According to Public Service Enterprise Group (NYSE:PEG) CEO Ralph Izzo, the first step in getting to a 100% decarbonized grid is simply “getting people to use less energy than they use today, without sacrificing quality of life or activities they find valuable.”

The technologies — from LED light bulbs and smart thermostats, to energy-efficient appliances — are here, Izzo told a virtual audience at National Clean Energy Week’s Policy Makers Symposium. But, he said, “one of the policy changes that’s important to help bring about the embracing of these technologies is to allow the utility to profit as much from investing in technologies that reduce throughput as we do from technologies that enhance throughput.”

With regulations in New Jersey that provide such incentives, Izzo said, “our shareholders are indifferent as to whether we invest money in a programmable thermostat or a transformer or substation.” PSEG would be investing $1 billion in energy-efficiency programs over the next three years, he said.

Izzo was speaking on Wednesday, the second day of the symposium, which provided an overview and significant insights into the mainstreaming of the clean energy transition in the U.S. and how certain, more traditional sectors of the energy industry are positioning themselves to be part of a low- or no-carbon economy. No representatives from solar or wind companies or associations spoke at the event.

The symposium also heavily focused on the ongoing congressional negotiations over the bipartisan infrastructure package and $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, and what key incentives and initiatives in the two bills will survive to reach President Biden’s desk.

Izzo spoke in favor of the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) in the budget reconciliation bill, which would provide incentives to utilities to meet mandated clean energy targets and penalize those that don’t. The CEPP, tax incentives and a price on carbon could, he said, help create “more of a national market as opposed to a balkanized, fragmented, state-by-state market, and you’d really see investment levels take off.”

PSEG announced in June that it was pushing up its target for cutting its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero from 2050 to 2030. It is “in the process of completely exiting the fossil fuel business” through a combination of plant closures and sales, Izzo said. While the utility’s energy mix going forward will be nuclear, offshore wind and solar, he said, developing carbon capture and storage technologies should be a national priority.

Natural gas “is so abundant and so low-cost that perhaps the nation would be wise to continue to preserve some optionality around that, as long as we can mitigate the carbon attributes,” he said.

Carbon-free Technologies Initiative

Similarly, a panel on Tuesday centered on the Carbon-Free Technology Initiative, an alliance of energy advocacy groups and investor-owned utilities, with a focus on advancing a portfolio of carbon-free resources, from advanced nuclear and geothermal, to CCS and zero-carbon fuels, such as hydrogen. These technologies are needed to fill the “24/7 dispatchable gap” as the deployment of solar, wind and storage accelerates over the next decade, said Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force, a member of the initiative.

Jeff Lyng, director of energy and environmental policy at Xcel Energy, noted that his company is planning on nearly doubling its solar, wind and storage resources in Colorado and adding close to 6 GW of wind, solar and storage in Minnesota. Such deployments must be paralleled with the development of other carbon-free technologies, Lyng said.

“I think we can all appreciate that that’s going to take time. That’s going to take focus, and I think we really have to keep it in the ‘important and urgent’ quadrant, because we’ll need these technologies in the 2030s to achieve those carbon-free aspirations,” he said.

Getting there will mean research and development that goes beyond a single pilot project, Cohen said. “The first of a kind is always going to be very high cost and may not fully represent to the commercial community that something has been de-risked,” he said.

“Let’s not just do one and walk away and assume the market’s going to deal with it,” he said. “Unless we can do a substantial cluster of deployments of the technology, we’re really not going to get those economies of scale and learning that issue into the commercial space.”

Supply Chain

Anyone who cares about clean energy should also care “about accessing minerals in an environmentally responsible way,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who delivered Wednesday’s keynote on the urgent need to build out a domestic supply chain for critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, zinc and copper. These minerals are a key part of solar and energy storage supply chains, and the dependency of the U.S. industry on foreign sources — especially in China — is “unacceptable,” requiring a holistic, whole-of-government approach, Murkowski said.

“A truly complete supply chain” should include not only mining, but processing and refining minerals, she said. “I think our country right now is at a crossroads when it comes to critical minerals. We can move forward without action, continue to look the other way [or] we can take the other path. We can acknowledge the challenge; we can face it head on.”

As passed in the Senate, the bipartisan infrastructure bill would extend Department of Energy loan guarantees to critical mineral projects, which “would open an avenue of new financing [and] make available technical expertise and resources at the department,” Murkowski said. Permitting reforms to expedite “responsible mining” of critical minerals on public land are also in the bill, she said.

Speaking on a panel following Murkowski’s keynote, Anthony Staley, vice president of the metals division at The Doe Run Co., known primarily for lead extraction and recycling, underlined the connection between clean energy and the need for rapid development of domestic supply chains for critical minerals. For the U.S. to meet its emission-reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, it might have to increase its production of critical minerals fourfold, he said.

“But in order to generate the raw materials we need, we need to make sure that we produce them in a clean way,” Staley said. Companies like Doe Run face “a lot of the regulatory hurdles and international competitive costs disadvantages associated with strategic subsidies and inconsistent environmental standards from other countries,” he said.

Permitting a new mine can take seven to 10 years, and such delays “decrease the mineral value at a mine by about one-third,” Staley said. Further, even well established companies like Doe Run ship their minerals to China for processing.

“This always strikes me as really curious, because when you look at other countries, the first thing they do upon finding a mineral resource is immediately legislate that the processing of those minerals and metals is done within the confines of the country,” he said.

Izzo on COVID

Deviating somewhat from the topic of the discussion, PSEG’s Izzo said the utility industry is not coming to grips with the changes to system reliability and resilience that are emerging as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People are working from home, and I think that many people will continue to work from home, even after we get higher penetration of vaccines and have the virus under control, and what that will mean is pretty profound for our industry,” he said. With people working in homes where most systems are electrified, outages will have deeper impacts.

“You can’t work, and more than likely your phone may not be fully charged, nor will your vehicle be fully charged, so you may not be able to call somebody, and you may not be able to get in the car and go to work,” Izzo said. “That’s a whole new set of reliability and resiliency [issues]. That’s going to require a whole new way of thinking and design.”