great to be here i should confess up front that phil and i have been friends for a very long time i actually looked it up on google and it turns out that when i met phil ninety percent of the people in the world had not yet been born something about both of our airlines and for those of you who don't know the conservation law foundation we went through that kind of quickly here but but that is part of some serious street trade if you were to take the washington environmental council  and the oregon environmental council and the idaho conservation league merge them all together and double their resources that sort of the conservation law foundation in new england i think it's safe to say that we've got a serious player here to leading the leading environmental group in israel he also helped design the first environmental legislation ever for the palestinian authority so fill first environmental legislation for them so phil is a guy who has been in the trenches for a very long time has a lot of wisdom and i'm thrilled and delighted to spend time with him but the warning from all of that was mostly that if you came expecting to see william buckley taking on korea's adult this is a little bit friendlier than that but it but but still see if i can trip him up every now and then so filled your solar journey begins in your own home in cold snowy massachusetts has that worked out for you i mean you have to go up in the winter and brush the snow off of your solar collectors well we installed our our solar system in march of two thousand and thirteen and it was actually two days after a classic new england snow storm and i expected that the crew wouldn't show up at all they did show up and one of the crew members was a guy named liam madden and he was a burly guy who'd been an iraqi war veteran who served in the marine expeditionary unit and he looked up at our roof which has a fifty five degree slope and i saw him blanch and i asked myself if you ever installed on a roof this steep before he kind of shook his head so they attached their ropes from the peak of the roof and at the end of a harrowing day our system was in place we now get seventy five percent of our total power needs from the sun and that includes charging our plug in electric hybrid vehicle every night so we're doing pretty well i think one of the reasons we're doing so well is a somewhat counter intuitive one for people who aren't very familiar with photovoltaics they actually work better in colder weather so as long as they're not covered with snow which they are sometimes in new england we produce lots and lots of solar energy  know i didn't realize how steep your roof was and i asked that question because you're better off than most so you've chased all over the country you met with dozens and dozens of people assume the kinds of questions that i think everybody in the audience would ask if they were curious about this issue now what are a couple of the most interesting surprising things that you encountered i think it we're all accustomed to thinking of renewable energy as a progressive issue plea of measures that we need to take to get to a more sustainable energy future and so one would expect progressive politicians to support solar energy so i'm very happy that former congressman henry waxman wrote a blurb on the back of my book wonderful but predictable less true that was not the quote that's true thank goodness a lot less predictable is that people like former congressman barry goldwater was a congressman from california then headed up a group still is the chair of a group called tusk tell you kill of these solar won't be killed and it's a very kind of libertarian in perspective group that is basically saying that homeowners and businesses that have a right to generate their own solar energy should be able to kind of fight off the giant utility monopolies and should be compensated for their excess solar power by their thousand inhabitants it was known as a gang warfare center for many years until two thousand and eight when rex parris a right wing republican law and order guy former class action litigator was elected mayor and he was elected on a crime fighting platform and he very proudly told me that he had put twenty thousand suspected gang members behind bars during his first  years in office i have to say i am adding suspect that he did not say suspected and a tough guy and he said to me if you join a gang the constitution just doesn't apply to you so that kind of hard nosed political perspective fortunately he also brings to address the climate change issue and he deplores the fact that fellow republicans have decided that climate change is an issue that is off balance he feels it is a very real issue and when he was in china several years ago he stood up before a group of esteem and diplomats and said i just want to tell you about my city lang castor california because it's going to be the solar capital of the world he came back to lancaster and went about getting solar installed on all public buildings there is now a code in place in lancaster that requires that every residential new residential unit either have solar on it or have off site solar that gives power to to that unit and his projection is that through those measures and other measures including utility scale development bank catherine will be a net solar energy producer and export or within the next couple of years and that it's sort of part of the great tradition in america where you you were able to make coalitions of convenience without necessarily agreeing on everything as i think a great many of us who were thrilled and delighted with the pope's comments on climate suddenly discovered this morning that our viewers did not find themselves in perfect alignment on  so there are lots and lots of polls out there one was released today by the sierra club showing that a vast percentage of americans choose solar as their favored energy source followed by wind fall of may conservation and then you get down into the indicator of where solar energy is today is the first six months of this year if you look at newly installed electric generating capacity during that period thirty nine percent of it came from solar and the vast majority of that was from photo s thirty five percent sorry thirty six percent came from wind so together you have renewable resources generating three quarters of the new capacity during the first six months of this year and we all think of gas as the  easy way to go not from an environmental perspective but we've got cheap cracked asked so let's build lots of gas turbines and you know we'll worry about the environment somewhere down the road gas amounted to about twenty one percent of new installed capacity during this period so i think that's a promising sign new technologies are coming and we can get into you know where some of those technologies are going but i mean we tend to focus a lot of pun the technology and upon the economics but in the end being able to create something that doesn't have broad public opposition as you have for most kinds of power sources today is just an enormous asset in that field and we should explore that a little bit with regard to some solar about that sure the u s e p a has a division called repairing america's land and that division has looked at america's brownfield resources and for those of you who aren't familiar with the t brownfield it's sort of means what it sounds like it means it's contaminated or potentially contaminated properties they might have been former mining areas former factories landfills and the like e p a surveyed more than one hundred thousand of these sites and it estimates that from those sites we could be generating about three times our total power needs from the sun now that isn't to say that it would be economically expedient to go that route right now but we are seeing a lot of these brownfield sites developed and i think of hanford washington i haven't frankly been out there but i would imagine that you have some pretty substantial brownfield sites that one might want to consider converting to solar because there probably aren't too many other terribly desirable uses for those kinds of properties one of those properties that i visited was in the west pulman neighborhood of chicago on the south side very crime ridden area international harvest built a plant there and was assembling farm machinery there for many decades it closed the factory in the early eighty's the facility lay dormant and it was a very very contaminated site exelon came in two thousand and nine built what's called exelon city solar which now generates enough electricity for about fifteen hundred households i wish i could say that it had solved the crime problems on the south side unfortunately the major source of breakage at that facility is stray bullets falling from the sky that said what was an environmental hazard a health hazard and a visual blight is now a very productive environmentally responsible economically advantageous facility there are lots of other facilities like that around the country in the green fields when there is real controversy particularly within environmental ranks of going into so natural areas some of which are not traditionally green as the color but they are does are scapes that have enormous emotional appeal to people in their own unique biodiversity attached to them and they also have typically incredibly sunny and rich potential to develop this solar but what do you feel about the greenfield development i think we're at a point in our history where we really have to develop everything we can that is clean and renewable and ideally we want to focus first on our built environment the national renewable energy laboratory which you once headed has estimated that we could be getting about a fifth of our total power needs from rooftop solar alone so that's a great place to start but if we want to push the frontiers of solar beyond that and i think you and i probably both want to push the frontiers of solar well beyond that i think we have to look outside our built environment and green fields offer a great opportunity one facility i visited it's called the california valley solar ranch it's become result plane in san luis obispo county california it's an area that was partially farmed but it also has some very distinctive wildlife values some refer to that area as california's serengeti which is a bit generous but there are some very valued creatures such as the san joaquin kitfox the giant kangaroo rat i have to admit i knew nothing about either of those species before i went to this facility but sun power which is the corporation that developed this facility took great pains to relocate the species from the construction site during construction and it's allowed them to reenter habit the site post construction they also created migratory carders for elk and antelope through the fields and they set aside twelve thousand acres as permanent conservation lands so that's a great example of a company that has really gone above and beyond it to protect natural resources while building a facility that on fourteen hundred acres of solar panels generates enough electricity for about one hundred thousand households i think we need to put our use of the green fields in perspective in terms of just how much we have let frankly farmers get away with ranchers get away with in contaminating our lands and in misusing our lands and while we really do need to be vigilant i think in how we go about developing solar power and green fields i think we also have to be cognizant of just how huge a resource we have in our open lands and how badly we have mucked them up and i'd be curious for you to just say a few words about your recent book cowed because you look very closely at ranching practices and what has happened in that regard yeah well this is all about harnessing the sun but another volume out there which some of us recognize from the crowd here when we did our presentation on coude as well does talk about other competing uses for land and in fact we would like to see him far more land used for cattle grazing and particularly for bison in ways that the plants that are grown on them are the plants that have always grown on them the grasses in the forms that we have no other purpose for except uncle it's to eat and in with many of those it would be possible to i think come up with something where you were using it easily for wind and potentially for solar as well but getting to getting back to you rather than me you were talking about the the roofs of buildings and distributed energy of course it's possible to harvest economics be damned for just a minute but it's possible to harvest energy off of the south wall the east wall the west wall the buildings as well as to take those eneral numbers and say ok but what if we started orienting all of our new buildings correctly and having roofs with the right angles on them and solar access laws so that when you were building something and putting solar on it your neighbor would be shading it and just giving you the most expensive roof in the neighborhood but that doesn't do anything for you if you if you're thinking about this in the timeframe that you think about a real energy transition of twenty five thirty forty years the built environment turns over every forty to fifty years how much do you think it might be possible or to even have any hunches about this to to actually from a distributed fashion if we got serious about this and as a society started moving there aggressively i think it's a very good point that housing and other building stock turns over because what we're seeing right now is that about between twenty two and twenty seven percent of domestic roofs are solar suitable and between sixty and sixty five percent of commercial roofs are appropriate for solar and you could say well that is a limiting factor but if you're saying that limiting factor could change significantly going forward and i think it also taught speaks to technological innovation we're hearing about roof tiles building integrated roof tiles that would be photovoltaic we're hearing about windows that could incorporate photovoltaic technology we're hearing about much improved efficiency of various solar cells so i think we can expect to see that one fifth of our total power needs going up very substantially because of those kinds of technological changes and because of well because of if we institute the right regulations so that people build new buildings with the appropriate orientation which is not by any means a given and just one anecdote in that regard one of the places i investigated solar was at a football stadium where they're frankly more symbolic than anything else but the person who took me through the gillette stadium in new england is from houston texas and i asked him what i thought was going to be a perfunctory question which was do you have solar on your home and he said actually i don't because my homeowner association prohibits it and i was recently on dallas public radio and i told the story and they had their researcher quickly go online and it turned out that as of september one the governor signed a law that requires all buildings within i think any homeowners association with more than fifty units now has to adopt solar so perhaps that's an open to thought so we do need to see those kinds of reforms and the potential is really quite substantial now we have seen a lot of industries that have been changed dramatically in in recent years sometimes for good sometimes for bad sometimes with mixed results we have a few disruptors here in seattle change some industries for the profoundly one of the most conservative stick in the mud industries as a whole has been the utility industry and yet if you're going to be having distributed power that is servicing anything other than the building that are design top of you've got to have something that districts you have some ideas about one  is there a role for utilities to play in the generation of distributed power into would what do you see as the perfect role of utilities looking again forward a decade or to have future i think we're at a very interesting transformational moment for utilities because traditionally the job of utility is has been to generate electricity and sell it and that's a very narrowly defined role and it worked pretty well when we were getting all of our power from a coal plant or a nuclear plant where you basically turn a plant on in one moment and forty or fifty or sixty years later you if nothing to astra's has happened to turn it off solar obviously has natural variations by the day by the season same thing with  wind we've got to get much smarter about how we think about electricity generation storage and use and kill it is have really got to wake up to that challenge and it's a little like the kodaks in the polaroids of this world who just did not wake up to the digital era until it was too late utilities really have to become energy services providers and not just power producers and there are some interesting iconoclasts within the utility  sector david crane of n r g energy is certainly one of them who are very candid in saying that the utility sector really has to utterly transform itself or go under and i think we're going to see some real struggles we're already seeing some struggles where utilities do not like distributed solar generation they want to control the show so i think there's going to have to be utility involvement in energy storage and smart use of demand arguably certainly in terms of his statements and probably in terms of most of his policies the architect of enlightment utility executive i mean if if you ask anybody in the field who is your favorite utility c e o is david crane of the stock price of energy has declined by almost sixty five percent over the last twelve months of wall street isn't feeling quite the same way about this transition you think this is one of those things where  a buying opportunity for those of us i'm sure you have i'm not in the business of giving stock but i think one of the things that's happening right now with the solar industry is that it is facing a huge uncertainty because of the potential lack of continuity of key government policies were very custom to thinking of oil and gas and nuclear as getting substantial federal subsidies and in many cases state subsidies over decades what we've seen happen with wind and what we're seeing happen with solar is that incentives that are provided today are by no means guaranteed tomorrow so there's a federal investment tax credit a thirty percent tax credit that applies to homes that applies to businesses that applies to fill of these it will expire for homes as of the end of two thousand and sixteen and it will go down from thirty percent to ten percent for businesses and for utility scale solar  as of that year that's a huge hit to the industry and we're seeing other solar policies at the state level threatened with sunsetting and i think that you can't run a for example a manufacturing sector based upon that kind of unreliability you need to know ten fifteen years out what you're going to be able to produce in order to make it worth your while to build the factory same thing as applying with solar developers there's no utility scale solar developer today who is not thinking about that and a twenty sixteen fundamental change in the tax structure and so i think we all have to to work press our political representatives to provide the kind of continuity for solar that we have taken for granted for various other energy technologies for so very long for very long and such as decades and some it's more than a century right  d they connected some of them in ways that are now difficult to replicate carrying sacks full of money and brown paper bags from houston to washington d c that was part of the sam rayburn lyndon johnson and a little personal thing something that is almost known by nobody and not that anybody cares about me and turned back and i was for a brief period of time the the so called consumer member on the national petroleum council which would be sixty of the largest c e o s of oil companies in the united states plus me and and in the course of that i would get into these casual conversations with people and express my naivete and say could you please explain to me but intangible drilling cost write offs i mean and literally nobody could mean it was just money in their pocket there was no rationale for this whatsoever that it's like why there will be you have a depletion allowance instead of the question tax it's just a whacko sort of ways we've set up so if we're going to be getting a solar future presumably got to have the inverse of that we ought to be not trying to say how can we get and even playing field with oil and coal it's how do we get a gigantic advantage on that playing field because of this to really expand explosive that's fair and the way they call that intangible for the reason you said is quite intangible yet although the close up a lot of bank accounts a lot of the most successful business model successful in the sense of really purchase agreement which is a great advantage to homeowners who don't want to foot the full bill for installing a solar array on their home but they want that home generated solar power so a company will come in and offer to install a solar array and then give you a set price that you will be paying per kilowatt hour for the power generated by that that solar array seventy two percent of all newly installed solar is via that arrangement today there are also lease arrangements that allow you to lease the solar equipment and then you get all of the power generated by that equipment i think that was a wonderful ways to broaden the  demographics of those who can enjoy solar power i think there's another though step that is just beginning to be taken that we need to encourage and that is low income solar how do we really reach into low income communities and provide them with what is really an economic benefit it also happens to be a significant environmental benefit but california is taking the lead in this respect as in many respects regarding solar they have about three hundred million dollars allocated for low income so we're development on housing and they use a nonprofit entity called grid alternatives that in turn relies upon volunteer crews to come into homes install solar and give people basically a wonderful gift which is that they end up with out electric electric bills to pay over the next several decades and people who would have a very difficult time not having an impossible time getting access to the capital to do that absolutely it would be paying really high rates of interest if they ever could get access to the right when you discuss solar is a fraction of energy it's of course an important part of the you focused on the numerator but an important part of the nominator there are some things that you've said over time that the need to think that you have some skepticism about some parts of that denominator that some of us of thought of as being very attractive and just all of the data centers and things are part of the digital revolution we we talk about scraping instead of taking the car and that will save a lot of energy but it's also going to be using a lot of electricity what are you thinking about the denominator going forward are we going to be replacing pretty much energy use as we have in this country with electricity and i think  it's part of human nature to translate the possible into the inevitable and that worries me very much because we can look at the supply side of the equation and say look at what solar power can do look at what wind power can do  as you say then we have to look at well ok but what percentage of the hole will that be and if that hole grows and grows then we're not necessarily in a very much better position fifty years from now than we are today and i think that self driving car is an example of a technology that certainly has interesting and innovative appliqued applications they will be huge data consumers and we already know that one of the major new energy consumers are these giant data centers because everyone from my daughters who take multiple pictures per day for instagram or whatever it might be to you know potentially these self driving cars demand lots and lots of data and those data  centers are a wild card and there are certainly some other wild cards population growth is another significant contributor as much as we'd like to think that one can have a larger population that would be a more sustainable population reality is more people mean more energy consumed and so i think we have to really focus as much on managing our use of energy as we do on producing the right kinds of electricity in terms of producing the right kind if you were using your judgment to guess twenty five years from now twenty forty how would you guess it's most likely not what would you like to see but what do you think if everything goes as well as you think is plausible and we will even throw over a couple turnovers of congress course of this and a president who is genuinely committed to things that a great many of give the lip service to but but but still within practical reality how would you see in the optimal likely world energy distribution but by source in say twenty forty  in the optimum world as opposed to what i really think will happen in the optimum world i think we could easily be getting half of our total power supply from wind and solar right now the national renewable laboratory projects that using technology that is commercially available today we could be generating about half of our total power needs so if that's the case using currently available technology then we have to look at what are the innovations that are really on the cusp of being commercialize a bill that could use that number very substantially i think that's certainly feasible i think we need a degree of political and light meant that we do not yet find across both aisles in congress  we certainly need that enlightment at the state level as well and at the local level so i'd rather talk about what i think is possible then get depressed by talking about what i think i been a genuine technological preemption that has taken place without massive political organization or social movements or of you needed to have some antitrust rulings that made  vulnerable you needed to have some fundamentally different approaches to the way that businesses saw a computation to make i b m vulnerable that we took a couple of the most powerful entities in the united states and turn them into fragile shells of what they used to seattle what do you think is the art of possible in terms of going forward you know it's really weird i should not this is your show but i am one of the world's classic pessimists like i can with almost any audience certainly do it in the labs and there's no reason that it can't get out there commercially with only a modest increase in the cost and so if you're doubling the efficiency i think we can move pretty quickly not to half of our power but to two thirds and more of our total energy coming out of distributed the downside of that is not downside in the sense of being a disadvantage the reason to be pessimistic about it is that when you really start quantifying what needs to be done in terms of building new factories to produce that much it is an awesome undertaking but the quick version just to give you a taste of what i could do in ten minutes if we really went into the pessimistic pro ten years ago we did a series of back of the arnold of sketches to say what would it take to produce all of the energy used on the planet in the year two thousand if we were to get that much energy produced from solar photovoltaic by two thousand and fifty and it turns out that that at that time there were two factories on earth that produced a gigawatt of p v that's to say and in one year they produce enough panels that if you took all of those panels lay them in the sunshine at noon on a sunny day they would produce as much energy as a nuclear power plant so you you have that as a one gigawatt factory there were two of them if we if we set up a new gigawatt factory every day from the year two thousand to twenty fifty and used our humility of production it would not produce enough electricity to supplant all of the energy used in the world in two thousand so it is it's a doable yeah but it's a mobilization akin to world war two and it goes on for five decades and it's a massive deployment of resources and it's not something that will be done by neoliberal economics it will be done by the good side of by saying there is good and there is bad but if we have a moral responsibility of stewards of the earth then we have to act this way to fulfill that stewardship well i think the the world war two analogy is actually a good one in that we are facing a global threat climate change and i think it is worthy of that kind of mobilization so just as we really could mobilize resources that were unprecedented to fight world war two we certainly could mobilize those resources if there were sufficient awareness and sufficient motivation and i think what we're finding with pope francis and others is that the acceptance of climate change as a very serious challenge that we need to address is more and more proves pervasive and we're even seeing renegades within the republican camp acknowledging that this is something that we really need to address so i am optimistic that we can transform the way that we relate to the challenge whether we can gear up our industrial sector to produce efficient technology is another question and i think a sub question there actually is what is the energy that we're using to produce the photovoltaic let's say technology one of the challenges today is that about eighty five percent of our solar panels come out of asia a lot of those panels are made by burning dirty coal so if you're producing a panel in washington where the majority of the electricity is hydro electricity it's a very different story in terms of its carbon footprint than if you're producing that panel in china so i think we have to really buil transformation of the manufacturing process into the process into the transformation of our overall electricity infrastructure and it's a great example of globalization in general and when germany set up its feed in tar that that that's the kind of mobilization we're talking pours are for step now we're getting toward the point where the wonderful people who've been sitting patiently in the audience but i'm sure like to get into it let me throw two quick final questions at you you have addressed this first one a couple times already but i'd like to throw it in to have you focus directly on it instead of as an option we've talked about the right policies as a precondition to this as you look across the country in addition to the things women might do nationally you looked at a lot of cities and a lot of states and you are in a very progressive city in a state with a governor who is really trying to be out front on this you have any recommendations for what we should do in seattle and what we should do in washington well washington's in an interesting kind of challenging situation because your power is actually very cheap you're paying eight to nine cents per kilowatt hour in massachusetts we are both we have the fortune and misfortune of paying almost twice that amount for our electricity so it makes it easier to sell distributed solar generation because that's what we're competing against i think that the policies that are in place here that provide for renewable energy production incentive payments  is a very enlightened one it's now discretionary it's not mandatory so making that mandatory could be a very positive step in terms of really pushing toward the next frontier here in terms of renewable energy certainly continuity with the federal tax credit that i talked about thirty states plus the district of columbia have what are called renewable portfolio standards which require that a certain minimum amount of utilities generated power and distributed power be produced from renewable sources that is proving to be a very powerful motivator in getting the solar industry going and getting the wind industry going so there are still a good number of states w gone that route that would be a very important step to take and i think solar net metering is also a very important step where people can be guaranteed that even when they're not using the power they're generating there is a market for that power in selling it back to to their utilities you know we have a renewable energy portfolio but it is way too modest and it doesn't have a solar carve out yeah there are lots of ways we can tweak it i think we've covered everything that i wanted to cover here when we turn this over to the audience  we have representatives of solar energy association of washington here and solar entrepreneurs here in a couple of professors here and i suspect this will be the stimulating part of the program my name's an extra i ran climate lobby in seattle and i have solar panels on my house and i've the first ones i put in twenty one haven't pam and jeremy and i'm in the second section on my roof and i have an electric car charger i've done all of those things today in the mail i get from the city like they're reducing our incentive by thirty percent that makes me quite upset because i thought i was going to be able to  not just in this room i mean clearly that kind of the continuity that you expected is the kind of continuity that is going to get people to be willing to invest in solar whether you're a homeowner or whether you're a business and  the the disillusionment that you feel is certainly not going to help the solar industry move forward so i think that a major presence on your capital i want to say hill i don't know if it's on a hill or not but in your state capital would be very important in making sure that there is greater continuity than there is today ok i'm reasonably confident that germany would be willing to share with you the names of the other people with whom you install those panels and if your voice is a collective one where we're now moving as you know district city council election so those are very acceptable people show up and raise cain at the meetings or running for office right now and make clear that you're going to support the ones that are prepared to support you and seattle city light is now in this interim between people running it this is a good time for them to be vulnerable and i hadn't heard anything about this before this evening but that sounds outrageous and it's not something that you should do is that this interim interim period at the utility so cain i was reading a lot recently about elon musk and the work he's been doing and with tesla in particular i was interested what your thoughts were on that work that he's been doing and the impact it will have down the road here with the kind of excess common acceptance of electric cars in the industry and how that kind of transforms the equation we're talking about as well you know on musk is a visionary he's kind of a maximalist i personally don't think the test is a great inspiration because it is such a high end vehicle and i actually test drove a tesla my daughter's and it should've and practically expired when i hit the accelerator and it's quite different from my honda civic hybrid that takes ten minutes to get onto the highway but i think he is at least showing what electric technology can do i think one of the interesting opportunities for electric vehicles actually and there are more practical electric vehicles in the car my wife drives is a ford c max energy which is a plug in electric hybrid  and she averages about one hundred fifty miles to the gallon on that car and much more modest car one of the things that i think utilities can do which is very important is to regard electric vehicles as battery storage resources musk is now talking about you know the storage walls of batteries their single purpose storage and titties if you have a car i would bet that most of you don't drive more than an hour a day and some of you probably drive a lot less than an hour a day so that means that your car is sitting idle for twenty three plus hours that is a wonderful battery storage resource that a utility could be using to charge and the charge according to when renewable energy is available or not available and provide us with the kind of storage resource that we need to accompany a robust renewable energy infrastructure so i think musk is pointing us in the right direction i happen to think that his kind of iconic vehicles are not necessarily the ones that are going to inspire a lot of people who can't really afford a car that's quite that expensive and hoping the prices of come down as well in fact they have been promised of they will come down to twenty seventeen with thirty five people two thousand dollar model right people say they will become cheaper i like to say they will be less expensive yes number of companies one that i'm sort of familiar with less so than i was a year ago local used to be too green which basically is producing the interface between the vehicle and the grid and to oversimplify it's basically if  were selling electricity for eight cents a kilowatt hour i'm buying if you're buying electricity for twelve cents a kilowatt hour i'm selling and leave enough charge in my battery to let me go forty miles tomorrow and suddenly automatically without anybody doing anything except sticking in a plug you've got a whole series of financial structures that are operating automatically and it's taking advantage of that vehicle as a storage battery and lots of clever things to do i was wondering if you could talk a little bit broader about the actual costs of solar in particular the building of these plants the materials the land that's going to be quite a kind of one of the most commonly occurring minerals on earth  d between the silicon and the metal framing you're talking about very recyclable materials in fact europe is way ahead of us in this regard europe is now mandating the recycling of solar panels as part of its electronic waste law by twenty eighteen eighty percent of all discarded panels must be recycled for example  in terms of the land issue there's no question that solar is surface intensive the question is what are those surfaces if they're brown fields so much better if they're roofs that's great if they're walls fine  sometimes green fields would need to be used and again i think what we have to do is look at the choices california today as of two thousand and thirteen i've looked for a more recent number i can't find it but and thirteen california was still growing more than a quarter of a million acres of cotton highly water intensive they also have thousands and thousands of acres of sod farms you know one can identify various inappropriate uses for land today that could be more appropriate appropriately used for solar and so i think we have to be selective we have to be sensitive to the plant will wildlife values on some of those greenfield solar farms but i think we have to get serious and say this is part of the transformation major portions of wyoming are devoted to mining coal huge amount of appalachia has been destroyed through mountaintop removal mining very recently the president announced that up to forty million acres of the forty million acres i think it is of the gulf of mexico is now open for oil and gas drilling so you know look we have to put these things in perspective i think are slightly less common than silicon in them but but not rare earths and not things that are in short supply there are some technologies if you still do cadmium telluride then you need to have some safety concerns in both manufacturing and the ultimate recycling but it's also solar it's it's really mostly a matter of making the decision to do it again what sort of factory is roughly the size of a large sum a conductor fab and it's yeah it takes land but it's a football field size it's not austin and if you compare that to anything else if it's oil it's gas it's cold it's nuclear the land requirements for solar for anything other than absorbing sunshine are sort of trivial by comparison it seems like a massive part of the problem is the storage problem and the transmission problem which doesn't get much discussion because it basically doesn't exist at all today i mean it's one thing to build a  gigawatt capacity of solar panels but we're going to need the equivalent however many gigawatt hours or whatever of storage capacity and battery technology does not seem like it's you know looking at a big breakthrough anytime soon i mean  the manufacturing cost but that's a radically different business model for the utilities and regulatory and that whole bit so i don't know if you could go a little further down that direction because that seems like maybe that's the the piece of the iceberg that's under the water on this you know that we're looking at you know the piece that sticking up and going oh great we can we can get all the solar panels out there but you know i don't want my car supplying energy overnight and having a dent in the morning right so that's maybe not not a good use for my car battery to keep powering the grid over night ok well first it might be if your car takes three or four hours to charge and there's a lot of flexibility in there in terms of when your utility might actually be drawing from that battery and when it might be charging it but more broadly one inspiring example to me in terms of complementarity and that's what we really need we need to think about how different energy technologies work with each other denmark now generates forty percent of its electricity from the wind what it does is it is in a very kind of symbiotic relationship with norway which has a huge amount of hydro power so when denmark has a surplus amount of wind generated electricity it wields that power to norway which uses it to pump water into pumped storage reservoirs which are then releasing the water when there is a need for electricity on the european grid we can use pump storage here as just one example battery storage is another but really as important storage is using energy in a smart way and that is not simply charging into charging an automobile battery it has to do with everything from how your refrigerator operates in your home to how a commercial air conditioning system works where a utility can modulator the consumption of power based upon what is available on the grid it requires a more much more sophisticated grid but we have that sophistication at hand and we could be developing that kind of an integrated infrastructure and just one one more point and that is  a broader regional grid that is drawing diverse renewable resources is very important so while the sun may not be shining in california at nine pm the wind might be blowing strong in wyoming at that time so you're getting complementarity between different renewable resources right you know that solar panels to have since six or seven it was one of the first ones up but you know it just the sun doesn't shine here for six fifteen hundred hours of sunlight per year seattle gets about twenty one hundred hours of sunlight per year and if you look at washington as a whole you obviously have a major portion of the state that is actually semi arid where you're getting loads of sunlight to do we need to undergo that transformation let me just on for one second my my little building six stories same roof area on a six story building is a one story building or a fifty stor we managed to export not energy to the grid for eight of the months of the year but there there were four that we had to import but each of those four we produced a lot of electricity just not enough to meet all of our needs i mean you're absolutely right there is winter and there also things that can happen including the absolute dumbest thing that is out there is these folks who would try to moderate climate by injecting sulfates of the atmosphere and diminishing the availability of sunshine you run the solar equipment so you don't need to worry about climate change but we can work our way through most of that on the technology side i'm even strangely far more optimistic today than i was even three years ago about batteries including batteries for longer term storage low batteries and  things where the real problem is in human institutions and in this case utilities are just tough as hell to change but hopefully a lot of bright young kids are going to come out of college and move into positions of get at that turned around  d over here mentioned her dilemma and it turns out her you tell the seattle city light is also in that dilemma because they committed to do community solar projects that are dependent on the same incentives so we contained in that what what do you see in that word transformation how is this going to happen is there a time scale you're thinking well we're already seeing utilities for example in the community solar  area community solar is the bell up by private co ops and by private companies utilities are getting into the game too because they see that as part of their future utilities are also wanting to become solar installers so you  are seeing utilities begin to recognize the opportunities and create competition some of it's welcome some of it's not with other entities that are trying to move solar forward what it will take is a lot of people like david crane really pushing the frontiers of what utilities are doing today and hopefully being able to bring his or her shareholders along