[00:00:23] Speaker A: Welcome to Right on Radio. I'm Eric. And on tonight's program, Josh talks with George Crocker about his book about how to democratize electricity. Now, about Power makes the case that society's major problems can be reduced if not solved with proper energy management and why emphatically nuclear power is not part of the solution. When we get energy right, we'll have the energy to get the rest of it right. About Power provided a historical context that sheds light on why society gets energy management so terribly wrong and offers direction about correcting the flaws.
All this and more. So stay tuned to write on radio.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: All right, everyone, welcome back to Right on Radio. George Crocker, whenever you're ready, you begin with your first reading.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: All right, so on April 10, 2024, the United nations climate chief said that humans have two years left, quote, to save the world.
He went on to talk about the required shift in technologies and the finances that need to get behind a massive transformation.
But if it seems so clear that reducing fossil fuel combustion gases to the atmosphere is a vital part of the strategy to reduce the damage climate chaos causes, why then does the financial health of monopolistic power companies improve when they sell more electricity and spew more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? This is absolutely backwards. Why do our regulatory institutions insist on rewarding behavior that is actively eroding our ecological foundation?
So something to do about it would be to change power company incentive structures to reward energy efficiency instead of energy consumption.
Electric utility regulation could be reformed, for example, so that power companies sell energy services rather than selling kilowatt hours as a commodity, and then the power company would be rewarded for providing those services as efficiently as possible. We do it backwards. If things were not backwards, power companies would make more money and have greater financial health as they delivered more service while consumers used less electricity. Correcting this regulatory flaw alone would eliminate most, if not all, CO2 dumped into the atmosphere by US electric utilities, which amounts to a third of all US emissions, or something over 1500 million metric tons in 2020.
This correction alone would reduce global CO2 emissions by almost 3%, enough to start reversing the global trend of annual CO2 emissions increases. Making this correction is difficult, not just because large numbers of powerful people make lots of money by doing it backward, but also in significant part because so many electric utility customers are functionally illiterate when it comes to energy management.
How many consumers understand the difference between a megawatt and a kilowatt hour, for instance? Conversely, knowledge is power.
How transmission infrastructure gets developed provides a glaring Example not of backwards energy management but of managing it upside down. No doubt you have heard ignorant, foolish or self serving people purport that hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new high voltage transmission infrastructure desperately needed to develop enough renewable energy to make a difference environmentally and that we have to make the commitment for the new transmission now due to the climate emergency and the long lead times required for power line construction.
That all may be true, but only if what you want is top down transmission develop. And what you want sometimes five or ten years from now is relatively few large corporations owning massive wind and solar farms located in remote remote locations, mostly somewhere on the Great Plains. With such a development scenario, wind and solar energy resources become commodities that get extracted for exclusive private profit should we get that far, while the consuming public pays for the extraction by purchasing infrastructure the high voltage transmission lines needed to deliver the power to load centers. With the UN climate chief saying we've got two years, why would we want to choose the five to 10 year option?
But it is also possible and much cheaper and quicker to strategically size new wind and solar installations, perhaps along with battery storage, and connect them to the grid on the lower voltage side of virtually every load serving substation transformer in the nation without requiring any new high voltage transmission. The strategic sizing causes all the power from the new renewable generators to be consumed by customers served by a specific substation or set of substations serving that particular neighborhood. No new power would ever flow back into the higher voltage system, which is why no new transmission would be needed. In Minnesota alone. This type of bottom up approach amounts to well over 8,000 megawatts of new wind and sol solar generation that could be distributed and dispersed around the state with no need for new power lines.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Very good.
I'm joined in studio by George Crocker, the co founder and Executive director of the Minnesota based North American Water Office, which describes its mission as to phase in modern renewable energy and energy efficiency systems and technologies and to phase out destructive electrical generation technologies and obsolete abusive energy management practices.
To discuss his book about power, how to Democratize Electricity Now About Power shows how power companies get rewarded for emitting more pollution in Earth's atmosphere and for extracting wealth from communities wealth that would otherwise advance social justice and economic democracy. George, welcome to Right on Radio.
[00:07:19] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: You begin the book with a reflection on how the concept of apocalypse has evolved, particularly with climate change now being a central crisis. How do you think the energy industry contributes to this apocalyptic, excuse me, apocalyptic.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: Vision in multiple ways.
First and foremost probably is what we've just talked about, the pollution that they're rewarded for producing. So that's eroding the ecological foundation that society requ but it also extracts huge amounts of wealth, which is one of the primary reasons why we have a homeless problem. It's a primary reason why children often don't get enough to eat in some communities. It's a primary reason why the healthcare industry is so stressed as it is because of all of the diseases that come from exposure to all of the pollution that comes from delivering utility services upside down and backwards. So it's a long list that needs to be addressed.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: You highlight that human institutions have failed to correct behaviors that lead to ecological collapse. What specific policy failures do you believe have been the most damaging in the energy sector?
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Well, we've talked about them already. One is that we reward consumption and energy production and pollution. So we reward pollution instead of rewarding energy efficiency. We extract wealth from communities as opposed to circulating wealth within the communities. Wealth that is generated by the use of electricity and other energy sources to provide for the goods and services that we all require. But when that wealth gets extracted, why communities are impoverished to the extent that the extraction occurs. And if we stop that kind of extraction, there's so much wealth that could be used for so many social justice and public interest resources. So there again, it's a long, long list.
As we noted in the introduction, when we get energy right, when we get it right, we can do the rest of it because we'll have the energy. If we don't get energy right, why we're going to have a really hard time feeding ourselves and clothing ourselves and housing ourselves and keeping from warring with each other over scarce resources.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Before we came to studio, I know you mentioned to me that you're concerned that we're gonna face a food crisis probably towards the end of this year. I was wondering if you could talk more a bit about that and your reasoning for believing that's gonna be the case.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: Well, what's happening to the price of eggs? You know, Spanky is out of control.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Hold on. So Spanky is what you used to refer to as Donald Trump?
[00:10:18] Speaker C: Well, Spanky, we'll call him Spanky because everybody knows who Stormy is. And Stormy chased Spanky around the hotel room with his rolled up rag of newspapers bare ass. So that's Spanky. And as soon as we start calling Spanky for what he is, why, it'll be a lot easier for a whole lot of people to get more comfortable about doing what they need to do. In order to stop the abuse that is coming from those who are trying to support Spanky.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Okay, so again, what do you think is going to happen then? Why do you believe that there's going to be a food so egg price, as you mentioned, what else?
[00:10:56] Speaker C: Well, we're sort of at a cusp and it might not happen this year, it might not happen next, but we're on course so that the availability of goods and services, including food, the demand for it is outstripping the ability of societies to produce these things because in significant part of mismanagement of energy resources. And when it comes time that, that the demand of social society for goods and services outstrips the ability of that society to provide those goods and services, why disruption happens. And one of the first things that happens in that disruption is unavailability of food. And part of the stress of this is, for example, all of the pollinators are no longer with us. Many of them, the pollinators are facing extreme stress because of all of the pesticides and all of the herbicides and all of the climate chaos that's happening. And when you don't have pollinators, why there goes a significant chunk of the food chain for humans.
And that kind of iteration happens in issue after issue with whatever natural resources we use in the transformation of those resources to goods and services.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: You argue that human cleverness should evolve into intelligence that can correct economic structures.
What would an energy system look like if this transition were successful?
[00:12:41] Speaker C: Well, it would be one that was focused on community and focused on neighborhoods. Everybody's familiar with the substation, with what a substation is. As you drive down the highway, you see a substation. What that substation does is essentially just a transformer system where higher voltage transmission is transformed to lower voltage for distribution into the neighborhood, where it hits the transformers on the local lines that feed your homes and businesses.
There is no reason why each load serving substation couldn't have its own generation that was strategically sized to fit. And like I said in the introduction, if it's below the minimum load of that substation, no power will ever flow back up. Well, the people in those communities could own that infrastructure. That could be a wealth producing economic engine for every single community across the nation, across the world.
That would enable people to become responsible for the production and management of their own energy. And to the extent that we can do that, why capital gets circulated locally, we avoid the disruptions that come from economic disparities. We avoid the disruptions that come from deprivation of resources because the abuse of the natural resource system would be so much less if we get energy right.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: There's a phrase you used when I was talking to you before we came on the air. Is that what you're asking for? What you're encouraging is a transition away from being energy consumers to being energy managers.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: Is that fair?
[00:14:35] Speaker C: Yes. Yes. We need to learn, people need to learn the difference between a kilowatt hour and a megawatt. We need to become literate in energy. I mean, people are somewhat literate, and when they go shopping, they have to be because they're buying stuff. They have to know what they want. Well, how many people think about what they're purchasing when they purchase energy? It's a gallon of gas or the energy bill. That's about as far as it goes. We don't consider the externalities. We don't consider the costs that are attached to the production of those commodities the way they're sold now. And if we transform these commodities into services, into energy services, why, then it'll be so much easier to get the incentives right and reward the behavior we want. I mean, it's common knowledge that we tend to get the behavior that we reward.
That's why we use money, for example. So if we start rewarding the behavior that we want, most people would agree that we want efficiency as opposed to waste. And if we reward efficiency instead of waste, why, all sorts of transformations can happen in the course of transforming those natural resources into goods and services.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: You mentioned how ignorance and large numbers can be powerful in collective decision making. How do you see misinformation affecting energy policy today?
[00:16:09] Speaker C: Well, first and foremost, nobody knows the difference you mentioned before.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah, the difference of not knowing what wattage is.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
So when people are functionally illiterate, why, it's hard for people in that situation to really understand what their interests are. And so, you know, to the extent that we can understand the nature of the problem that we're facing in terms of resource management, energy in particular, it just becomes so much easier to get it right.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: You believe that energy reform needs to be part of a larger movement that includes health care, employment, and environmental protection. How can these issues be effectively integrated into political activism?
That's a challenging one, and I wanted to get your take on this, George.
[00:17:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So.
Well, it starts with community, and it starts with information, education.
People need to, it seems to me people need to learn more about what their community really is so that we're not also isolated in our individual selves and that we can understand our connectiveness to each other in ways that we do not do now. I mean, we do it. I mean, people go to the polls and they elect their city council. People and communities across the nation are vibrant and doing their very best to mend their circumstances.
But in the setting that we have, why the privilege that comes with monopoly control in the electric utility system, for example, it's destructive. It's extremely destructive of community. The reason we have monopoly structures in the electric utility industry is because of its history.
When the economies of scale going forward, from the first power companies in the late 1800s, Thomas Edison and those guys up until the late 60s and into the 70s, the economies of scale were such that each unit of electrical energy production, each kilowatt hour of production got cheaper as you built your power plants, bigger and bigger and bigger. And so it was that economy of scale that drove to the central station infrastructure that we know today and the monopolistic attitude of the industry. But those days are behind us now. We have the modern technologies. The modern technologies are not central station. Central station required each power plant to be custom built. Each was its own individual unit. They were all unique.
Whereas the modern technologies are mass produced. They come off of assembly lines and batches. And the more you make of all of the widgets associated with modern technologies, whether it's the solar cells or the wind generators, the cheaper it is. The cheaper it is. The more you make off of these mass produced systems, the cheaper that each unit becomes across the board. And so we want to make lots of them, lots and lots of them, but we want to disperse them and distribute them in such a way that enables people in their own communities to take advantage of that economy of scale. And because of that switch in economies of scale, why there is no longer any, any, any need at all for monopolistic electric utility systems. It doesn't exist anymore. It's a relic and it should die out quickly. And the sooner we get rid of that monopolistic control and that monopolistic attitude in terms of how energy services get delivered, the quicker and the sooner we'll be able to start the healing.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: What lessons can we learn from historical attempts to restructure energy distribution? And what mistakes must be avoided?
[00:20:42] Speaker C: Well, there's all sorts of ways to make mistakes.
And one of the best things about making mistakes is that you have the opportunity to learn from them if you can.
And it's important that we do. We've made all sorts of mistakes in the course of the transition from the, from the old central station apparatus to the modern systems.
And Part of it has to do with a failure to understand the value of ownership. For example, many in the environmental community say they're agnostic as to ownership. We don't care who owns it. We just want as much renewable energy as we can get and we need it now. Well, it turns out that those who own the monopolies are not so much interested in renewable energy as they are in maintaining their monopoly. And so they'll transition to the modern systems at a pace and at a speed at which they continue to own it. And that's the struggle that's ongoing to this day with it. If we were not engaged in this ownership issue, why, we already would have developed the substation by substation approach we talked about earlier with it. We don't do that now because it interferes with market share. It interferes with the monopolistic status that we're currently operating under. So that's one example. Another example of a problem that we need to overcome from the old system has to do with the allocation of capital.
Most renewable energy in the world in the United States today is the result of passive income tax credits. Tax credits. Tax credits on passive income. Not the income you earn from the sweat of your brow, but the income that is earned by large financial institutions and wealthy people who have large reserves of capital. Stocks, bonds, interest from accounts of various sorts, rental properties, things of that sort. Money that comes to you because you have money that's passive income. So when we allow the development of renewable energy to be dependent on passive income tax credits, what that means is that the people who have lots of money now get to continue owning the infrastructure we need in order to make the energy transmission. That's bound to fail in terms because their interest is not in getting energy right. Their interest is in making money with their passive income tax credits. And so then those of us who are interested in environmental improvement and in economic democracy have to figure out how to jump through intolerable hurdles and hoops in order to gain access to the money. That is absolutely essential if you're gonna develop renewable energy facilities that cost on the order of million or tens of millions of dollars.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: My last question before we go to break. You point out that electric utilities don't actually sell electricity, they sell services.
How does this misalignment of incentives shape energy policy and regulation? We've talked about this a bit already, but I was wondering if you can elaborate further.
[00:24:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
So if you stop and think about it, why what you want.
What you want is your food to be cold when you put it in the refrigerator. What you want, you know, is the popcorn to pop when you put it into the popcorn popper. What you want is the air conditioner. You want the coolness in your room.
What you do not want is a kilowatt hour of electricity. You've never seen one, and if it touched you, why, it would hurt.
So we need to figure out how to align the provision of the services with the physical reality of the apparatus. What we have now is a situation in which we're selling, we're selling kilowatt hours as a commodity as opposed to understanding that what people are after is a service. And that's a fundamental contradiction. That if we get it right, if we actually understand what it is that people want and need in terms of energy delivery, why, we'll start learning how to sell service. And that will align the incentives to reward efficient delivery rather than wasteful consumption.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: This is my time for the first part of the hour. Talk with George. George Crocker about his book about power. Stay tuned for more of our discussion. And now this.
And we're back. This is Josh Weber. I'm talking with George Crocker for this hour about his book about power. George, you reference Amory Lovin's concept of a soft energy path in your book. How has this idea influenced your thinking? And do you think it's relevant in today's energy landscape?
[00:26:33] Speaker C: It's absolutely relevant and it's influenced me deeply. I remember reading. I mean, the thing of it is that as I came of age in late 60s and on into the 70s and got involved with the power line fight in West Central Minnesota in 1976 and 77 and on why there was no way, there is no place you could go to learn about how energy services should get delivered or are being delivered. There was no curriculum about it. It wasn't taught in schools.
There was a dearth of public conversation about what it meant to have clean and safe and affordable and reliable and efficient energy services, those conversations didn't happen. They didn't even start happening until after the Arab oil embargo in 72 or 73. That was when all of a sudden people became aware that, oh, maybe it's not just everywhere, all the time, whenever I want, for cheap with it. So Amory was one of the pioneers. Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute were one of the first people to grapple with these huge contradictions that we have between the societal interest in using energy efficiently and the private corporate interest in extracting wealth and making money.
And he Wrote the book Soft Energy Paths as one of the first really well thought out positions on how energy services would be provided if we get it right. And it made a big impression on me because it was one of the only sources of information at the time that I could use to track and make sense of the issues I was grappling with as we struggled with the power line fight across west central Minnesota and acid rain issues in the early 90s and nuclear waste issues as the storage pools kept getting fulled up and something else needed to be done with this waste. So the soft energy paths that Amory wrote and one of his other books, Brittle Power, which talks about the extreme exposure we have to all sorts of nefarious activity simply because we rely on very few remote generators hooked to loads with very high voltage power lines. I mean, the analogy that Amory used in that is why do you think it is that trees don't just have three big leaves?
Why, you know, it might be more efficient if all your leaves survived, but trees have many leaves because if one is damaged or destroyed, or two, or a branch, the tree is still good. And it's that metaphor that he used there that also struck with me. So Amory Lovins. Another person that did a tremendous amount of good work in that time was David Morris of the Local Institute for Local Self Reliance, which to this day continues to do very, very good work towards the energy future that we all need. So there have been these great minds that I've looked up to and learned from.
And in the course of that learning, I've done my very best to apply the knowledge that I've gained in the venues that are available to to ordinary person from the public to try and make sense of how society is managing its energy resources.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: You state that the central Station power era is nearing its end. What do you see as the biggest obstacles to transitioning to decentralized energy systems privilege?
[00:30:55] Speaker C: The money. The money of the cartel oligarchs that run the central station machines and all of the apparatus that they have built around them to protect their capital.
What we talked about earlier, that passive income business, that's part of it, it's all designed to ensure that those that have the money keep the money. Those who have the power keep the power. And that market share is preserved for those who have market share.
And as long as they're able to work their will in that way, we will continue eroding the ecological foundations of SOC until we do have the food riots that we talked about earlier.
So that's why it's so incumbent upon us all to get involved, get informed, and learn how we can help accomplish an energy transmission that truly does bring us to the democratization of electricity.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: You take a very strong critical stance on nuclear power.
What do you see as the biggest myths surrounding nuclear energy?
[00:32:10] Speaker C: Well, one of them is that it's cheap or it will become cheap. In the early days, they said it'd be too cheap to meter.
They sold it as atoms for peace. In the early days. Well, it's the most expensive power you can make now.
A recent plant came online in Georgia that was, I don't know, four or five or 10 or 15 or 20 times over budget. I can't remember. It took them 20 years to build their plant. So the long and the short of nuclear power is that it's required if what you are intent on doing is maintaining your privilege.
But to use exploding uranium atoms to make heat to boil water is a really, really stupid thing to do. The liabilities associated begin with the Price Anderson act, for example. Price Anderson is what shields nuclear utilities from any liability.
They can blow up their plants, and if they do, why, they're not only going to blow up their plant, they're going to blow up their service territory. Well, how much does that cost? Well, Price Anderson says it don't cost them anything more than maybe a few hundred million dollars. That's the limit for their culpability in such an.
And without that protection, there would be no nuclear power.
It was built as atoms for peace in order to make it easier to continue the Cold War at that time. So there's that nexus between the war and the electric utility industry. To their credit, power companies initially did not want nuclear power. They recognized the liabilities. It was a horrific sell job that got electric utilities into the nuclear industry. It included the Price Anderson Act. It included the fact that the feds would take the waste, all of the waste, as the responsibility of the federal government. And they still don't know how to manage all of the waste. It's piling up at reactor sites all over the country, and they're still struggling with a place to do a centralized storage facility while they await the development of a permanent repository, which probably will never happen because there really is no place on earth that can adequately isolate these materials for the required periods of time, which is 240,000 years. So how do we do that as humans with it?
What were humans doing 240,000 years ago?
So, you know, the list of liabilities attached to nuclear power is just horrific. And it continues to grow.
All of the waste sites that are being considered now are an indigenous land. So there's nuclear racism in spades in multiple dimensions, not only with the waste management, but in terms of the fuel extraction from the mines and the milling that's been going on.
It turns out that most of the uranium reserves in the free world anyway, such as it is, are on indigenous lands. It's the marginal lands, it's the lands that indigenous populations got shunted off to as white people shot and bullied their way across North America, Australia and South Africa. And in the course of that way, the only economic activity in those lands after the white people took it over for the extraction, the extraction. So the miners went to work, the indigenous miners, and they were not protected and they died young and painfully. And to a certain extent that kind of behavior persists. So there's a long list we could go, you know, on and. But I. Let's, let's, let's talk about something else. Well, one more thing.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: Sorry, one more thing about. Because I'm very curious to hear your take on this. Some argue that nuclear energy is necessary to meet climate goals. Increasingly, big tech companies are pushing for nuclear energy to meet the demands around the use of AI. What alternatives would you propose?
[00:36:25] Speaker C: Well, first of all, let's talk about why nuclear power won't work. For that, please. And the reason, pure and simple, why it won't work is how many new reactors?
When do we need all of this power for all of this AI data processing? When do we need it? Do we need it now? Do we need it next month, next year, the year after that?
How many nuclear power plants are being built right now? Where are they? How many have been built in the last 20 years?
How long will it take to build one? If we start building one now, 10 years, 20 years?
So the idea that nuclear power will somehow answer the issues created by artificial intelligence is pure and utter ridiculousness. It's people who have no knowledge of what they say to be doing that. So there are. So repeat the question again. What was the next part of the question?
[00:37:31] Speaker B: What alternatives would you propose?
[00:37:33] Speaker C: Okay, so the alternatives are what we've already talked about. Let's just say, for example, that we went to work and we put renewable energy, solar and wind primarily. You could get hydrogen in there. You could get storage in there with batteries. There's a Minnesota company now that is figuring out how to do very high quality permanent battery with nitrogen and iron with it. So you don't need the exotic minerals, the rare earths, in order to do that. And those kinds of technologies are ramping up, and God bless them for doing that and getting those kinds of, of technologies online. But if you do renewable energy and storage on a substation by substation basis, as we said earlier, in Minnesota alone, we could install over 8,000 megawatts, well over 8,000 megawatts of new power within a few months. Because it's mass produced technology. All you need to do is order it from the factory, ship it to the site, install it and turn it on. It's not custom built like a nuclear power plant is, which requires all of that time and all of that money. So those technologies, if we were to do that, then we could get serious about what conventional central station machines we can afford to phase out over what period of time while we continue to meet the loads that we have from AI and the rest of it. 8,000 megawatts of new power in five months, in a year, or within that time frame, that's not a problem. We can do that, but it interferes with market share, you see, it interferes with the monopoly ownership, which is what the big bugaboo is.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: You introduced the concept of clear energy management. Can you break down its key principles and why they are essential for democratizing electricity?
[00:39:37] Speaker C: Okay, Clear.
[00:39:38] Speaker B: Clear. Clear's an acronym, I believe, right?
[00:39:40] Speaker C: Yeah. So C. Clear starts with C and that means clean. It has to be clean. We can no longer afford all of the carbon dioxide and the radionuclides and the metals, the arsenics and the mercury and the zinc and the rest of it that comes from the smelting of the coal at the coal fired power plants. It has to be clean.
L local, local. It can be within the substation footprint. That's local. That's community based. That means that we're talking about economic democracy. It's local. It's within the control of the local community. CLE Efficient. It has to be efficient.
Right now we have a system that is driven by consumption. The more they sell, the more money they make. It's not based on the efficient use of the product. It's based on the consumption of the product. So it has to be efficient. That's the E A Affordable. Everybody has to be able to afford it. It's not tolerable to have low income people paying 10 and 20 and 30 and 40% of their monthly income just to stay warm in the winter. That is absolutely abysmal. That's a failure of society. Whereas a more affluent family is spending 2 or 3 or maybe 4% of their income on Energy. So it has to be affordable. C L E A R stands for reliable. It has to be reliable, it has to be able to work. And to the extent that we have large central station machines, remote from loads far, far away, hooked with high voltage transmission lines, we've developed an infrastruct infrastructure that is brittle. As Amory Lovin said, in brittle power, it's brittle. It tends towards being unreliable. So reliability is the issue. And to the extent that it becomes local, it can become much more reliable. We can do a lot more of the infrastructure to distribute the power underground because it's all local. That's not as expensive as high voltage lines underground, which can be done, but very expensive. So clear is clean, local, efficient, efficient, affordable and reliable. That's clear energy. That's a clear energy future.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: You emphasize the importance of grassroots organizing in energy reform. What strategies have you seen work best in local communities?
[00:42:18] Speaker C: Well, we really haven't seen any strategies work best because we're still trapped in a system that rewards consumption and where monopoly control dominates the industry.
So to that extent, why, it's a little less than a work in progress, but it is a work in progress. And so there's organizations right now doing really, really, really good work, like Cooperative Energy Futures, for example, which is figuring out how to cooperatively develop solar gardens with community ownership in solar gardens that they get. And they have to fight like hell with Xcel to get a market for their product. It's an ongoing struggle with Xcel repeatedly and over and over attempting to dis and dismantle that type of energy development.
But the models are coming forward.
There's an idea called I'll Think of it in just a second.
I hate it when that happens.
But it has to do with how to pay for energy efficiency improvements off of the savings of energy. So if you stop and think about it, why can't we create situations in which when I buy a new refrigerator that only uses say 50 or 40% or less of the electricity that a conventional refrigerator uses, and there are such models on the market, why it would be possible to structure a financial situation in which you would purchase your efficient refrigerator, and because it reduces your energy bill, why you can pay for it on the savings of your energy bill.
You would still pay your energy bill, but it would be less, only it would be a little more than it would be if you extracted all of the savings right now, just for you, right now, because part of the savings would be going to pay off your new refrigerator. So that could happen over and over Again, in any sort of appliance or any sort of consumptive device that you can think of. Inclusive financing is the word that I was struggling for, and now I remembered it.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Inclusive financing.
[00:45:07] Speaker C: Inclusive financing. A wonderful concept.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: You argue that distributed renewable energy sources increase grid resilience. What role should local communities play in developing grid resilience?
[00:45:21] Speaker C: Well, as we said before, why, to the extent that each community has its own infrastructure for the production of most of the electricity that it consumes, why, it won't matter so much if some power line far away goes down or some power plant or set of power plants far away go down, or even if they're not so far away, if you still have your local renewable generation within the footprint of your substation that's active and online, and your neighboring communities each have their own generation.
So the resilience is built into it. And it's. Again, it's like having all of the leaves you need on your tree so that even if some of the leaves fall off, why, you're still good to go. Your tree is still alive and flourishing, as opposed to the destruction that happens when the big storms come through. And how many millions of people are without power because they're all reliant on these big central station machines and these big power lines? Well, if we did it, if we did, did it more intelligently, why, that liability would not be there, I believe.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: My last question for you, George. You think boomers took the most and gave the least in terms of resource consumption? What responsibility do older generations have in supporting energy reform today?
[00:47:02] Speaker C: Well, my generation, truth be told, I'm older than 75 and. And that seems to me preposterous, but that's the reality. And I have grown up in a time where most of the children got a really good education, not all, but most.
Where the economy was expanding, not always, but most of the time, where wealth was more distributed than many places on Earth and many times on Earth, despite the fact that it's still so concentrated and the concentrations are increasing. So my generation, what I'm trying to say is my generation has been privileged with a whole lot of new wealth, new technologies, new social relationships, social structures that have enabled. Enabled us to accumulate wealth more so than any other generation in the history of the world.
And what has my generation done with that wealth and that privilege? Now we got Spanky, now we got the warring, now we got the climate chaos. Now we got the taking, the taking, the taking of people from my generation, taking as much as they can. And what are they leaving but chaos. And that's what I meant by that.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: This has been my time talking with George Crocker about his work about power, how to democratize electricity. Now, George, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:48:43] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:48:44] Speaker B: And now this.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: You'Ve been listening to Right On Radio on KFAI at 90.3 FM in Minneapolis and streaming live on the
[email protected] I'm Eric Zimmerman. We want to thank George Crocker and all of our listeners. Without your support, KFAI would not be possible.
