SPEAKER_00: TED Audio Collective.
It's TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Heu.
What happens when clean energy initiatives collide with bureaucratic red tape? Climate innovation leader Rich Powell has seen it.
And he illustrates the conflict in his 2023 talk from the TED Countdown Summit,
while suggesting what needs to be done to accelerate the clean energy transition. After the break.
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SPEAKER_01: When I was a junior in college, from the back row of a darkened auditorium, I listened to the CEO of a clean energy developer describe an amazing new technology that could produce a lot of clean electricity and reduce a lot of emissions. It was a project called Cape Wind, an audacious plan to drive 130 massive offshore turbines
to the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Supplying enough clean electricity to supply more than 300,000 homes and eliminate the need for a mid-sized emitting power plant. It was one of those moments that inspired me to a career in clean energy and climate policy. Now in the 20 years since that night, we could have built literally thousands of those turbines
up and down the U.S. East Coast.
But instead, we have built literally six total turbines in the U.S. East Coast.
Now that's because a combination of wealthy coastal landowners, both liberals and conservatives, don't like those turbines spoiling the views from their sunset cocktail parties.
Who knew they could agree on anything?
Now, Cape Wind had broad public support. More than 80% of Massachusetts residents were in favor. Probably because they realized that siting the turbines 12 miles offshore
makes them barely even visible to the naked eye. But the project was stymied, using regulations designed by environmentalists
to protect the environment, instead used by a wealthy few to protect their views.
Tragically, Cape Wind is far from unique. Regulations and lawsuits have been used to slow down or stop hundreds of clean energy projects in this country, from renewables like geothermal to solar to hydro to new nuclear plants to pipelines carrying captured carbon dioxide to new transmission lines. Many of those projects have been killed.
Many others are still stuck in permitting purgatory. Now there is some good news.
Recently, alumni of Cape Wind have teamed up with a massive global energy developer and are finally going to put steel in the water off the coast of Massachusetts later this year. But only after overcoming, I quote, countless regulatory hurdles.
To take a step back, we have many of the technologies, the engineers, even the policies
to drive down global emissions and solve the climate challenge. But what keeps me up at night is that government red tape combined with NIMBY, that's not in my backyard,
opposition will get in the way. Now, like literally right now, government needs to get out of the way
and let the private sector build clean energy. And as for the rest of us environmentalists, we all need to say a lot more yes than no in the coming decades.
So free enterprise can get out there and do the hard part. Now you're probably getting the sense that I'm not your typical environmental warrior. I'm not a socialist or a member of a green party. I love to be a part of the green party.
I love being in nature, but I don't own any Birkenstocks. I can see that free markets deploy clean capital faster than any other force on the planet, which makes calls for degrowth or ending capitalism deeply irresponsible to both environmental progress and human flourishing.
I run an American clean energy nonprofit organization called Clear Path.
We advance public policy and we make sure that we have the right tools and we advance policies that accelerate innovations to reduce and remove global energy emissions. We spend a lot of time understanding clean, reliable, 24-7 energy systems. In order to build those, we got a lot of work to do in very little time.
For starters, we have to transform the American power system. Now all roads to net zero emissions in the United States start with making this system 100% clean. But then, because we have to electrify so much more of our economy,
this system will need to at least double in size, maybe much more.
Now, it took 125 years to build the system we have today.
And if you're like me, targeting 2050 for net zero,
it means we have to accomplish that in the next 27 years. That translates to 10,000 new clean energy projects just in the US, just this decade.
And every single one of those projects starts with a permit to build.
Now tragically, in the US since the 1970s, well-intentioned policymakers and environmental leaders have designed a world-class apparatus for getting in the way.
Let me give you an example.
NEPA, which I promise is the only boring legal acronym I will use today, stands for the National Environmental Policy Act.
NEPA was passed in the 1970s with the intention to get developers to understand the environmental impact of their projects and to show that they had considered lower impact alternatives. Makes a lot of sense.
But NEPA was passed before the modern Clean Air, Clean Water, or Endangered Species Acts. And crucially, NEPA gives outside stakeholders the right to sue over government regulatory decisions.
And now, wealthy outside stakeholders use NEPA suits to slow down and kill clean energy.
Regionally, things are also in gridlock.
Did you all know that here in Detroit, this beautiful electricity system is managed by a massive supergrid that procures electricity from independent generators all over the Midwest and moves that electricity to factories and cities and homes through a power market? Sounds great, right?
The problem is the line to connect a new clean energy plan into that power market now extends to almost four years nationwide. And at the state and local level, elected officials are also putting up walls to specific kinds of clean energy.
In the U.S., 12 states still have some kind of a moratoria on new nuclear energy, for example. Now, I will let somebody else do the talk on the amazing benefits of nuclear energy. But suffice it to say that putting 24-7 clean, reliable energy off limits doesn't make a lot of sense.
And we now have low-income communities across the country also voicing opposition to new clean energy projects, which is understandable because they have borne the brunt of environmental pollution in the past.
So now, we have communities across the country, rich and poor, all saying no instead of yes.
This movement goes well beyond nimbyism. Some folks have called it bananaism. That's build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.
Sad, sad.
And this isn't just a problem in the United States. In Germany, there's been opposition to new offshore wind, even as they're shutting down their nuclear fleet for ideological reasons. And you're getting a sense of how I feel about that. There's also been opposition to new wind in Norway, while Australia has banned new nuclear, even as they've said they wouldn't shut down new coal.
The list goes on around the world. Now, I have just painted a pretty gloomy picture.
And most folks who know me know that I am a sunny optimist.
So here's the part where we get to begin anew with the end in mind.
It starts by realizing there is a very important role for balanced environmental regulation.
Here in the U.S., we all benefit from the Clean Water Act, passed at a time when our heavily polluted Cuyahoga River literally caught on fire. But the solution to our permitting emergency begins with all of us environmentalists.
We all need to support new build and retrofit clean energy projects of all kinds, regardless of whether they're things we've been specifically for in the past. Carbon dioxide pipelines aren't so bad to look at, especially compared to the impacts of climate change that they're meant to mitigate.
And this seems trivial, but developers need to do their part to make their projects more visually appealing. Just look at the way these advanced nuclear developers have reimagined their designs to incorporate nature and welcome in the local community.
We all need to elect local officials that support new build clean energy and reject regulations that get in the way. At the regional level, we need to encourage those super grid operators to modernize their processes.
They could review applications systematically in clusters rather than one at a time. Doing that could save two years from the average project timeline.
And making that change could rapidly bring a terawatt of new energy generation into the U.S. system, the vast majority of it clean. That would go a long way towards that doubling of the grid, all clean.
Lastly, we need to encourage our federal policymakers, Congress and the administration, to reform the rules that govern our national environmental laws.
In 2005, during an energy crisis, we actually made it really easy to permit new oil and gas production on public lands in the United States to improve energy affordability.
Why don't we give clean energy developers the same kind of leeway now during this great national challenge? We should automatically permit some classes of clean energy that have very little local environmental impact.
Think a new solar site or nuclear plant on a brownfield site like a retired coal plant. We can audit them later to make sure that they're complying with environmental laws. And for those projects that do have significant environmental impact, let's make sure that their reviews are done in a year or less,
that the lawsuits are brought in three months or less, and that we adjudicate those suits in six months or less. Doing that alone could shave five to ten years off of project timelines nationwide.
Other countries serious about building clean have already started to make some of these reforms. Spain, for example, has eliminated those upfront environmental statements for some classes of clean energy, and they saw projected installations increase 20 percent in a matter of months. To put it simply, if we're serious about getting to net zero anytime soon and solving the climate challenge, let's get to yes.
Greenlight approved yes in my backyard tens of thousands of times all over the world.
Let's get building. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00: APPLAUSE
