we put our effort into it, we can detoxify it or get rid of it or whatever. It's just that if you think it's all bad, then you wanna just stay away from it and have less of it, you know. It's tough. The movie Pandora's Promise, which I worked on years ago, one of the reasons that we wanted to put that movie together was to start these conversations between people.
People who were, let's call it, not rabid pro-nuclear people, but people who were like, "Hey, why don't we consider nuclear," and people who were against it, but they didn't really have enough information, knowledge, or even wisdom to have a basis for that fear. And if you can have a conversation about that, then you can explore a space where there actually is a future for advanced nuclear energy, as opposed to saying, "Now we should shut this down forever."
While you had a job at Google that was not climate and energy-focused, yet you were hungry to start gathering this information, was this nights and weekends? Was it books? Was it the internet? I mean, how did you get yourself up the learning curve?
Well, my years on the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal effort had already taught me a lot of things about the structure and the way energy and policy works. And the project I was working on at the time when I was going through this change was actually still an energy project, but it was looking at a very specific problem, a useful one, but it wasn't tackling what I then believed to be the bigger problems like how do we pull CO2 back to 350 PPM? Or how do we avoid some of the worst aspects of climate change.
Instead of looking at energy as this is what we want people to adopt or force people to adopt, what are people likely to adopt and how do we create more of that? And that was really where my mind went. And it's when I started spending more time actually looking at scientific publications, looking at what is at the edge of research that might actually become useful, and thinking about, for example, the nuclear fusion, right?
People make annoying jokes about it always being on the horizon, but the reality is that it's an engineering problem. It's a difficult one, but there are people that are working on it really hard. And if I could crisp it down to this one kind of notion, it's like we have these people that are really trying to make something work.
How could Google accelerate their progress in order to create a better future? And that's really how my mind was framing it. And then it was like... The problem became two separate problems. One was, how could I get resources within Google to make that happen? And other is what could those efforts look like?
So what was the initial theory of change? And then how did you solve that chicken and egg of needing to show evidence of, of it working to get the resources, but needing to have resources to show evidence of it working?
Oh, that's a great question. I think that that kind of chicken and egg problem is, you don't have it when there is an alignment of vision between some key decision-makers. So if you've got a couple of people, let's say, if there's a mandate in a part of the org to make a difference in energy for the future, then you've already got a hook, right? And then it's the case of every company has something like this.
It's like, if we're gonna spend time and money on this, then why should we do it? Why should it be done at all? And why should we do it now? You know, 'cause it sort of figures out this fit. If it needs to be done, but there's no way for a company to do it well at all, then it really doesn't make any sense. So it's this little Venn Diagram intersection of things.
And I think that's part of what makes the whole climate thing interesting is that what Google could do, for example, to partner with this fusion company to help them is what was in Google's wheelhouse, but there are other companies working on other neat things that have problems that might actually fit into other tech companies' wheelhouse.
So it would be fun for people in general to say, "Oh, you know, if there's a company doing some form of fusion that they like, are they experiencing a type of problem because of the way that they are approaching it, that maybe somebody who's doing large scale CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, or somebody who's doing really sophisticated high-speed control systems, maybe that is their avenue to accelerating that type of energy."
If you think about breakthrough new technologies versus better deploying what we've got, or if you think about this technology versus that technology, or if you think about technology in general versus policy, are you more focused on finding singular solutions that can have outsized impacts? Or is it more looking at the system overall and figuring out how to get the system to transition faster? Or both?
It's kind of at the intersection of those two, you know. Like if you look at Drawdown, for example, there are literally hundreds of things that one could do. But categorically, if you look at what it takes to really move the needle on the climate change experience for people in the next, let's call it, century, energy transition requires real solutions for the grid and real solutions for fuel.
Options like for fuel to make fertilizer or stationary applications, and then a solution for portable power applications. So each of those problems is hard and they're kind of different economically and technically. And then carbon sequestration to remove over a 1,000 gigatons, we need to do that in a way that costs almost no money and has almost no environmental detriment to the planet.
That's an interesting set of challenges right there. And there, there aren't too many paths that you can go down that would get there. And there's so little money that's going into that, that, that is an area of concern that I have that I would, I would love to remedy. And so, yeah, it's the scale, like I would say in carbon sequestration, there are things that operate at the gigaton level, that might be useful for making synthetic fuels and, you know, creating a circular economy in the fuel system.
But at the 1,000 gigaton level, it's not a collection of one-gigaton solutions that solves that problem. It's actually... You need something that its baseline of operation needs to be in the multiple gigatons. And biology is really the only one that we know of that can do that.
So I wanna come back to something we were talking about before about you can't just will the transition to happen in 20 or, or 30 years and how it takes time to play out on the fuel side and on the electrification side. What are the biggest barriers or gaps or knots or things that are holding back that transition from occurring practically?
I think the answer to that is different for almost every little slice of the pie you look at, for example, phasing out liquid fuels for automobiles faces a whole hurdle of challenges many of which are... Like, for example, let's look at fire trucks and ambulances. Let's say we wanted to make them carbon-free and electrify them.
Well, that actually conflicts with a need in those services to be available to send those trucks anywhere, anytime and if they need to be refueled in order to get somewhere further, that needs to happen without delaying their arrival time. That sector would be almost folly to decarbonize anytime soon, anyway, because the risk to life and limb is much worse than the gain you would get by the small CO2 savings you would see.
On the electric grid, for example, if we mandated going over to, you know, renewable storage, I think we would see pretty rapidly that the cost of incorporating the storage would be really a problem, especially when you, you wanna figure out how do I, you know, keep the grid working in the middle of the winter when solar isn't so high here in California.
And each one of these situations is very interesting because if you want to conclusively prove that something can be done, you don't wanna take something to the quarter way point and then make an argument that that could take it to the 100% point. What you wanna do is you wanna take a sizable representative set, like let's say a medium-size city in Arizona or one in North Dakota, and disconnect it from the grid and put in an alternate solution that you think would work and then see, what does it practically take to make that happen?
And once you've done that and you've worked through the kinks, then you can say, "Here is what 100% solution looks like." And I think this is something that is missing from the planning process. And it's why I say you can't just force something to 100%. You need to show people that it can be done and that it can be done economically because if you don't, you're gonna be fighting people who are gonna doubt that every step of the way.
So have you given any thought to structurally what we might do to try to foster environments for that type of proof point to happen more frequently across more areas in a more timely way?
Oh, that's a great question. The role of policy and I guess the willingness to experiment together, are really important components to making that work. You can't conduct an experiment like this in an area that doesn't want to incur some of the downsides on the path to getting maybe where you're happy in a medium.
And on the policy side, whenever you make a transition, that means investing in new types of infrastructure investing in change and that costs money. If you're asking for people to go through the problem and cough up all the money personally within their little area, that's probably not a great thing either. So the role for federal or state dollars there I think is also pretty important.
Before we started recording, we talked about how there are certain words that are kind of these generalized hot button words that are polarizing just to say them. And one of those words, which we didn't talk about, is sacrifice. So one question I have for you is, or two questions, what role should sacrifice play in the energy transition? And then a follow-up is what role do you think realistically that it will play? And those might be the same answer. I don't know.
That is a really tasty question. If you don't mind, I'd like to frame it using a slightly different, but parallel word, which is care. So I'll use the example of airline travel. So in order to reduce my carbon footprint, you know, I don't travel all that much, but realistically I wouldn't probably travel super a lot anyway. But let's say you were to say, "How much would I sacrifice in my travel?"
And when I was younger, I might answer, "Oh, you know, I'd be willing to sacrifice a fair amount and, and not travel much at all." But now that I'm, you know, a little older, my daughter has moved to the East Coast and my wife and I are certainly going to visit her, and our parents are getting old in Canada and we're certainly going to visit them.
And so it's not like we don't care about the environment, but the things that we care about in terms of our family and connections, rank higher. And so we are not willing to make that sacrifice of cutting down on our aviation in order not to see our daughter or not to see our parents, and I think this is like a very personal story.
I'm sure people can come up with very rational or perhaps rationalized stories for themselves, but it explains some of the reasons why it's hard to get to 100% reduction, for example, in aviation or 100% reduction of gasoline automobiles, or name these other things that people can care about something to an extreme amount, for a limited potion of their lives, I believe.
And so a durable solution is one that allows us to have a behavior that ultimately we value at the goal level, like being carbon-free, but that we don't really need to think about it so much. It doesn't constrain our behavior that much. I think that's what a successful solution really looks like.
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