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Rob and guest host Jillian Goodman talk atomic politics with Third Way’s Josh Freed.
Rob interviews Ali Zaidi at Yale.
Rob and Jesse talk with Heatmap staffers about why — and how — consumer choices matter.
Inside season 2, episode 6 of Shift Key.
Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Inside season 2, episode 5 of Shift Key.
Maybe you’ve never heard of it. Maybe you know it too well. But to a certain type of clean energy wonk, it amounts to perhaps the three most dreaded words in climate policy: the interconnection queue.
The queue is the process by which utilities decide which wind and solar farms get to hook up to the power grid in the United States. Across much of the country, it has become so badly broken and clogged that it can take more than a decade for a given project to navigate.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob speak with two experts about how to understand — and how to fix — what is perhaps the biggest obstacle to deploying more renewables on the U.S. power grid. Tyler Norris is a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was formerly vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables, and he served on North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper’s Carbon Policy Working Group. Claire Wayner is a senior associate at RMI’s carbon-free electricity program, where she works on the clean and competitive grids team. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Can I interject and just ask why, over the past decade, the interconnection queue got much longer — but also over the past decade, 15 years, the U.S. grid did change in character and in fuel type a lot, right? We went from burning a lot of coal to a lot of natural gas. And that transition is often cited as one of the model transitions, one of the few energy transitions to happen globally that happened at the speed with which we would need to decarbonize. Obviously, switching coal to gas is not decarbonizing, but it is a model — it happened fast enough that it is a good model for what decarbonizing would look like in order to meet climate goals.
Evidently, that did not run into these kind of same interconnection queue problems. Why is that? Is that because we were swapping in within individual power plants? We were just changing the furnace from a coal furnace to a gas furnace? Is that because these were larger projects and so it didn’t back up in the queue in the same way that a lot of smaller solar or wind farms do?
Claire Wayner: I would say all the reasons you just gave are valid, yeah. The coal to gas transition involved, likely, a lot of similar geographic locations. With wind and solar, we’re seeing them wanting to build on the grid and in a lot of cases in new, rather remote locations that are going to require new types of grid upgrades that the coal to gas transition just doesn’t have.
Jesse Jenkins: Maybe it is — to use a metaphor here — it’s a little bit like traffic congestion. If you add a generator to the grid, it’s trying to ship its power through the grid, and that decision to add your power mix to the grid combines with everyone else that’s also generating and consuming power to drive traffic jams or congestion in different parts of the grid, just like your decision to hop in the car and drive to work or to go into the city for the weekend to see a show or whatever you’re doing. It’s not just your decision. It’s everyone’s combined decisions that affects travel times on the grid.
Now, the big difference between the grid and travel on roads or most other forms of networks we’re used to is that you don’t get to choose which path to go down. If you’re sending electricity to the grid, electricity flows with physics down the path of least resistance or impedance, which is the alternating current equivalent of resistance. And so it’s a lot more like rivers flowing downhill from gravity, right? You don’t get to choose which branch of the river you go down. It’s just, you know, gravity will take you. And so you adding your power flows to the grid creates complicated flows based on the physics of this mesh network that spans a continent and interacts with everyone else on the grid.
And so when you’re going from probably a few dozen large natural gas generators added that operate very similarly to the plants that they’re replacing to hundreds of gigawatts across thousands of projects scattered all over the grid with very complicated generation profiles because they’re weather-dependent renewables, it’s just a completely different challenge for the utilities.
So the process that the regional grid operators developed in the 2000s, when they were restructuring and taking over that role of regional grid operator, it’s just not fit for purpose at all for what we face today. And I want to highlight another thing you mentioned, which is the software piece of it, too. These processes, they are using software and corporate processes that were also developed 10 or 20 years ago. And we all know that software and computing techniques have gotten quite a bit better over a decade or two. And rarely have utilities and grid operators really kept pace with those capabilities.
Wayner: Can I just say, I’ve heard that in some regions, interconnection consists of still sending back and forth Excel files. To Tyler’s point earlier that we only just now are getting data on the interconnection queue nationwide and how it stands, that’s one challenge that developers are facing is a lack of data transparency and rapid processing from the transmission providers and the grid operators.
And so, to use an analogy that my colleague Sarah Toth uses a lot, which I really love: Imagine if we had a Domino’s pizza tracker for the interconnection queue, and that developers could just log on and see how their projects are doing in many, if not most regions. They don’t even have that visibility. They don’t know when their pizza is going to get delivered, or if it’s in the oven.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
