The Future of Chinese Solar, Battery Myths & Climate Politics | Ep174: Michael Liebreich & Bryony Worthington

Michael Liebreich

Hello. I'm Michael Liebreich.

Bryony Worthington  

I'm Bryony Worthington.

ML  

And this is Cleaning Up. 

This is the final episode of season 12, and in what is now a new tradition, this is where Bryony and I get to go through the last three months, what's happened in the world of net zero transition, and how we've tried to reflect it in our conversations with amazing climate leaders. So let's get started. Hello, Bryony, how are you?

BW

I'm very well, thank you, and great to be back together. It's been a long three months, it feels like, doesn't it? Lots and lots has happened. 

ML

It has, and both of us have been on the road a little bit, and we'll get onto that later. But where are you right now? 

BW  

Right now, I'm in Canada, up north of Vancouver, on a small island. So yes, carrying on my travels.

ML  

And that sounds like a holiday, not business travel, or are you doing some business as well?

BW

Well, you know climate. Once you're in climate, it's never fully off your mind, is it? There's a lot of people here, actually, thinking about climate. We've had the horrible fires in Jasper, which has really rocked everyone, actually. So, yeah, you're never really fully off duty/

ML  

Never fully off duty. Well, I have to admit that I sort of am. So I'm out here, you can tell from the shirt, I'm kind of on holiday but I'm working through here in Switzerland. And again, we'll also talk about somebody... I recorded the last episode before this in Switzerland, which we'll talk about as well. That was with Jenny Chase. But let's go all the way back. Let's start with the first episode of the season, which was with Dr Ma Jun. Can you even remember it?

BW  

Well, I have to confess, I did have to listen back to it. It did seem like a different era, but yeah that was back in April, right? I found that a fascinating episode, because I hadn't fully appreciated quite how interventionist China had been in shifting its finance policies in a way that the West really hasn't managed. And so I just thought that was a fascinating insight into how China has managed to get this lead on clean energy systems that we've seen. 

ML  

Yeah, we tend to deal in caricatures. And there's a caricature of China which says all it does is use coal, but it owns the supply chain for solar and batteries in particular, but all it's doing is exporting and there's no sign that it's really that interested in acting on climate change because everything's about mercantilism and so on. And when you talk to somebody like Dr Ma, you realize that's completely wrong. There's a huge amount of domestic action in finance, and also global leadership, truly leadership, around finance, trying to shift the world to a lower carbon trajectory. It's quite an eye opener when you get into the detail, isn't it?

BW  

Completely. And because the other caricature is 'it's all just state planning,' and 'it's all very inefficient,' and 'it's an old way of doing things.' But actually, he talks about how he used monetary policy to shift capital in ways that the West has sort of eschewed, probably to its detriment. Putting in that need to reflect externalities into your finance system shifts trillions of dollars into the right things and away from the dirty things and I found that fascinating to see just how they'd harnessed capitalism, but tweaked it so that it delivered the right things for society. I thought it was excellent.

ML  

And there were a couple of other things that I thought were very striking. One was the interplay between financial policy or financial regulation, and the activities of the individual ministries in all the different functional areas, and then being coordinated by the NDRC. And that was very striking. The other thing that was striking to me was the role of Airpocalypse, those episodes around sort of 2013/14 where China's air quality, Beijing's air quality, was just so horrendous, and it's come up in a number of other episodes with other guests. So that was very striking to me that Dr Mar's epiphany, which switched him onto green finance, was the same thing that switched Jonathan Maxwell, an earlier guest, onto sustainable finance with SDCL, and also Lauri Myllyvirta, who's now in Helsinki with CREA doing analysis and holding people's feet to the fire over air quality and climate. Those air quality episodes actually determined a lot of careers and a lot of action, didn't they?

BW  

Yeah, and I think that's true. And then you kind of get to climate solutions via much more immediate political problems of health and air quality and that is another factor that should make this transition really urgent and happen at pace. But we'll come on to some of the reasons why politics, communications, all of these things, have slowed down this transition. When you look at the bare facts, burning stuff near to people who are vulnerable isn't a good idea, and China's moved on that faster, perhaps, than many. And we have explored through the season, why that is.

ML  

From a very poor starting point, it should be said. But we have had a lot of very good conversations about politics and, as you point out, air quality politics might be easier than climate politics. But before we go to that, let's talk about some of the episodes where we talked to guests about the solutions, about the low carbon solutions, that are, in some cases, progressing incredibly quickly, and in some cases, I think it's fair to say, we were a bit more sceptical. The episode just before this - Jenny Chase - I filmed it in a solar factory, 3S Solar, that makes fantastic rooftop integrated solar systems. And I sat down with Jenny Chase, whom I've known for nearly 20 years. I brought her into New Energy Finance, as it was then, and she then became the lead solar analyst and then the head of the solar practice. You watched the episode, what were you thinking as you watched that? 

BW  

I was thinking I hope she doesn't press that red button that's next to her head, which you had seated her next to. Sorry, people who didn't watch this video won't know what that button was, but she was literally sitting next to a button saying, 'Do not press.'

ML  

There was a machine behind her, because we were in this factory. It has to be said - health and safety - that factory was not actually in use when we filmed.

BW  

Fair enough. What I loved about that it was like listening in to a conversation between two very old friends who've known each other for a long time, and you were politely disagreeing with each other and arguing about prices and reflecting on the history you've had together, which I thought was great, because it gave you a chance to look backwards at how we've got to where we are, and then obviously talk about where we are and where we're going. And the thing that perhaps I took away was that Jenny - who is possibly now, as you discussed, the world expert on this topic of the pricing of solar - she's saying perhaps we need to be focused on other things now, in addition to solar, from a policy perspective, because it's doing so well. And that there are other things that need to catch up to make the transition possible, so that was, for me, the takeaway. What did you take away from it? 

ML  

First of all, it was enormous fun to sit down with Jenny. She's always been incredibly stimulating to be around, because she tells it exactly like it is. And that's been her hallmark since the first day that she walked through the door at NEF and so it's great fun. We've also grown up together in a way. Obviously, I was the CEO and she was first the intern and then the analyst. But we've grown up with the industry and we talk in the episode about how we made up some of the terminology. We followed some of the blind alleys around, I don't know, maybe solar thermal or various things. But we've really seen the industry go through these waves of growth, waves of consolidation, waves of bankruptcies. And I just think we're at a really extraordinary point. When you look at the manufacturing capacity today, which is over a terawatt of solar photovoltaic manufacturing, and if all of that was made and then installed, it would meet 4.5% of global electricity in one year. So if you did that for two years it'd be 9%. You do it for four years, it'd be nearly 20%, and so on. So now the solar industry is at a scale which I just don't think people out there realise. And in fact, that capacity by 2025 will be 2 terawatts. So we have the capacity now to get to 25-30% solar in our electricity within a very short number of years, certainly within a decade, if we can do that. But then, as you say, the question is 'can we do that?' Can we put the other things around the solar to actually use it? 

BW  

Yeah because you've had a very interesting conversation about the kinds of things that need to happen in order to not just overbuild into that midday peak where you're going to get lots and lots of solar. The need for transmission, the need for storage, and the need for EVs to soak up the production, all of that needs to catch up in a way. And the other thing I thought is, as I think you discussed, there's going to be some fallout, because we've got a huge amount of capacity for manufacturing, but where is the demand? I mean, the demand is somewhat patchy and a bit vulnerable. You talked about that very famous example of Spain, which switched off its subsidies overnight when it was too successful. Solar has had a history of boom and bust. And the other thing I think that's playing into this is this desire to reshore manufacturing so that you're less reliant on China. Jenny had a lovely phrase where she said, 'I'd rather be reliant on China for buying one solar panel every 25 years instead of oil every week.' And she's completely right but, you know, India's seeking to reshore, these are big markets reshoring their manufacturing. So there might well be some shakeouts here, right? People are losing money again. 

ML  

And I think we're at a point where, I think we called it in the conversation the 'there will be blood moment.' Because either we install at terawatt scale, in which case the Chinese solar industry will be fine but there'll be vast disruption across the electricity sector, because electricity prices, are going to go to zero for big chunks of the day and for big chunks of the year, and that's going to have huge ramifications. Or if we don't go to terawatt scale installations by next year, or the year after, then there's got to be a massive shakeout in China. You can't keep adding that amount of capacity and not selling those sorts of volumes. So I think 'watch this space' was my main takeaway. For all the history, we've got to a point where this thing now is - what is it? - the immovable object meeting the irresistible force?

BW  

Yeah, just purely because of the fact that it's such a low cost now. What is it? 10 cents per watt. You know, just so cheap to build. Then the fixed costs of getting into the right country, in the right place, with the right installation costs is the challenge. And that's a project finance question, which everyone is capable of doing. And it's the first form of major electricity with no moving parts. So you know, it's an exciting time, but as you say there's going to be a shakeout as a consequence. One of the things, going back to this point that other things need to catch up, was we also had an episode with Ben Nelmes, where we talked about electric vehicles. Because the other thing China's done faster than anyone else is built into battery manufacturing and the supply chains and then the electric vehicles that they're producing. And those two, solar plus electric vehicles, seems like A) China dominates, but B) you need both in order to absorb the solar when it's being produced, and the other forms of variable renewables. So what did you think? We're both on the same side here with respect to electric vehicles being the future. But was there anything in that episode that stood out to you?

ML  

Yeah. So when you talk about what you need to put around solar to make it work? And clearly, everybody jumps to batteries and electric vehicles. I would just like to say, I wish we were also talking about heat pumps as part of that same matrix, because thermal storage is the other leg on the stool. I really enjoyed your conversation with Ben from NewAutomotive, that was episode 170. I think the theme there was whether the shift to EVs is now unstoppable. Is it going to saturate, because there's all this background noise of 'nobody's buying these EVs,' and 'the growth has stopped in EVs.' And I look at the data, and EVs are still growing globally, first quarter of this year, 30% growth. So I'm like, 'well, it's a slowdown, maybe, relative to 50% growth, or relative to 40% growth.' And meanwhile, internal combustion vehicles peaked in 2017. So I'm like, what slow down. But nevertheless, you still do need carefully constructed policy, and that was my takeaway, was how thoughtful the work has been around the world to enable this rapid shift to what's now one vehicle in five electric. That's a pretty rapid change, I don't think it's going to stop, but it hasn't happened accidentally.

BW  

No, absolutely not. And it's a story that sees policies being picked up and adapted from really California, who started it back in the 90s, where they started to bring in electric vehicle mandates, and then China, famously bringing in their own version of that. And then Europe, and now the UK, introduced even more ambitious mandates, so wedging open the market, which has been very slow to adapt on its own, not surprisingly, given the profit margins on the existing cars. So policy adaptation and uptake has been a huge driver of that. And again, it does lead you back to China bringing down the costs, which means now you can bring these things in and more or less we're reaching price parity for people who drive a lot of miles. So, the economics now starts to swing in favour.

ML  

So as always, during these episodes, we've done quite a bit of mythbusting. So with Jenny on solar, we explicitly went through a bunch of myths, but we also had, on batteries, Hans Eric Melin. Because one of the things holding back - is it holding back? yes, I think it is holding back - the shift to EVs, is this idea that, 'the batteries all end up in landfill.' 95% of lithium ion batteries are not recycled, etc, etc. And Hans Eric Melin, has a consulting business called Circular Energy Storage. He is the world expert on battery recycling and is it happening, isn't it happening? How do you measure it? And the answer is, that figure of 95% non-recycling to 5% recycling is absolute nonsense, and he just surgically unwraps that and shows that already we are recycling something over 90% of batteries and extracting the critical minerals. And that opens up the way for circularity, so that battery minerals can become forever minerals. They can just go from one battery, 10-15, years later, to another battery, which will be better because of innovation. So I love that episode.

BW  

Yeah absolutely. And it further underlines the difference between the fossil fuel economy, which is the least circular of any system you could imagine, where you're digging stuff out of the ground continually, transporting it continually, burning it continually. And that shift to a battery system of full recyclability is going to be more efficient and cleaner. So hopefully, it's inevitable.

ML  

Yeah, and the way I put it on X as it's now called, is that recycling is not the Achilles heel of batteries. It's actually the secret superpower, because once you've mined it, and it's in a battery, you then control that mineral or that material, and can then reprocess it and remanufacture. You can't do that with coal and oil and gas. It's up there in the atmosphere, doing harm for hundreds of years. It couldn't be more different.

BW  

Thousands of years, yeah. 

ML  

So Bryony, staying with batteries, you also had a conversation with Anand Gopal about batteries, but these were thermal batteries, right? 

BW  

Yes, that's right. I sat down with Anand Gopal from Energy Innovation based here in San Francisco, and we ran through what I think is a really exciting category of technologies, which is thermal electric storage, or heat batteries, as they're sometimes referred to. Which is basically taking that excess electricity and storing it as heat and then returning it as steam or high temperature that you can select from that system. And the beauty of it is it's very simple, the engineering isn't complex. It's not quite at commercial readiness levels but demonstration projects are happening. And so it's another thing that's chasing this oversupply of variable renewables and then turning into some form of storage that we can use for industrial processes or even backup electricity generation. So yeah, that was a great conversation. And I feel like Michael, we need you to do that job of giving it a name and categorising it, and tracking it because it is a very new and disparate industry that needs some good data around it, and some good names, because no one seems to have settled on what they should be called. 

ML  

Anand called it 'hot rocks in a box,' which I thought was brilliant. Obviously, that doesn't sound very official, but thermal batteries are kind of what they are. But what's interesting is that these are high temperatures. We're not talking about saving a bit of heat, a bit of hot water, which I've been talking about for years — yes, we should do that, because it's cheaper than electricity. This is potentially up to 1,400 degrees, 1,500 degrees — really hot — for industrial processes, and then obviously you don't need quite that for power generation. I found Anand — who I don't know, and I've not spoken — to be absolutely delightful. I found myself watching that episode going "Yes, yes!" because he was just so spot on his understanding of the thermodynamics, the microeconomics, and you did a section at the end with him on direct air capture where he basically - I'm paraphrasing - he said, 'It works from an engineering perspective. It's going to be expensive. It'll get cheaper, probably not very cheap, but fundamentally, society is probably just not going to pay for it.' And I was going, "Yes, yes!" Sadly, that's exactly right.

BW  

Well, the reason I think you were so in tune is because he is an engineer by training and now an analyst, so you guys are cut from the same cloth. But absolutely that bit at the end, which was where he applies his political brain to the question of: Will society stump up the cash for all of this engineered carbon removal when politicians are going to be facing so many demands from society in this changed climate? Is that going to be something we prioritize when it's going to be so hard to scale and will be so expensive, and the results of it are going to be quite far in the distance? And my knowledge of politicians tells me — I tend to agree with his analysis — that it's a nice idea, but it may never scale.

ML  

Yeah. And what I liked about him is that he is an engineer, but also he was seamlessly crossing the boundaries into the political economy. And we've got a couple of other guests who do that as well, which we'll get onto. But this question about whether society will stump up for direct air capture, that's something that I spoke about in an earlier episode about a year and a half ago with Julio Friedmann the carbon wrangler, and he's absolutely convinced that because we need it intellectually, or because the physics say we need it, society will therefore pay for it. And I have to say that I didn't believe it then, I don't believe it now. We'll do some, but I don't think we'll do the numbers that are in the models. There was somebody else you spoke to where, again, I was skeptical about the sector for reasons that are perhaps more to do with consumer behavior, not politics. Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute was talking about synthetic proteins, and to me, I found that was one where I'd love to think that we'll do a lot more synthetic protein, because it offers so many benefits environmentally, but I wasn't convinced that we had a pathway to do that. Were you convinced? 

BW  

It was interesting. I think I come from... perhaps I'm being a bit Pollyanna about it, but I think there is a trend underway where we're starting to realize the huge inefficiencies of red meat in particular, and that societies' diets are shifting. And therefore, I suppose I can see the need for a replacement for the patty burger, which is such a staple of many Western diets. But, do I think that the problem is as large as the Good Food Institute presented it as? I think I'm somewhat undecided, because there are many ways of getting to the outcome we want, which is less wastage of agricultural inputs then feeding humans. I, perhaps a bit too Pollyanna, said 'why can't we be a bit more Indian?' There are ways of finding protein and sustaining people without the need for this very engineered cultivated or lab-grown meat. But I find it fascinating, and he has studied it in such detail, and is a very good communicator. He's looked at the projected risks, and he's come up with a very interesting way of intervening to try and make sure that we're tackling it. And for that, I applaud everything that Good Food Institute does. I suspect it's not going to be an easy path, but that's one of the challenges, isn't it? Working out what can scale. And that's what they're trying to do by investing in science and exploring this. So it's definitely a wedge of the problem we've got to solve. 

ML  

No question that there is a problem with the impact of particularly red meat, and that it would be enormously impactful if we could reduce people's consumption. But what I got hung up on is the consumer behaviors. And there was a bit of social media to-and-fro between me and Bruce after that episode, because he just wants to call it 'meat.' He says it's identical to meat, we'll just call it meat. It is meat, it's made of the same cells as meat, it's functionally identical. But I say the thing is that you've got to call it 'synthetic meat' or 'cultured meat' or something, because people won't trust it. You can't expect people just, you know... if you look at the definition of meat, then you'll see it comes from animals. And if you have the same thing that doesn't come from animals, you have to be honest about it. And I'm not sure that Bruce agrees with that. We had this to and fro where I could call it fake meat, I can call it Franken meat — okay, that's offensive — but at the very least, I think we've got to call it cultured meat or replacement or something or we're just going to lose people. There's no way, I think, consumers are going to feel happy eating this stuff without knowing that it comes from a lab or a test tube or a factory.

BW  

Yeah, I hear you, but I suspect the way in which people consume meat... I mean, I'm now in the heart of North American food culture, and you go to your local favorite branded restaurant, and you buy whatever they offer you at a price point you can afford, and there isn't really a lot of scrutiny. A lot of people are not sitting there in their local butcher or at a supermarket judiciously reading all the labeling, you're just trying to feed a family on a budget. So it feels to me that it's all about the economics, and at the moment, the economics are terrible for cultivated meat. So the question is, can we get around that? And then, you're right, there will be all these societal adjustments. But my sense is that we're already pretty blindly trusting what we put in our mouths to the brands that we buy it from. Anyway, it was a fascinating conversation, but I'm sure we'll have to have more as we go beyond energy and into agriculture as one of the big problems.

ML  

For anybody listening, by the way, we will put links into the show notes to all of these episodes and a couple of the other ones that I've mentioned from the past. There was a fabulous episode with Jim Mellon of Agronomics where we also talked about synthetic and cultured proteins and so on. So we are starting to open up those topics as well a little bit on Cleaning Up. Transition is a really interesting word, because you do a whole bunch of new, exciting, fun stuff, the stuff that we've been talking about in those episodes. but if it's a transition, you also have to get off the old stuff, which means you have to talk about coal and utilities and methane and so on. And we did a bit of that during the season as well. You went to China and you talked about repowering coal with Staffan Qvist, that was episode 163 and that's a favorite topic of yours, isn't it?

BW  

Yeah, absolutely. I went to China and took part in a conference that was looking at this question of, how do we view the assets that are already there, the thermal assets, the coal stations, the 1,000 gigawatts of coal in China, and what options do we have for repowering them into clean. Since I've been there, actually there's been a policy announced in China that they're going to look at retrofitting coal, but they've selected the sort of technologies that perhaps we would consider to be less sustainable, like biomass or even ammonia. And what we want them to focus on is really clean, which is basically thermoelectric batteries, the nuclear reactors that could replace coal, and the geothermal that's coming through. So some progress in China on that question. And it was a fascinating episode with both Dr. Yaoli Zhang, who's in China, and Staffan Qvist, who's one of the leading academics who's written on this topic.

ML  

And it was another one where hearing from Dr Zhang was great, because you then realize all of the work that's going on in China that we don't generally hear about. It's very nuanced, I have to say. You know, firing power stations with ammonia, of all the ideas that I hear that I think are just not going to happen, that has to be one. If you want to use a bit of ammonia and fire it, because you're providing backups, you store the ammonia instead of storing hydrogen or whatever, and you use it. Maybe, but it's going to be so expensive. The idea that you could just seamlessly go from coal to ammonia without some 10x jump in the costs, I find completely absurd. But I suppose we'll just have to wait until things play out in China or in Japan or Germany, the countries that are trying to do it. 

BW  

Yeah, absolutely. 

ML  

Sticking with hydrogen, just for a moment. There was, of course, an episode on hydrogen. That was an audioblog version of a piece that I originally wrote for BloombergNEF, which is called 'hydrogens missing trillions.' It was a reasonably popular episode. Funnily enough, people are still interested in hydrogen. What I did there was, I took this figure of 90 million tons of clean hydrogen that the great and good of 26 countries agreed at the hydrogen energy ministerial in Tokyo a couple of years ago, and then reiterated it, and just turned it into the amount of subsidy you would need if you really want to see 90 million tons of hydrogen by 2030. And you come to this eye watering figure of $23 trillion. And it's just arithmetic, it's not a political statement, it's not that I love hydrogen or hate hydrogen. It's just, if you take how much hydrogen costs, and you multiply by the volume, and you say you need to guarantee that for 10 years, you get to these absolutely astonishing figures. To me, that just sums up why we should not be putting our eggs in the hydrogen basket, but of course, enormous amounts of debate. I don't know if you even bothered listening to yet another Michael rant on hydrogen.

BW  

I did as you say, you just did the maths. And when you lay it out like that, it does look quite extraordinary. And the thing is, as you've said, there's this tsunami of new technologies, some of which we just discussed, which will remove the need for this over reliance on what people are saying hydrogen is going to deliver. It will shake out over time, and I'm sure we'll come to it in future episodes. But yes, it was a new angle I hadn't heard you do before.

ML  

A new part of my repertoire. Well, I may be running out of hydrogen boosters who are prepared to come on Cleaning Up to debate with me. I hope not, I hope we still get them. Because it is such an important topic, because there are certain things we have to do with clean hydrogen. Another episode which was sort of related was my conversation with my old business school buddy, Grant Swartzwelder, where we talked about methane leaks. And you did an episode last season on methane leaks, but Grant is from Texas and his businesses, OTA Environmental Solutions and ESG Dynamics actually work on eliminating, and data managing, around methane and other fossil fuel leaks, fossil-fuel gas leaks. And I just found it so interesting to get under the hood and understand, actually, where this stuff is coming from, and how hard it will be to actually stop it from happening — economically and socially hard? 

BW  

Yeah. As we've said, there are lots of associated issues to do with the fossil economy. It's not circular. It has this huge carbon impact, but it also has this methane problem, and that's particularly true in places where you don't have the right regulations to require it to be dealt with. It seems to be that, obviously, with the oil industry, if you've got colocated gas and there's nowhere to go, it is going to be either flared or vented, in some cases, and that seems ludicrous. So there are some really low hanging fruit that you could get at to reduce that. But my sense is if you're running a system on a fossil-fuel natural gas system, it leaks all the way along the supply chain, and even at the end point when post combustion, you get methane slip as well. So it's endemic to the industry, and it is going to be one of the Achilles heels of why we'll shift away from burning things. Because there are all these associated problems that we have that are coming into sharper focus.

ML  

I would depart from you, because I think that engineers can fix these things. Obviously, engineers can certainly build it better to start with. They can fix these things. So the idea that we have to live with methane leakage, or even the issue that you raise methane slip, unburned not just methane, but unburned fossil fuel in exhaust. That's an issue I'm starting to learn about myself, because it's really not on the radar, and it's also very significant. But what was interesting in that episode, for me, is the literally hundreds of thousands of not that wealthy people running these wells, not the big oil and gas companies, but families and yeah, they might be wealthy families, but they're still quite small operators. They don't have huge resources. But between them, they may have to find figures like $100 billion to cap off and remediate gas and oil wells that are leaking and are at the end of life. And a solution has to be found: some state money, some tax money, some of their own, etc., but boy it's not going to be easy. That was my main takeaway: a real, much deeper understanding of why there is this problem, and how hard it's going to be to fix. 

BW  

Yeah, and the changing nature of ownership structures. But this is the question, though, isn't it. If we've got a limited amount of time, capital and attention, how much of it needs to be deployed on fixing the current system, which is currently very leaky and damaging, versus simply moving ahead with all the clean stuff. We started this episode talking about removing the demand, but then you have to have a managed decline when you start to move that demand away and you're left with legacy infrastructure. So yeah, that cleanup job at the end is something we're absolutely gonna have to do, whether we can get ever more brilliant at stopping the leaks all the way through the supply chain. I partly just hope that the whole pie is going to shrink and that that problem will get less.

ML  

But I'm also starting to get my head around just how big a problem methane is in terms of the warming that we see everyday. And you know, figures like 1/3 of the temperature increase has been caused by methane, you really start thinking, 'well, maybe we should put a little bit more resource into urgently stopping that.' Because if you care about the next 20 years, methane is the place to go, or a big place to go. Moving on, because there was somebody else who was also asking for more money, or more investment. I really enjoyed the conversation with Leonard Birnbaum episode 164. He's the CEO of E.ON, of course, one of the huge utilities in Germany. He's also president of Eurelectric, and I interviewed him outside the Euroletric summit in Athens. And  the themes were all about how you have to build transmission and digitization is coming down the track, both in terms of what it can do for us, in terms of helping manage the energy system better, but also data centres. This huge challenge of data centres.

BW  

Yeah, just at the point where we think we're building enough clean to keep up with demand growth, suddenly a whole new segment of demand starts to take off, making the job harder. There's no doubt that smarter use of the grid and reinforcement of the grid, and better demand management is going to have to be part of this, because otherwise it becomes a bit of a perfect storm of it being difficult to build the clean and then this demand growth that's suddenly descending upon us. So it was an interesting episode. I have to say, Michael, I feel that the utilities, the electricity sector as a whole, has been very slow to come out with what its demands are, in terms of clearly signalling that the future is electrification, and therefore from that flows all of these needs. From a political perspective, there hasn't been an overwhelming voice coming out of Eurelectric that's clearly showing how much more efficient this system could be, which I would love to have seen given more profile. But maybe I'm not speaking to the right people.

ML  

Can I say that I think that may be overly coloured by the experience in the UK, where there's this vast rear guard action by the gasbags, without question. And it's been very prominent, very vocal, very connected to the press and perhaps in the US as well. I actually have a huge amount of respect for Eurelectric and what they have achieved, because when I started New Energy Finance, the utilities were coal-based, and their attitude was, 'Don't rock the boat, because we use a lot of coal, and if we don't, we're going to use a lot of gas.' But they have really gone 180 degrees. They've changed. And I've had conversations on Cleaning Up with Christian Ruby and with other folks,  Francesco Starace, who was a president of Eurelectric prior to Leonard Birnbaum, and I actually think that they do have a clear vision for electrification but it is competing with so much noise from the fossil fuel and the incumbents, if I'm honest. Hopefully that's something that we can work on, amplifying the voices of those who know where we're going. 

BW  

Yeah, I think the focus has been on cleaning up the electricity system, as opposed to using the electricity system to decarbonize everything else. And hopefully that now is broadening. That perspective is being broadened.

ML  

Absolutely, and you this is going to change very rapidly, I believe, because we're coming from 20 years in the OECD where electricity demand, power demand didn't grow because of more and more efficiency and LEDs and so on. And we're now going to go into 20 years where it will grow. It'll grow because of electric vehicles, it'll grow because of heating, and it'll grow because of data centres and digitization. So with electricity growing, it becomes the exciting, dynamic sector, I'm pretty convinced. Now, just moving on quickly, if we might, it's been a huge quarter for politics. Of course, next season we're going to see the US election, but we've seen elections in India, across Europe, a number of European countries, and, of course, the UK. Dr Simon Evans, deputy editor of Carbon Brief, episode 169, where you and I spoke to him together about the UK election, just before the election. Does that episode stand the test of time now that we've seen this huge Labour landslide? 

BW  

Oh well, it was a moment, wasn't it, where we still didn't know who was gonna win. I mean, the polls were pretty clear when we recorded, and now we have the benefit of hindsight where we've seen this pretty remarkable outcome. My sense is that people were voting tactically. There was a lot of churn of seats. There's a big story there about Scotland, and Scotland coming back to Labour, and we've now got a new energy team, a new direction, a new manifesto that's being very quickly brought into reality. The lifting of the planning restrictions on onshore wind was done, I think, on day three. So they've definitely hit the ground running. So yeah, the politics of the UK has definitely shifted. And one of the interesting outcomes, of course, we didn't just see the Labour landslide, we also saw minor groups getting seats, the Reform Party getting five seats, the Greens getting four seats. But interestingly, 20 — oh no, sorry — 13 independent MPs being returned to Parliament, which is quite hard in a first past the post system. And I found that quite interesting because it also links to one of the episodes we did this season, where we focused on Australian politics with Simon Holmes à Court, of the Trimtab Foundation, where he had been instrumental in helping bring in independent candidates. And I'm just wondering if there's been this, you know, perhaps people are getting frustrated with the the restrictions of party politics, and they want genuine local candidates who represent their constituency, who've got a kind of backstory or a life beyond politics and we're starting to see this block, perhaps, of independent people being put into parliaments, which is really interesting. 

ML  

So I think there's an element of the fragmentation of politics, hyper local, the ability to reach people through social media, but I would say that the independents that Simon Holmes à  Court has been helping to get across the line, that was a pull, right? These were very attractive candidates that spoke to the centre, they spoke articulately, and people were excited about it. And there was a real sense of momentum and movement. Lovely episode, what he's done has been quite extraordinary. Whereas the independents in the UK, I would argue, the reason that you've got Greens at one end and Reform, which are basically the anti-Greens, and have pretty much not another thought in their head, and then you've got these independents, it's really a rejection of the major parties. It's a push away. So there's a whole bunch of people who refused to vote Conservative after the debacle, frankly, of the last few years, but can't bring themselves to vote for Labour or even the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems had a good election, they got 70 odd seats, the largest number that they've had in my lifetime, since they were the liberals and actually in government, probably. But I think what we've seen is a lot of voting against. So let me ask you a question. You talked about hitting the ground running, and the removal of the effective ban on onshore wind, which is something I've argued should be removed. Are you excited now? I'm sorry I'm going to characterise you, I know that you're a crossbench peer, but your heritage is much more Labour. And I'm obviously coming from a different political tradition. Are you excited? Do you think that this is like a new dawn and so fantastic and wonderful?

BW  

Well, what I'm very happy about, which I think you would agree with, is that when Sunak tacked to the far right and tried to align himself with anti-climate narratives, most of which are tenuously linked to reality, he didn't make any difference. The public didn't follow him, it was pretty squarely rejected. And I think that's super important at this particular time in global politics, that the majority of people are sensible enough to know that something really is seriously wrong with our climate and we need leaders to guide us through this period, and leaders who are not doing dog whistle politics where they're trying to chase this very minor but very vocal group of antis. And I think that's what excites me, is that we've got back to sensible politics.

ML  

But Bryony so you know, and I know, that there were far more votes in the middle than there were at the edge. So that really, by moving away from that, he basically gave up votes. He didn't achieve anything with this kind of great climate reset, but there are powerful voices on the right, not just Reform, but on the right of the Conservative Party, saying the problem was that his tack to the right — and it's not far right, I reject that, by the way, out of hand — but his tack to the right was only rhetorical, because what he actually did was he said, 'Oh, we're not going to ban this. We're going to ban the ban on meat.' Well, there was never a ban on meat. And he moved back a few bits of the timeline around heat pumps or around EVs, but he also doubled down and put more money behind heat pumps. So it was entirely rhetorical, it wasn't sincere. And there are people on the right of the Conservative Party, on the right of politics in the UK, saying he needed to be much more extreme. He really needed to deliver what had been promised in terms of stopping immigration and abandoning net zero. It's not something I espouse, but that is an alternative explanation that is out there.

BW  

But he would have lost even more if he'd done that. So my point is that for whatever reason, he was being overly influenced by a very small group of people for whom it was a question of probably vested interests, really, or just being obstinate, and denying the reality of where we are in terms of climate change, and that was not a winning tactic. It failed. And I really hope now that the Conservatives will reset, go back to the sensible politics of the centre, and you'll be able to feel proud about your alliances to that, and then we will go back to consensus politics on climate change.

ML  

So you really hope that the Conservatives tack back towards planet sensible, rather than spinning off to the nebula of bonkers, which is a possibility. If you hope that, what do you think I feel like? 

BW  

Yeah exactly, that's where we're aligned.

ML  

Because if those voices say the only answer is to become even more extreme and to scrap net zero and repeal the Climate Change Act, which was written by who knows who... if that faction wins, I am completely politically homeless, so I'd have to start a party or do something. Goodness knows.

BW  

You could be an independent candidate, Michael, in your local constituency, and get involved that way.

ML  

I could be the first British Teal. I could go and talk to Simon Holmes à Court and see if he wants to open up a branch in the UK. 

BW  

This also links to what you talked about with Rosie, right? Because Rosie Barnes — Dr. Rosie Barnes, Engineering with Rosie — you both had a lovely conversation where you bemoaned the lack of engineers in politics, and then interestingly, said, 'Oh, but we wouldn't want to do that, would we?' So there is a question about why aren't engineers stepping up and getting involved. So maybe it is your time.

ML  

So I have to say my conversation with Rosemary Barnes, she's a YouTuber, she has a channel called Engineering with Rosie. She's also a very serious engineering consultant. Her company Pardalote Consulting works a lot in wind, but not only wind, across energy. I loved that conversation because it was kind of a geek out between two engineers bemoaning the lack of being taken seriously, and influence and the amount of nonsense out there that is being taught by people who've really not got a clue about STEM or engineering. To be fair, though, when I asked her if she would go into politics, she said something like, 'never, never, never, never.' She was absolutely categorical. I toyed with the idea of going into politics a few years back, in 2015 I thought of standing for Mayor of London, but then thought that Zach Goldsmith would be a much better candidate, because he's taller, better looking, richer and had already ruined his life by becoming a politician. But we all know how that turned out. And who knows, maybe one day I will, whether it's as a teal or as a good center-right mainstream Conservative. Hopefully after the party picks itself up off the floor and licks its wounds a bit. Let's just talk about the European elections. So the European Parliament saw a shift to the right, but not sufficiently disruptive to change the overall power structures in Brussels. I think it's fair to say Ursula von der Leyen has been reinstated for another term, but it has to be said, the shift in particularly the French elections probably makes it much harder to be an activist climate commission this time round. Would you agree with that analysis?

BW  

I think there's definitely been some pushback on some of the ways in which the green agenda has been dealt with at a European level. And yeah we've got a parliament that's just just narrowly more conservative, but the mainstream parties are still, at least on paper, committed to the net zero agenda. It will be harder to pass more progressive things. Whether there'll be a great unpicking of what's already there, I doubt it. So I suspect it's more just about pace than direction. But yes, we've dodged what could have been a very ugly situation in France, which would have changed the politics. We'll have to wait and see when they all come back and which commissioner has got which brief to really know where the land will lie. But there was this moment where it looked like electric vehicles were going to get dragged into the politics of von der Leyen's presidency. But thankfully, the European parliament moved away from that and didn't hold it hostage. So so as things stand today, it's pretty much business as usual, but with perhaps a bit less acceleration. But we'll see when the cards are all dealt out later in the year. 

ML  

I think that's probably right. There's one sector where I must say, I was hoping, or am hoping, that there would be a reset, and that was Europe's plans on the famous old hydrogen, because something happened a couple of weeks ago. The European Court of Auditors issued a report calling the EU's hydrogen plans unrealistic, and said that there needed to be a rethink. The European Court of Auditors identified €18.8 billion that was being devoted to hydrogen. Of course, almost not a single ton of CO2 has been abated by hydrogen in Europe so far and it's likely to stay that way through to 2030. There will be some hydrogen produced, but they called for this great reset. I was cheering from the sidelines because I, at the Financial Times Live summit, also called for a reset but I don't think we're likely to see one. I had a bit of fun on social media because the Court of Auditors said that their targets for 2030 — 20 million tons of hydrogen — had not been based on robust analysis. And of course, I had Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, the head of hydrogen Europe on Cleaning Up explaining how those were his numbers. So I poked a bit of fun and said, 'There you go, I knew they were not based on robust analysis.' But I don't think we're going to see a reset, I think that the EU Commission will turn around and say, 'Things are going a bit slower, but all of those targets that we've talked about will still happen, but maybe they'll happen a bit later.' And I think that will be hydrogen, but it could easily also be the renewable energy targets or the EV targets, or any of the other great pronouncements that they've made. I think they're more likely to delay than to rethink in any substantial way.

BW  

I think that's right. And as I say, I think the direction will stay the same, just the pace at which we will go down that path will be slightly slower, which is not what you need when the planet's on fire, and when these transitions have so many co benefits that we've talked about today. So yeah, I actually hope that the engineers who are busy working out how to make all this work will show, as they have in the past, that this is easier than we think, that there is a path now opening up that's very clear that will get us where we need to be. And then politicians will just be emboldened by what's happening on the ground. 

ML  

Basically, they just have to get everybody else to walk into the light and embrace electrification of not everything, but almost everything, which we've talked about on lots of episodes. Now we didn't have an episode specifically this season on politics in America, but we did have a real expert, a delightful expert, John Marshall, talking about the messaging that works. Now it's sort of funny to gloss over these tumultuous few weeks in American politics. There's former President Trump having his ear shot off. And then, of course, he's now appearing, and you start to have a look at the ear, and it seems to be pretty much intact. It's all very confusing. But that happened, and he was on a high because it really looked like no way Biden could catch him. And suddenly, the tables are turned, Biden steps aside, and we have a climate aware candidate for the Democrats. It's just a completely different world. So there's all that going on, but your conversation was really into the nuts and bolts of American-style messaging and advertising and just what they're really good at, wasn't it?

BW  

Yeah. I mean, John Marshall's company, Potential Energy, is a not for profit marketing agency, and most of its work is in the US, because the US is probably the most polarized  country — perhaps Australia is a close second — but the politics there of climate is tribal and very deep-rooted, and there's an awful lot of information swirling around that has, the very vaguest links back to reality. So everyone's living in their bubbles. And what John's trying to do is find universal messages that can appeal to centrist audiences, to get people embracing the need for action on climate change in a non-partisan way. So his insights are always really fascinating, and I work closely with John, and I was delighted to get him on the show because we've had a number of these episodes now where we've thought about, 'how do we win hearts and minds?' And John's formula, which he's now got data to show, is that as humans, we are really very motivated by not losing the things that we love. This feeling that there might be a permanent loss, an irreversible loss, and that our children are going to inherit a world far worse than we currently enjoy, that's a hugely motivating thing. It applies across all countries, across nearly all demographics, across all politics. So if we can lean into that and harness that to political action, we stand a chance of not allowing the minority, the incumbency, the fossil voices, to dominate the narratives and tell us what we should think. We can decide ourselves and elect the politicians who are going to then move us forward. And as you said, Kamala Harris has been somewhat on the sidelines as a vice president, but now she's firmly in the spotlight. And if you look back at her track record, she's been pretty bold on climate. So it does signify a massive shift in a very short amount of time, she's edging up back to catch Trump on the polls. And we've still got a long way to go, right? We've got until November. It's exhausting. US Politics is exhausting, and one thing that all my US friends have said is, 'We're so jealous that you've managed to get this all over and done with in the UK in such a short space of time.' And here we are, you know, still months away from the election, but there's no other topic anyone's talking about.

ML  

The election has really caught fire now. It was so unbelievably dull, frankly, but it now has caught fire. We are definitely into an interesting period. I tell you what I loved about the conversation with John was the fact that it's data driven. Listen, I'm as guilty as anybody, I've said what we need to do here is be optimistic, show people how we're going to solve the problem, and stop moaning about floods and and fires and RCP 8.5 which you and I have debated, and I've gone on about endlessly on this show, right? But what he says is that, 'no, all of that stuff is just anecdotal.' What he's got is data. But it's not fear, it's not the sort of Rupert Read way of jumping on a table and telling the kids they're going to die of climate change. It's playing on what everybody, I think, suffers from, or everybody experiences: this sense that things were better in the past, this sense of loss and the desire not to lose the things you love. But he can prove that that's the message that works with data. So I loved it.

BW  

Yeah, it was great, wasn't it? And this whole fear and hope dichotomy. He said don't think about that. Think about what works. And for some audiences, they do need to be woken up, and fear is a motivator. There shouldn't be a divide between the people who only want to talk about optimistic things and the only one who would talk about doom. We've got to embrace the model and get through it with messages that cut through, and emotional messages, not technocratic messages. If you're explaining, you're losing, it's got to appeal to people in language they understand. And as a movement, I think we're pretty bad at remembering that. We can get into our little bubbles, as we love to do, in all the technicalities and ultimately, we've got to keep connecting with people. And I think John's a brilliant example of that. The last episode we've not talked about was the episode I did right at the beginning, way back with Lily Cole. There's a woman who comes from a completely different world. She became famous, very young in the world of fashion, and is now working to try and unify the climate movement, to make it less divided and more cohesive. And her focus is on making things desirable, trying to tap into the human nature that we do want things that are beautiful, we do have emotions that are triggered by desires, and how do we harness that? And so I think that was another episode where we just took an adjacent topic to the core of this transition, and looked at that hearts and minds element, which is important once you get to people needing to be part of this transition.

ML  

I think it was a very striking episode. I really enjoyed it. We 've had Anya Hindmarch from the fashion industry. Fashion has got this huge climate footprint. So I was a bit worried that there'll be lots of statistics about how many gigatons the cotton industry and the use of water, and it would all be a bit grim and sanctimonious. And also that there would be some cognitive dissonance, because there's Lily Cole, this industry has been enormously good to her, and so there she would be preaching about how we should all wear old clothes, and we don't have to buy new stuff. But actually, she was absolutely delightful, incredibly thoughtful, strikingly thoughtful and connected. So when she was talking about indigenous people, people that she really doesn't have to empathise with, given where she is, but she really honestly and clearly does. And her thoughts on what is value, what is uniqueness, what is art and how we could play this whole... the challenges, how we can respond to the challenges that we face in such a, I don't want to say in a softer way, but really in a much more multifaceted way. So I really enjoyed it. If anybody has not listened to that episode, because you think, 'Well, what has a fashion model got to tell anybody who works professionally on climate change or whatever,' just listen to or watch the episode. I guarantee you you'll enjoy it. It was a great one.

BW  

And also, she has her own podcast where, you know the title is, 'Who Cares Wins,' but in the course of the conversation and through her exploring this topic, she's modified that slightly to 'Who Cares Who Wins.' Meaning, look, let's not get so caught up in our little tribal fights about this thing versus that thing. And let's embrace the diversity and show that actually by caring, you can win, but there are also multiple paths. So you know, it's a nice unifying message to take away.

ML  

Bryony on that message we are going to have to wrap up because time has been passing. It's always great fun to talk to you, but particularly when we've got such rich content to go over and chew through. So I really enjoyed the conversation. This is, as I said at the beginning, the last episode of season 12. So enjoy the summer. For those who have signed up to social media, we'll be sending out some prompts for some episodes from the past to watch. We're going to try and push people to enjoy the back catalogue over the summer, in case you miss us. And join us in September, there'll be a few things changing around in September. Bryony, obviously, you know, but the audience won't know, we've been beavering away in the background, there'll be a little bit of a new look and feel, some new formats, some new friends, some new things going on. And I really look forward to unveiling that when it comes to season 13, which starts early September. 

BW  

Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, you need a break as well. You've been incredibly busy these last three months. You've been everywhere. There's been so many other things you've done alongside this podcast. Thanks for bringing me with you on this journey, and I'm really looking forward to next season. So let's get some downtime in the meantime and see you in September.

ML  

And with that, it only remains to thank our production team and organisation team. So there's Jo Jagger and there's Oscar Boyd, Alex McInerney, who's now joined us as well, we're becoming a cast of thousands. Fabulous job, everybody, thank you so much. And to you the audience, thank you for joining us throughout this season, and we will see you in September. Please make sure that you subscribe to cleaning up on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform. And, if you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you give it a like or a thumbs up and leave a comment. That really helps other people find it. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, and also subscribe to our free newsletter on cleaninguppod.substack.com That's cleaninguppod.substack.com. Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.