How to train an electric dinosaur
Like it or not, shifting to 100 percent renewable energy won’t happen fast enough without help from some of the people in today’s energy industry
There’s an old joke that goes something like this:
“Q: How many social change activists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: As many as it takes to get someone else to do the job.”
That’s pretty unfair. Heck, I just switched out my office lightbulb all by myself. (OK, my daughter helped.)
But that joke illustrates a critical, often unspoken, element of any serious effort to get this country to generate 100 percent of its power from renewable energy, which is vital to tackling climate change:
Somebody has to do the dirty work . . and it isn’t going to be energy advocates and policy wonks like me.
Some of my favorite people are among the country’s best energy lobbyists, but every talented person has a different skill set. I wouldn’t hire any of those lobbyists to write the insanely complicated code necessary to send electricity generated by a wind farm in Iowa to a home in Arizona at a moment’s notice. And few of them can design, build or install a solar panel.
But some of the people who have risen through the ranks at utilities and other “traditional” energy companies have several necessary skills in their toolbox. Like it or not, a successful transition to renewable energy partly depends on some of those multi-talented dinosaurs who, nowadays, are wasting their time bolstering the old energy paradigm.
I’m talking about the people who build and install power converters at coal plants, who devise systems for efficiently getting gasoline to service stations in the middle of nowhere, who successfully manage organizations with millions of customers and tens of thousands of employees. Those skills and that expertise can be readily transferred to the new paradigm, if those folks are willing to evolve in the face of circumstances radically different from those they originally trained to handle.
Such people don’t grow on trees, so to speak. So, any worthwhile long-term energy strategy has to welcome the best of them on board ASAP. At a minimum, we need to refrain from reflexively trashing them for their previous lives or those of their mentors.
I was reminded of the importance of those folks last week when Sen. Ed Markey introduced the “New Green Deal” resolution in the U.S. Senate. He likened the proposal to President John F. Kennedy’s “put a man on the moon” plan. Markey explained that “We have the technology to do it. We have the moral obligation. We have the economic imperative. We just need the political will to get this done.”
As the recent movies about the ’60s space race, “Hidden Figures” and “First Man,” have illustrated, it takes a whole lot of smart, dedicated people (and lots of taxpayer dollars) to turn political will into reality. But what those films don’t effectively show is that many of the behind-the-scenes organizational geniuses, technical whiz kids and visionary theorists were toiling for profit-making corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed on space projects for years — sometimes decades — before President Kennedy said a word about going to the moon.
Neil Armstrong would have never landed on the moon in 1969 without their work.
And we won’t get 100 percent renewable energy by 2040 (let alone sooner) without the expertise of many people now in the private sector.
The good news is that many energy company staff already are on board. Some of them are genuinely motivated by the environmental and moral task at hand; some just see the writing on the wall.
Some are “ahead of the curve, taking advantage of the vastly improved technology for energy efficiency, renewables and natural gas,” an old friend who’s a former state public utilities commissioner told me. “They cooperated in the regulatory changes, learning to be nimble and innovative. They’re doing great now. But there are plenty of others who are stuck in the past.”
The problem for slow-moving dinosaurs is that when they or their mentors started climbing the corporate ladder back in the 60s and early 70s, the business model for utility companies was crafted for a very different world. Demand for electricity was forever rising, the supply of fossil fuels seemed never-ending, and nuclear power plants were supposedly on their way to being “too cheap to meter.”
The work was easy. For example, all a utility’s CEO had to do was estimate how much more electricity would be needed over the next 20 to 30 years, build big new power plants to supply that need, pick a mix of coal, oil, gas and nuclear to fuel them, persuade a few friendly regulators of his wisdom, and watch the money roll in.
Furthermore, a lot of their technical staff didn’t need to do much more than tinker with technology invented more than 50 years ago.
But now, “those guys are doomed, if they don’t evolve soon,” my friend concluded. “The longer they wait, or, worse yet, if they never change, the more long-lasting damage they’ll do to our environment on the way.”
How do we retrain those energy dinosaurs? Should we even bother to try?
Frankly, I’m sorely tempted to drive them into extinction as soon as possible, Over the forty-some years I’ve worked on energy issues, many of their species have lied, dissembled and crushed opposition to their plans. They’ve shown little or no remorse for their role in creating the world’s climate crisis, our nation’s air and water pollution, and economic absurdities.
But I would be a fool to not recognize that they’ve also helped power improvements in the quality of life of every American. For example, imagine living without any electricity in your home: no electric lights, refrigerator, TV, etc. When my father was born in 1929 in rural Pennsylvania, not even 10 percent of American farms had any access to electricity.
And I would be blind not to see that their expertise could be used to mitigate the disastrous side effects of their previous work.
So, I’m willing to give those dinosaurs who aren’t planning to retire soon another chance, if they are willing and able to evolve.
Such cooperation won’t be easy. There will be times when it will make sense to accede to their way of thinking. There will be times to part ways.
With so much at stake, we can’t afford to ignore one of the most positive lessons of the space race:
Our world needs some good dinosaurs.
