3 Takeaways
Former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz: Tackling Global Warming and Energy Solutions (#234)
Tue, 28 Jan 2025
Energy is complicated. As global demand continues to grow, so does the need for realistic, climate-friendly solutions. Are renewables the answer? How about nuclear power? What is China’s role? Listen, as former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz provides smart answers to daunting questions about energy, and examines the threat of nuclear war.
Chapter 1: What drives global greenhouse gas emissions?
Global warming, such a hot topic. Many believe that global greenhouse gas emissions are being driven by the developed countries, especially the US and Europe. But that's not actually the case. China accounts for nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And the next largest emitters are the US at about 11%, then India at 7%, and Russia at 6%.
The emissions of all other countries are each below 3%. The US and the four largest European countries, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy, account for less than 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
So even if the US and Europe achieve net zero, which is to say no net greenhouse gas emissions, global greenhouse gas emissions will still increase if emissions are increasing in the rest of the world. Energy is complicated. The issues include environmental impact, cost, scale and energy security. What should the US and other countries do? Hi, everyone.
I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz.
Secretary Moniz is by background a scientist. He earned his doctorate in physics from Stanford and served as head of MIT's Department of Physics and as director of the Bates Linear Accelerator Center. Then he joined government, serving as Under Secretary of Energy and then Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Office of the President.
He was appointed Secretary of Energy by President Obama and served as Secretary of Energy for four years. Secretary Moniz is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which works to mitigate nuclear, biological, cyber and other threats.
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Chapter 2: How does the U.S. energy demand compare to the world?
As a scientist, former secretary of energy and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, he has a unique perspective on global warming, energy and nuclear and other threats. Welcome, Secretary Moniz, and thank you so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thank you, Lynn.
It is my pleasure. Let's start by talking about energy. Demand for energy is increasing in the U.S. as well as worldwide. The U.S. accounts for about 11% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the increasing demand for energy, the U.S. is consuming both more fossil fuels and more renewables. How do you see the energy situation in the U.S. ?
energy production in the united states in multiple technology areas has gone up dramatically as we all know renewables have been built very very aggressively especially over the last 10 years and we'll see much more of that we are now having a bit of a nuclear renaissance although we've heard that many times before and we'll see if nuclear energy does in fact grow
A major interest in nuclear energy, of course, is the absence of greenhouse gas emissions, which then, of course, brings us back to fossil fuels as the source of those emissions. And in the United States, through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, we have seen an enormous increase in the amount of natural gas and of oil produced over the last 15 years especially.
But I want to also point out that the greatest single reduction in the United States greenhouse gas emissions, and we have reduced emissions, has come from the substitution of coal by natural gas, which is much less carbon intensive. And secondly, on the oil front, frankly, global demand has kept increasing, putting aside COVID interruptions, but fundamentally demand has kept increasing.
However, the increased U.S. production does not seem to have accounted for that greater demand. What has happened is there's been a shift of market share towards the United States away from the OPEC countries. So we have not really, I think in our production, increased overall oil use globally. However, it does point out, I think, a very important thing, in my view.
A lot of the arguments that one hears around addressing climate change tend to focus on the fuel side. I believe it's the demand side that we have to be working on. We have to create the demand for low emission technologies, and that will come by innovation and cost reduction.
Speaking of demand, there have been articles saying that artificial intelligence is an energy hog using as much electricity as small countries. How much impact will artificial intelligence have on energy demand?
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Chapter 3: What role does nuclear energy play in reducing emissions?
What does electrify the economy mean to you?
It means shifting, for example, in vehicles from gasoline-powered vehicles to electric battery-driven vehicles or plug-in batteries. But basically, it's electricity replacing certain fuels. However, if decarbonization... is the objective, then of course how you make that electricity is critical.
And that's where things like nuclear power, where renewables, perhaps the modern geothermal energy, hydropower, all come in as a whole variety of low carbon intensity electricity generation. So again, if we enhance those elements of the power sector, and electrify the economy, then we are, in fact, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.
Wind energy in Texas is very inexpensive and Texas has been called the king of wind. But there's more to the story. What are people missing?
Well, what people are missing in Texas, and we have this bad habit of actually looking at data, and some would rather not look at data because it can be inconvenient. So, for example, we looked at a full year, hour by hour, how the wind resource in Texas specifically was so-called dispatched to consumers.
And what we found was in that year, there were 90 days, nine zero days, a quarter of the year, where there was essentially no wind in Texas. And that included a period of nine days in a row with no wind. Well, when that occurred, we looked at 2019, the dominant source of electricity in Texas remained natural gas. So when the wind wasn't blowing, you simply dialed up the natural gas.
But of course, that produced greenhouse gases. So that's what I mean, that we have to learn how to manage greenhouse these variable resources. We can't always tell what the resource will be like. And we have to worry about, again, reliability of the grid. You can't tell Texans or anybody else, oh, why don't you just take nine days off from having electricity supply?
That would not provide a very good job tenure for the utility heads in Texas. It's the whole system we need to design. And we have to replace it with alternatives that are low carbon and are comparable in cost.
How does the price of energy from different sources in the United States compare? How competitive are renewable prices?
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Chapter 4: How does artificial intelligence impact energy demand?
that's a difficult question it may sound like a simple question it's not so easy and the reason is solar energy and wind energy of course are the dominant new renewables entering the economy if one looks at the marginal cost of producing a solar electron or a wind electron, that can be very, very low.
However, there are hidden costs in a certain sense because those sources are inherently variable. They are weather dependent. And so they do, as they become very large parts of the economy, they can challenge reliability. We will need backup power. Somebody has to pay for all of that. We can store electricity, like with batteries, but only for a couple of hours, really.
So what happens when the wind doesn't blow for a week? Well, we need backup. And we're going to have to figure out how to pay... the full price, how to manage the grid when you have these sources that are not on all the time, that you just can't call on when you want them. The obvious case is solar energy at night, obviously, is not a viable resource, but wind is up and down.
I might add, Lynn, there is one other variable here, and that is that if we could connect the different regions of the country through high voltage transmission lines. Well, you know, when the wind isn't blowing in Texas, maybe it is blowing in Oklahoma or Nebraska and we could, you know, distribute it around to alleviate the problem.
But another problem we have in the United States is it's extremely difficult to build infrastructure. So building high voltage transmission, for example, across state lines, I have scars to show from my tenure as energy secretary from trying to accomplish that. It's very, very difficult.
So somehow, again, we need to optimize the entire system to have clean electricity all the time when we want it, where we want it. And I'll just end this comment by saying we've focused a lot on clean electricity, and that is very important. As I've said, it is the lead in decarbonizing the energy economy.
However, I think it's now widely, if not universally accepted, that clean electricity is absolutely necessary, but it's not going to be enough. We're also going to need very low carbon liquid fuels.
for our economy that's another big technical challenge how to replace things like gasoline as a fuel when it is to be honest very inexpensive when you think about the amount of energy you get out of a gallon of gasoline and we have to replace it with alternatives that are low carbon and are comparable in cost what would a clean modern electricity system take
In the United States, to decarbonize the entire energy economy, so not just electricity, but the entire energy economy, the estimate is that we would need an additional $200 to $300 billion per year of investment all the way out to, say, mid-century. It's a lot of money. But we think the capital is actually there.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges of renewable energy in Texas?
There have been several nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants, including Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in Russia, and Fukushima in Japan. How do you see the risks from nuclear energy?
Well, first of all, Chernobyl was using a very outdated technology that would never have been licensed in the West. And the operators were doing some unfortunate experiments, shall we say. In Fukushima... There was a regulatory breakdown. The size of the tsunami which caused that accident, historically, had happened at the same size in the same place, and it was not prepared for.
Doesn't change the fact that those accidents caused a lot of damage. Three Mile Island, on the other hand, it was more of a human problem, and very importantly, while the reactor was lost, there was essentially no public health impact. So we need to distinguish among these. Now, where are we today? Today, I would say the modern designs are much more advanced in terms of safety issues.
The reality is, let's say in the United States, we have by far the biggest fleet of nuclear power plants, you know, the order of 100 in the world. And we've never had an accident that impacted public health. So today you are seeing many new reactor designs as well that have what are called passive safety features.
Namely, if the systems that are to keep the plant safe go down, the plant will essentially turn itself off. Lots and lots of interesting directions being pursued. So it's an exciting time. And I think the safety issues have been moved to the forefront and we're in pretty good shape there.
The risk of a nuclear catastrophe, whether deliberately by accident or miscalculation, seems to be growing. Today, there are nine countries which have close to 20,000 nuclear weapons. In addition, there's radioactive materials from nuclear power plants and other sources. You are the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. What threats are you most worried about?
In terms of the nuclear weapons risks, I think there is no doubt in my mind that the risks are higher today than they have been certainly since the end of the Cold War. But actually, I would say going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and that's for a variety of reasons.
One is, of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led Russia to make many pronouncements about using nuclear weapons in that context, the so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. They have not, but they have, for example, changed their nuclear use doctrine recently, and that's problematic. shall we say, a bit nerve wracking.
Secondly, China is growing its nuclear weapons stockpile very substantially. We believe their aim is to have a nuclear weapons stockpile on the same scale as that of the United States and of Russia. That's an issue. Of course, North Korea is the only country to have tested nuclear weapons in this century and continues to work on producing weapons and producing ballistic missiles.
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Chapter 6: How do we create a reliable energy grid with renewables?
What are some specific opportunities that you see?
Well, for example, artificial intelligence and its simpler cousin, machine learning, are very, very powerful ways using modern computation, of course, to analyze enormous amounts of data and look for very, very small signals. Well, those very small signals could be to try to find entities in various countries that might be involved in nuclear weapons proliferation.
We at NTI carried out such an exercise several years ago, and I won't get into the specifics, but let's just say that we did find in one country five or six entities that had not previously been identified and then through machine learning, identified very suspicious patterns of trade. So that's an example where you can use modern technology also in a risk reduction mode.
What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?
One takeaway in the climate space and clean energy space is that we must be able to recognize that forming alliances and forming coalitions across sectors, across boundaries, is the only way to make real progress. Stick to our objectives, stick to our goals, stick to our values, but then have the flexibility to make coalitions to actually move in the right direction.
The second takeaway is that in nuclear risk reduction, there are many opportunities to lower risk. For example, there is a risk in every country with nuclear weapons that there could be an accidental use There could be an unanticipated use. It could come from incorrect data about threats. It could come from cyber intrusions, which could be national or subnational characters.
So there's an example where every country with nuclear weapons as the United States has just done, should do their own review of how they command and control their nuclear weapons to minimize, eliminate, ideally, the risk of accidental use. Third area is China is obviously a huge growing country with great technological capabilities, which it is focusing on.
I think we still in the United States have the edge in many areas of innovation, but I believe we should be working with China to economically develop clean energy, develop national security norms that will make everybody safer, everybody more prosperous, everybody living in a cleaner world.
Thank you. Thank you for your service in government. And thank you for your leadership of NTI to reduce nuclear and other threats.
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