WASHINGTON — This year’s gridCONNEXT — GridWise Alliance and Clean Edge’s third annual conference focusing on visions of the grid of the future — delivered the usual goods last week when it came to discussions of the advanced technologies and policies necessary to modernize how the U.S. produces and consumes electricity.

But a grim sense of urgency permeated much of the discussions, as speakers, panelists and audience members repeatedly reminded each other that the world is way behind on its decarbonization goals to limit the rise in the average global temperature to under 2 degrees Celsius, as documented by a U.N. report released last month. (See U.N.: Decarbonization ‘Key’ to Cutting Global Emissions.)

There was also much discussion about what is occurring around the world, and what the U.S. can do to help lead decarbonization efforts.

Here’s some of what we heard Wednesday and Thursday at the Liaison Capitol Hill hotel, just down the street from the U.S. Capitol.

Climate Crisis

The conference occurred during the final days of the 25th U.N. Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP25) in Madrid, which was widely seen as a disappointment. The talks ended with a partial agreement to put forward more aggressive emission targets than those of the 2015 Paris Agreement at next year’s conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Multiple news reports described how poorer, developing countries grew frustrated with the talks over the lack of U.S. leadership and left early. Many countries, however, are waiting to see if a new U.S. president will lead to a stronger agreement than Paris, which the U.S. will exit on Nov. 4, 2020 — ironically the day after Election Day.

Attendees made clear how they felt about the climate issue when U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in a keynote speech Thursday mentioned the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg being named Time’s Person of the Year and the room erupted in applause.

But most of the talk about the state of Earth’s climate was more dire.

A report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year found that even limiting global warming to 1.5 C — predicted to occur by 2040 if current trends continue — would still result in catastrophic effects in certain parts of the world, especially affecting developing countries, which are rapidly purchasing coal power technology from China to continue industrializing. (See IPCC: Urgent Action Needed to Avoid Climate Trigger.)

“I think people need to understand the huge difference in just half a degree” Celsius, Melanie Kenderdine, principal for the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), said Wednesday. “Urgency becomes very important when every 10th of a degree matters. … I approach our pathways to decarbonization from the position of what we can do now, what can we do consistently, [and] what should we be investing in for the future, because we cannot get there from where we are now. But we need to start now and stop fighting over it.”

“Is this the part where I’m supposed to disagree?” joked Rich Powell, executive director of ClearPath, a nonprofit that focuses on conservative policies to address climate change.

Kenderdine — who worked at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration under Secretary Ernest Moniz, the founder and CEO of EFI — and Powell were speaking on a “point-counterpoint” panel on the best policies to decarbonize the grid. But there was little disagreement or debate among them.

Powell said that for most of the world, “priority 1 is to staunch the bleeding.” Through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, for example, Pakistan is building subcritical coal plants. “To get yourself out of a hole, first you need to stop digging, and in many parts of the world, we’re still digging.”

He said the U.S. needs to focus on researching and developing “higher performing, more affordable, flexible clean energy technologies” for not just domestic use but to export to compete with China. Rather than subsidies for specific resources, such as wind and solar, the U.S. should put in place a “technology-neutral” subsidy for any new decarbonizing tech that phases down over time. “If something needs to be permanently subsidized, we can’t expect a Nigeria or Indonesia or Bangladesh to permanently subsidize clean energy in their markets,” Powell said. “We need technologies that are so good, you could actually imagine them being like-for-like substitutes for subcritical coal in the developing world.”

DOE already does “invest a huge amount in basic research,” Kenderdine said. “But I’m not sure that basic research is not all that the federal government needs to be doing right now. It needs to … move into different spaces.”

Around the World in Two Days

There was also much discussion on what the U.S. could learn from E.U. countries’ actions.

On Wednesday morning, Angelina Galiteva, founder of the Renewables 100 Policy Institute and a member of the CAISO Board of Governors, talked about how Europe is investing not in battery storage but “using their excess capacity from wind [to] make hydrogen,” which can be used to generate electricity — a practice virtually unheard of in the U.S. The next step, she said, is to create renewable natural gas by synthesizing the hydrogen with carbon dioxide in the air.

“Very ambitious, but certainly something that is doable,” she said. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, she added, is working to convert the coal-fired Intermountain Power Plant in Utah to a natural gas-fired generator by 2025, and then to hydrogen power by 2045, using a salt mine to store excess fuel. The comment prompted a grunt of laughter from a member of the audience.

“What? Hey! Science fiction, but the future is coming!” Galiteva said.

While Kenderdine and Powell’s discussion was cordial, some of their comments provoked Galiteva’s ire as she listened in the audience.

“I think we are mercifully moving away from the juvenile discussions of 100% renewables,” Powell said. “In an incredibly rich place like California that appears to have a truly unusual appetite for spending more and more money on their power sector … it’s potentially possible there.”

“I think that the deniers on the one hand of the climate debate and the magical thinkers on the other hand of the climate debate, who say it’s all going to be wind and solar in 10 years …are actually delaying action when action is urgently needed,” Kenderdine said.

Galiteva told them that while she agreed with the general premise that California needs a diverse set of technologies besides wind and solar, such as geothermal and hydro, “we don’t need nuclear. Nuclear is being shut down. Our biggest failure was investing several hundred million into upgrading San Onofre only for it to leak.” All the nuclear plants in development in the U.S. have been overbudget and there are risks involved, she noted.

While China and India lead the world in gross carbon emissions, Galiteva noted that the U.S. is the largest emitter per capita. “We don’t need to be jumping on [Pakistan]; we need to be helping them stay clean.” She said she grew up in Tanzania, where “the easiest solution was microgrids, solar panels, local resources [and] biofuels. … Let’s do that, and let’s not go back into the dangerous technologies that caused Chernobyl, Fukushima [and] Three Mile Island. … We don’t need to, it’s expensive and we have good alternatives, so let’s make it happen.”

Other speakers also talked about the need to address “energy poverty” around the world, and not just because of climate change.

Kristina Skierka, who gave the morning keynote address Thursday, is CEO of Power For All, which works to deploy decentralized electrification solutions in the fastest, most cost-effective ways in energy-poor communities, mostly in Africa and Southeast Asia. These solutions largely involve microgrids, with rooftop solar.

“It’s been really exciting to be here for the last 24 hours and hear Africa or India or developing countries mentioned so consistently,” Skierka said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting that.”

She described how people living in villages in Uganda and Nigeria need to walk hours to charge their phones and use hazardous fuels to power their stoves and lamps. “There’s almost a billion people without any access to energy, in this day and age where we run businesses from cell phones. And we have all the technology we need. So, this is actually a complete injustice in my view.”

Powell and Kenderdine were critical of California’s recent SB 100 excluding new natural gas plants that incorporate carbon capture and sequestration from being considered a clean energy resource. Kenderdine said the state can’t possibly meet its goals without CCS.

She brought up a study by EFI that found that Nigeria would become the third most populous country by 2050, and that the world will add 10 cities of 10 million or more people by 2030, with four in Africa. “You’re not going to power [these cities] with rooftop solar,” she told Galiteva. “It will make a huge difference in rural Africa, where four hours of electricity means something very different for people’s lives.” But these growing cities will still need centralized power plants, and they will need CCS to stay clean, she said.

The Fourth Risk

John MacWilliams, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, gave a pre-lunch keynote speech Wednesday in which he detailed the top five risks facing the electric grid.

The theme of the speech stemmed from Michael Lewis’ 2018 book, “The Fifth Risk,” which recounts President Trump’s transition into office in the early months of 2017 and its effect on the work and ongoing projects of several federal departments and their career employees. MacWilliams, DOE’s first chief risk officer, featured heavily in the first section of the book, which is about DOE and its many responsibilities, and he gave the book its title and theme. When he told Lewis about the top five risks the U.S. faces, he said the fifth was “project management.”

MacWilliams told Lewis the fourth risk to the U.S. was an attack, either physical or cyber, on the country’s electric grid (following a nuclear weapons accident, an attack by North Korea and conflict with Iran). Speaking on Wednesday, he said anthropogenic climate change was the fourth risk to the grid itself, coming after cyberattacks, physical attacks and aging infrastructure.

“Unfortunately, the recent scientific reports … [are] suggesting that we’ve actually underestimated the velocity and the magnitude of climate change’s negative impacts,” MacWilliams said. He tallied off the more well known impacts in general — including increased storm intensity, rising sea levels and more frequent wildfires. But he said the risks to the electric industry are more frequent and longer droughts causing reduced hydropower capacity, warmer air reducing solar power efficiency, and increased temperatures reducing air density and, thus, wind production.

“Massive investment needs to be made and needs to be made now,” he said.

MacWilliams’ fifth risk to the grid? Like project management, it was more mundane, but no less dangerous. “It’s the common squirrel. Yes, squirrels.” He said that in 2016, “these furry suicide bombers” were estimated to have caused 3,456 outages in the U.S.

– Michael Brooks