The extraordinary and highly reproducible case of South Australia

 Over the past three years, I’ve been talking a lot with politicians. It started with the Voices for Science program, which pairs scientists with their senators and representatives to help lawmakers understand how research benefits society. I went to DC and met with the offices of Senators Lee and Romney. I shared my story about how scientific research creates jobs in Utah and leads to innovation that benefits our economy and quality of life. I was surprised how accessible they were.

Some scientists on Capitol Hill. We were so young and naive.

I was also surprised at the differences in Romney and Lee’s voting records and approaches. As a junior senator, Romney was tucked into a basement office with borrowed filing cabinets. Despite the tight quarters, his team was working tirelessly to create or support meaningful legislation on everything from child poverty to climate change. Lee had a sumptuous office with heavy leather couches and professional flyers inviting donors to eat jello with him. Like their leader, his team seemed to be scrupulously avoiding anything meaningful, instead spending their time flailing in the culture wars while complaining they weren’t being treated fairly.

When I got back to Utah, I couldn’t kick the habit. Some BYU students put our program in contact with Representative John Curtis. We met on the mountain, discussing how climate change was threatening everything from our forests to our economic future. Curtis knew his stuff and seemed to be playing the long game—educating and working with a diverse coalition.

I wasn't sure what to wear, so I put on a faux leather belt. Seemed reasonable at the time.

Next thing I knew, my student Isabella and I were traveling to the Utah Capital to share the findings of a statewide study on the health and economic costs of air pollution in Utah. The bipartisan Clean Air Caucus listened to our findings and provided feedback and guidance on how to move forward. I was impressed by their sincerity, wisdom, and generosity.

Isabella and Ben go to Salt Lake City!

During the pandemic, we changed tack and worked on COVID itself, summarizing research on what interventions are effective for the broader community and in school settings. When we found out that the insane Utah Lake islands proposal was still on the table, we changed course again, organizing what turned out to be an extremely stimulating and productive Utah Lake symposium earlier this month.

Through all these forays into translational science, one topic seems to always come up: fossil fuels. Dirty energy is at the nexus of so many of the challenges we are facing. There are multigenerational problems like climate change and the socioeconomic instability of the oil world. There are immense and immediate tragedies like the 10.2 million people who lose their lives each year to pollution from coal, oil, and gas. Fossil fuels played a crucial role lifting billions from poverty in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. But two hundred years later, it’s time to move on.

Katherine Hayhoe teaches us about fossil fuels, oil derricks, and lumberjacks.

Every time I speak with a policymaker, I try to bring up how beneficial the transition to clean and renewable energy could be. If there are a thousand reasons to not like fossil fuels, there are a million to like clean energy. From cheap and equitable power to quiet and comfortable neighborhoods, the renewable revolution is going to be better than even Captain Picard imagined. Plus it is rolling in at warp 9, with a host of plausible scenarios getting us to decarbonization of the electricity grid by 2030 or 2035.

Not everyone believes this.

This email from a state representative is pretty typical in my experience:

Thanks for the energy data. I’m still not sold on the tech being there yet, but I hope it will be. California has been a cautionary tale on their energy management and the ability to handle the various loads. The tech could get there, but I can tell you that the appetite to put Utah at risk of rolling blackouts or anything close to it is pretty low. But we do believe in technology and I am hopeful it will get there and that it will be perceived as getting there (which is important in politics).

I appreciate sincere skepticism. Heck, my job literally depends on checking assumptions and thinking through things differently. However, skepticism is a pernicious form of damnation if it’s not married to a thirst for knowledge and light. There is nothing that can more completely shield us from basic truths and moral opportunities than self-serving skepticism.

If the technology isn’t there yet, then it follows that it’s not anywhere. Turns out that fully renewable, or near fully renewable systems are popping up all over the planet. Let’s take one of my favorite examples, which you may have never heard of: the state of South Australia.

A little bit bigger than Texas, South Australia is home to only 1.8 million people. Last year, it briefly reached 100% renewable energy (this temporarily created a negative cost to electricity of 9$ a MWh!), though it is averaging around 70% renewable electricity in 2021.

True, the power is extremely cheap (2.9¢ a kWh!). True, the grid is substantially more reliable and resilient than our fossil fuel one. However, the thing I find most thrilling and encouraging about South Australia is how quickly they got there. In just 12 years, they’ve gone from a coal and gas system like ours to a renewable system that is superior in almost every way. They have done so while growing their economy and earning huge dividends on their infrastructure investments.

Check out the speed of that energy transition! Full story in this article and linked report.

To be fair, the legislative groundwork did begin in the early 2000s, when they set a modest renewable energy target. However, it wasn’t until 2008 that they started working on this in earnest. They rolled out feed-in tariffs, which encouraged distributed power generation such as rooftop solar. They set renewable portfolio standards, which ensured predictable conditions for investment and business creation. They offered low-cost financing to individuals, organizations, and businesses to purchase and install the renewable tech.

But what about the intermittency problem!? What are you going to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow!?

The assumption that I hear parroted by many (including Bill Gates in his recent book), is that energy storage is not economical. South Australia has both utility scale and distributed battery storage, including the world’s (second) largest chemical battery: the Hornsdale Power Reserve. The project paid for itself in two years. That’s an ROI that even the summer sales bros can’t compete with.

The combination of distributed and centralized production has decreased strain on the power grid, allowing South Australia (and other areas that have decarbonized) to reduce maintenance and extend equipment lifetimes. It’s harder to shuffle electrons from a single location through a whole network than produce and consume it locally.

As their transportation and heating sectors electrify, South Australia has a goal of 500% renewable power by 2050 (that is to say they will be creating 5-times the electricity that they are today, and it will all be renewable). Really, really cool.

But what about California!?

On the topic of our friend to the west, I actually agree that California is a cautionary tale. They have high power prices and low reliability. However, I see that as a bureaucratic and administrative failure, not a technological one. They still primarily have centralized energy production, a large amount of interstate importation, inadequate distributed storage, and vulnerable long-distance transmission that often must be shut down because of fire risk (exacerbated by climate change).

Renewables get blamed for every grid problem, though their net effect is a large increase in resilience and reliability. Take the Texas power crisis in February. Natural gas and coal failed at twice the rate of wind, but everyone from Greg Abbott to Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the renewables (Reuters fact check here). 

Unlike California, Utah could be a national leader in this space with local production, multiple storage solutions, and an open energy market. Unfortunately, the current producers have effectively stifled deployment with anti-competitive tactics and regulation at the county to state level. Here in the valley, both Rocky Mountain Power and UMPA are doing their darndest to penalize rooftop solar, and the gas lobby scored a win last session by requiring hookups in all new developments.

There are lots of effective legislative actions that could improve the situation, including the following

1. Set statewide renewable portfolio standards. These targets create a stable regulatory environment that allows businesses and individuals to invest and deploy renewables.
2. Work with utilities across the state to ensure solvency and financing during the transition. Distributed power generation and storage is extremely frightening to many power operators who have been sold stories from the fossil fuel lobby about “death spirals” and “duck curves.” Clear talk and financial assurances would remove barriers and accelerate the transition.
3.  Provide financing, tax breaks, or direct subsidies for renewable power generation and storage. We are spending the money in any case. It’s our choice whether we pay the utility billions to build and maintain giant coal and gas plants, or support families and local businesses to create a cheaper and more reliable grid that doesn’t pollute.
4. Update the domestic building efficiency code (hasn’t been done for two cycles)
5. Invest in research and manufacturing of renewable technologies. Last year, 96% of all new electricity production was wind and solar. Fossil fuels are old news. The market for solar has almost been cornered by China. If we don’t invest in domestic production, we are going to end up with a solar OPEC sunburn.

Megadrought

I went in an airplane for the first time in 18 months. I flew over the Great Salt Lake—what was left of it. It looked like the Aral Sea. Antelope Island was connected to the mainland on three sides. The antelope were halfway to Saratoga Springs. There was hay growing in Farmington Bay. Foxes and coyotes were nearly across the new land bridge to Gunnison Island to visit the 10,000 pelicans they insisted were kin.

The Great Salt Lake is about to drop below the all-time low because of agricultural water diversions and climate change.

The bottom of the Great Basin. This is the place that floods when God sends the snow. This is the place that dries up when we divert the rivers.

Some of us get lulled into thinking that this drought is just more of the same. Some of us are wrong. The current conditions the Southwest is experiencing are called a megadrought—a dry period that lasts more than 10 years. This megadrought has been going on for so long that if you were born in the 90s or later, your entire life may have unfolded during the big dry.

Evaporation ponds next to the Great Salt Lake during a more normal year.

Lake Powell is so low the dock just broke loose. At the Utah Water Task Force meeting, I learned that reservoirs in the Weber River usually have 80,000 acre feet of water storage. This year, they hold 2,700. Now that humans dominate the global water cycle, this story is stuck on repeat almost everywhere on Earth (Abbott et al., 2019a). 

I think it's really important to provide some context to this drought. Tree rings show that we are in the driest 20-year period since trees started keeping records some 2,000 years ago. I think it’s even more important to identify what is causing these conditions. Our megadrought is directly a consequence of human-caused climate change. This isn't a natural disaster. This is an unnatural consequence of our overuse of fossil fuels. We have supercharged the summers, disrupted the wet winds from the Pacific, and made snow and rain less reliable. I don't blame climate change in a generic way, there is solid science on this megadrought specifically (Williams et al., 2020). These conditions have also caused a doubling of annual wildfire extent across the West, setting the stage for megafires that burn whole valleys and mountainsides. 

Governor Cox asks Utahns to join him in prayer to break the drought.

I believe in the power of prayer, but how does God feel when we pray for our actions to have no consequences? To solve this part of the megadrought, we need to dramatically decrease fossil fuel combustion so the climate can get back to normal. The best way individuals can do that is by pressuring their elected officials to stop climate change, changing their transportation to bikes and public transport, and eating a plant-based diet (cartoon Ben says it best). Doing these things would leave us healthier, wealthier, and much more secure (check out this recent post on the ongoing global decarbonization).

The natural response to scarcity is to try to increase supply. We build pipelines, dams, and canals so there is more water available when we want it. This has been the response of Utah as a state. I hear from state legislators all the time that we should build more dams, and the state just created a new River Authority that is going to fight with our neighbors in Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado for more water. They'll be fighting over water that doesn’t exist.

The problem with this supply-side approach is that demand can always grow faster than supply (Abbott et al., 2019, Ellison et. al., 2012). Demand is basically limitless. Building more dams won't help in any way if the rain and snow never come. Suing California won't help if there is no water in the river or aquifer to take.

We need to manage our demand as individuals and as a society to live within our means. Much of Utah, including where I live, is in the Great Basin. This is a huge internally draining part of the Earth with no rivers to the ocean. Areas like ours are extremely sensitive to climate change and human water use. Consequently, endorheic basins all over the world are experiencing hydrological collapse (Wurtsbaugh et al., 2017). We need to recognize that we have limited water resources and change our behavior to live within those limits.

So what are we using our water for? More than 80% of Utah's water use is agricultural. Some of this water use is totally justified and important, such as the water used to grow food for people. I love Utah cherries, watermelon, corn, and essential oils. Unfortunately, the production of Utah fruits has dropped by half since the mid 80s. Over the same time period, alfalfa production has increased by 300,000 tons per year (USDA). Today, 70% of our agricultural water goes to grow alfalfa, most of which is exported to China to feed livestock. Does it really make sense to subsidize an economically marginal activity that doesn't increase our food and water security? If you think it doesn't, I invite you to stop eating meat and talk with your legislators about supporting water reform.

Of the remaining non-agricultural use, most is outdoor water use. There are plenty of beautiful native plants that grow happily without irrigation. However, for some reason we have decided that we need turfgrass in front of every house and building, even though this non-native species needs huge amounts of water and fertilizer. As individuals and as a part of various corporate, educational, city, and state communities, we need to change the way we landscape.

Outdoor water use is up the bulk of domestic water use. In light of the severe and extended drought, we let our lawn go dormant this year.

There is also an economic solution to this problem: let the price of water increase. Currently we heavily subsidize water, paying one of the lowest prices per gallon of anywhere in the U.S (Utah Rivers Council). If the price reflected the cost, we would all waste a lot less water.

There are also problems with water law that cause a lot of waste. Under current water law, if you don't use your water rights, you lose them. That means there is a huge disincentive to conserve. For example, Provo is considering piping water from the Provo River and releasing it up Rock Canyon. They could simply let Rock Canyon flow, but they have water rights in the Provo River that they need to find a beneficial use for. I wonder if the river could use the water beneficially. There are thousands of counterintuitive inefficiencies like this going on every day in our state that we need to resolve. We should have water law that encourages conservation and strategic agriculture while ensuring the health of our ecosystems. Call your legislators or provide feedback here to encourage scaling up the water banking pilot program.

I grew up in Utah, and I love this place with all my heart. We need to change our laws, policies, and behaviors to stop climate change and water waste in our beautiful state. This will make a better world for all of us and make us much more prepared for the next drought. Or for this drought, if it lasts another twenty years.

Stewards and seedlings

The truth about EVs, windmills, solar panels, and other "green" stuff

As an environmental scientist, I used to get asked about climate change all the time.

Is it happening? Is it caused by people? How worried should I be?

I was always grateful for these questions. Regardless of the person’s background, they were reaching out to learn about a politicized issue that can be confusing and intimidating. I felt privileged that they trusted me enough to ask.

Though this post isn’t about climate change, the short answer to those questions is yes, yes, and very. If you want more detail, here are three of my favorite resources:

1. BYU’s course on climate change science andsolutions
2. Project Drawdown’s Climate 101 series
3. Skeptical Science’s ugly but accurate wiki

Cool sky at my brother's birthday party.

While I still get asked about climate change, a different set of questions have become dominant over the past few years.

Don’t solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they produce? Aren’t windmills only built because they are subsidized? Isn’t the ecological footprint of an EV greater than a gas car?

I see the evolution in questioning as an enormously positive sign. We are no longer in the “is there a problem” stage. We have graduated into the “what are the best solutions” stage, which is infinitely more useful and stimulating.

Given the rate of change in the renewable energy space, it’s no wonder that people are hearing more about these technologies. Last year, more than 90% of the new energy production built was wind and solar. This isn’t because of subsidies or regulation—fossil fuels still have huge structural advantages there. Despite the fact that fossil fuel pollution causes approximately 1 in 5 deaths globally (10.2 million a year)^1,2, we invest more than three times the direct subsidies into fossil fuels than renewable energy³.

Figure 1 From Errigo et al. 2020. Estimates of premature deaths caused by pollution and other causes and risk factors worldwide. Deaths associated with COVID-19 were current on 9 October 2020. 

If it’s not big government picking winners and losers, why are we hearing so much more about wind and solar? This quiet and clean revolution is happening because solar photovoltaic and wind power are now providing the cheapest energy ever available to humankind⁴. The cost of solar has decreased by 90% in the past 10 years, and the cost of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 95%.

A cost comparison of various energy sources. The levelized cost includes all manufacturing, installation, and operating costs over the life of the unit, allowing direct comparison across very different technologies. This is a sneak peek from a forthcoming paper with data from Lazard and IRENA.

But back to our questions. Isn’t this whole green thing a scam?

One of the most prominent ecologists of the 20^th century was Barry Commoner. He called ecology, the “Science of survival,” referring to all the organisms on Earth, including humans. 

Because ecology is a study of complex interactions (systems of systems), we usually don’t think of universal laws relating to ecological interactions. However, Commoner was a rebel, and he proposed four ecological laws:

1. Everything is connected to everything else
2. Everything must go somewhere
3. Nature knows best
4. There aint no such thing as a free lunch

While each of these laws deserves its own seminar, I think that #4 is especially pertinent to questions about renewables and electrified technologies. This law posits that every activity has an ecological cost. For example, all animals are heterotrophs—organisms that can’t harvest energy from the sun or inorganic chemicals. This means that we must eat other organisms to survive. Riding a bicycle has an ecological cost: the materials and energy to construct it, maintain it, and operate it. This is where I see many people get confused about more sustainable technologies and behaviors. While all lunches have a cost, law #4 does not posit that all lunches cost the same.

Many critics rightfully point out that EVs and solar panels have ecological costs. They are not, and cannot be, a “free lunch.” From an ecological perspective, the question is never, “is the lunch free,” but “how much does it cost.”

Because of the complexity of our globalized world (anyone else a huge fan of the “Good Place”?), answering the question of how much a particular product or activity costs ecologically is really complicated. Indeed, there is a whole scientific field dedicated to assessing ecological impact: life-cycle analysis (LCA). Researchers in LCA do detailed accounting to quantify the overall environmental impact of an object or activity from cradle to grave (or cradle to cradle in the case of circular production approaches). They assess how much energy, pollution, and habitat loss are created by extraction of the raw materials followed by the manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal of the product.

While LCA is a painfully meticulous research activity, it reveals the price column on the menu of life. For example, eating a plant-based diet only uses 15% of the energy and 25% of the land required by the typical American diet^5,6. Riding a bicycle uses less than 1% of the energy required to drive a car⁷. Driving an electric car produces much more pollution than a bicycle but 75% less greenhouse gas and a tiny fraction of the local pollution of a gas- or diesel-powered car^8,9. Solar panels and wind turbines recoup their initial energy and pollution costs within 1-5 months, producing less than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions of their fossil fuel equivalents per kWh^10,11. Most encouraging, the ecological cost of all these green technologies (from bicycles to solar panels) is decreasing as global manufacturing and transportation becomes cleaner. For example, Tesla’s gigafactories are nearing 100% solar, and new techniques for extracting lithium from deep groundwater brines allow efficient extraction without expansive evaporation pools¹².

A figure from Kim et al. 2020, which compared the greenhouse gas footprint of different diets in 140 countries.

Pro-tip #1, when given a choice, pick the cheaper lunch.

I think there is a deeply engrained human instinct to resent hypocrisy. This can be an influence for good, especially when we apply it to ourselves. However, it can also lead us to reject legitimate improvements just because they are not complete solutions. Are solar panels, windmills, electric cars, and heat pumps impact free? Absolutely not. That would infringe one of the only laws of ecology. Are they better than the current coal, gas, and internal combustion engine alternatives? Yes. They are so much better that we should be doing everything in our power to encourage their uptake. This is literally a matter of life and death for millions of people worldwide. Whether you are in a “sensitive group” or you are completely healthy, air pollution harms every system in our body: respiratory, reproductive, neurological, cardiovascular, and mental².

In addition to decreasing harm from pollution and climate change, there are another suite of reasons to embrace the clean energy revolution. Cleaning up our electricity, transportation, and heating is going to create millions of high-paying jobs in every zip code of the United States. There are approximately 1.14 million jobs currently associated with coal, gas, and oil extraction and processing nationwide. The renewable transition will create more than 25 million jobs nationwide, including manufacturing, installation, financing, sales, transportation, construction, and education¹³. The laborers and engineers currently in fossil fuel can be directly transitioned to jobs requiring the same skills in transmission, maintenance, raw materials, and permitting. We need these workers and companies to pull this off. If we remove the regulatory and political obstacles that are behind our current situation of expensive and dirty energy¹⁴, we can have a cleaner, wealthier, and more abundant life for all of us.

Figure 8 from Griffith and Calisch 2020. This shows the new clean energy jobs that would be created in the U.S. were we to commit to halving greenhouse gas emissions each decade until reaching zero emissions.

Last winter, my mom purchased a Chevy Bolt. A couple weeks ago, I was on a forum to see how the new version compared, and surprise surprise, people were fighting about whether EVs were better than gas and diesel cars. In the midst of long and usually data-free opinions, some dude from Wisconsin blurted in all caps,

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. THE CAR HAS WAY BETTER PERFORMANCE AND HARDLY COSTS ANYTHING TO OPERATE.”

This is one of the many signs that renewables are winning. If you have money to invest or things to purchase, I invite you to put it towards clean—though imperfect—electric technologies. If you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or member of the Independent American Party of Utah, call up your state representatives and encourage them to streamline manufacturing and deployment of renewable energy. Whether you voted for Trump, Biden, or Jo Jorgensen, don't miss out on the personal, financial, and environmental benefits of these new technologies.

If you have questions or challenges, I would be honored to hear them. If you want more information, here are some good sources:

1. Rewiring America (Other Labs)
2. 3 clean energy myths debunked (Yale)
3. Interview with Saul Griffiths on renewable jobs (VOX)
4. De-risking renewable energy projects (Forbes)
5. Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability  (Energy)
6. Are electric vehicles really better for the climate? (Union of Concerned Scientists)
7. Our Energy Library clearing house for articles and reports on fossil fuels and renewables (Our Energy Policy)
8. The 2035 Report (Energy Innovation)
9. The Electrify This! podcase (Sara Baldwin)

 References

1. Vohra, K. et al. Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem. Environ. Res. 195, 110754 (2021).
2. Errigo, I. M. et al. Human Health and Economic Costs of Air Pollution in Utah: An Expert Assessment. Atmosphere 11, 1238 (2020).
3. Coady, D., Parry, I., Le, N.-P. & Shang, B. Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates. IMF Work. Pap. 19, 1 (2019).
4. Bogdanov, D. et al. Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability. Energy 120467 (2021) doi:10.1016/j.energy.2021.120467.
5. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares. Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets.
6. Kim, B. F. et al. Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises. Glob. Environ. Change 62, 101926 (2020).
7. Hollingsworth, J., Copeland, B. & Johnson, J. X. Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dockless electric scooters. Environ. Res. Lett. 14, 084031 (2019).
8. Choma, E. F., Evans, J. S., Hammitt, J. K., Gómez-Ibáñez, J. A. & Spengler, J. D. Assessing the health impacts of electric vehicles through air pollution in the United States. Environ. Int. 144, 106015 (2020).
9. How Clean is Your Electric Vehicle? Union of Concerned Scientists https://evtool.ucsusa.org.
10. Haapala, K. R. & Prempreeda, P. Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines. Int. J. Sustain. Manuf. 3, 170 (2014).
11. NREL. Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Solar Photovoltaics. 3 https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf (2013).
12. Tscherning, R. & Chapman, B. Navigating the emerging lithium rush: lithium extraction from brines for clean-tech battery storage technologies. J. Energy Nat. Resour. Law 39, 13–42 (2021).
13. Griffith, S. & Calisch, S. Jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs. 34 (2020).
14. Stokes, L. C. Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. (Oxford University Press, 2020).