Energy Independence Day
This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about how clean energy is taking on the world, and winning. I’m Julian Spector—by day, I report on clean energy at Greentech Media; for fun, well, I keep thinking and writing about this stuff.
If this is your first time here, please subscribe to keep in touch. If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them. Reply to the email, or send your thoughts to brightideas@substack.com. My goal is to shed some light on the surprisingly rapid uptake of clean energy; I want to hear what works or doesn’t about how I tell the story.
I had a plan to provide y’all with guidance on how to talk about clean energy at a cocktail party. I love cocktail parties; I even went to bartending school before I went to college. And as a reporter, I’ve done some of my best investigative work at boozy industry receptions. But there aren’t any cocktail parties right now, and if there are, don’t go!
Instead, we have the Fourth of July coming up, and with it, opportunities for tastefully small, outdoor, appropriately distanced gatherings. So let’s work with that: how should you talk about the surprisingly effective rise of clean energy at such an event, while bringing your companions along for the ride?
My assumption here is that you subscribe to this newsletter to stay hip to the revolutionary transition underway toward a cleaner energy system, and that you’d like to share what you know with people you care about. I’ve been there, and I’ve noticed some patterns over the years.
Clean energy is a thing people often want to root for, but just don’t know much about. You may hear an “Oh that’s cool” or “I love sustainability.” But this creates a challenge for you as a conversationalist. You’re not a utility—you don’t want to monopolize things.
For it to be a conversation, both sides need to play a role. You should achieve what grid engineers call “bidirectional power flow,” like when a house doesn’t just consume electricity, but generates it and puts some back on the grid.
So, next time you find yourself speaking to a fellow human being, think about how to relate your knowledge and interest in clean energy to your interlocutor’s life. Maybe they’re psyched about fighting climate change, stopping the disproportionate burden of air pollution, or building resilience to wildfires. Maybe they’ve been hankering for a return to American industry since the flop of deindustrialization. Maybe they just have some very strong opinions about Elon Musk.
With that in mind, here are three sample conversation starters and a cocktail recipe for you to use or modify as you see fit. And if you get anybody hooked on the topic, tell them to sign up at brightideas.substack.com to stay with it. Let me know how it goes!
Did you hear they’re making drinkable water out of sunlight?
This one sounded inconceivable when the pitch came across my desk, but it’s real. An MIT-trained materials scientist invented a solar panel embedded with nanomaterials that are really good at sucking trace moisture out of the air. Then it uses sunlight to distill the water off the nanomaterials; it comes out of a pipe ready to drink.
It sounds far out, but the company, Zero Mass Water, just raised $50 million from investors including BlackRock, the largest investment fund manager in the world. And it’s not just getting started—the water panels are already installed and working in 45 countries. It’s more vital in places without access to safe water: refugee camps, deserts, off grid homes. But with climate change, who knows where the water’s going to be in 20 years?
With this technology, we don’t need to leave drinking water up to chance. That’s something everyone can relate to.
Energy independence is a myth, but clean energy makes it real
For decades, American politicians have talked about becomIng “energy independent,” but few stop to think about what that actually means.
Not being dependent on foreign countries for oil sounds obviously preferable. But the modern energy industry has always been a global affair, with companies extracting on multiple continents, refining elsewhere, and selling where they can. Even recently, when the fracking boom finally allowed the U.S. to produce more than it consumed, we still imported and exported based on the needs of the supply chain.
Clean energy changes that, because it is inherently local. We balance our electrical supply and demand domestically (with a little back and forth to Canada and Mexico). Electrons aren’t Happy Meal toys; it doesn’t make sense to offshore production and ship them around the globe. And with vehicles switching from gas to battery power, that suddenly means we can actually drive around using energy entirely produced within the country.
What would U.S. foreign policy look like if everyone drove cars running on American Made power? What would the economy look like? That should be good for at least a few beers.
Those solar panels will make electricity in the U.S., that could power cars in the U.S. That gets closer to energy independence than we have so far. (Photo credit: DOE)
Guess who’s leading on clean energy?
If you’re talking with anyone who has a general idea that clean energy is too expensive or uncompetitive, drop some facts from my earlier entry about how Republican states are leading in renewables.
To recap:
Four of the five biggest solar states, and four of the five biggest wind states, voted for Trump in 2016.
They’re not building clean energy to feel good about fighting climate change, like California (the Democratic outlier among the top five in both categories).
They’re doing it because they’ve got ample sun or wind and it’s become very cheap to create electricity with those natural resources.
It’s a useful datapoint to challenge assumptions about what’s competitive and where. Wind and solar are still a very small part of the national electricity supply, but they collectively dominate all the new capacity getting built this year, and they make up a considerable part of certain states’ grids, especially in Great Plains states and the sunny Southwest.
It’s quite possible that you already live in a state that’s demanding 100 percent clean energy, or you buy electricity from a utility that pledged that. Do you know where your life-sustaining power comes from, and how clean it is?
The Energy Stream
Since we’re talking cocktail party conversation, why not throw in some cocktails, too?
For the summer time, or what we here in Los Angeles like to call “life,” it’s hard to beat a nice aperitivo for soaking up the late afternoon sun. These lower alcohol, Continental-style mixed drinks offer refreshment with enough herbal bite to wake up the appetite for dinner. Or more drinks.
You can go deep on collecting regional herbal liqueurs from France and Italy, but here’s a simple recipe to start things off. I came to this by messing around with stuff I already had in the fridge, but I’ve heard it called a Moitié-Moitié in French, which refers to the fifty-fifty combo.
Pour equal parts sweet (red) vermouth and dry (white) vermouth
Squeeze in some fresh lemon or other favorite (available) citrus
Stir with ice and a splash of soda water till you get the right balance of flavor and spritz.
I like Cocchi brand vermouth, but you can experiment with whatever’s on hand. Instead of relegating vermouth to the background of more spiritous drinks, this one lets you taste it.