Clean Tech Alternatives to Natural Gas
10: 09:40
Glen Dowell: Good morning welcome. Thank you for coming. My name is Glen Dowell. I am the moderator for this panel. I would like to thank Ben Tettlebaum and the Environmental Law Society for inviting me to do this. We are here to talk about clean tech alternatives to natural gas. Ben has assembled a very nice panel experts in a variety of areas. We should have a good time here. My job of course is to keep things moving on time. So of course he gave me three academics and keeping academics on time is the proverbial herding cats. So I am going to lean heavily on my help here. I got a time sign and a hammer and I have asked the hammer and of course you as the audience to respect the time and try to remember we are the only thing standing between you and lunch so we will get through. I am an assistant professor of management and organization of the Johnson School just across the road and I am also affiliated with the Johnson Center for sustainable global enterprise. So my particular area is understanding the difference in environmental performance among organizations and trying to see how regulations impact organizations differently, how organizations, some of them go beyond what regulatory departments ask for and others as we know kind of flux up and down right around that line of regulatory requirements and I am going to let the panel. We got Todd, Al, Ben and Emmanuel, I will let them introduce themselves and I have been asked to give a couple of minute introduction just to give you a flavor for their own expertise and from there I got some questions and then of course we will take some questions from the audience with Jessie walking around with the microphone. So I guess we will just start and work out way down the panel. Todd?
Todd Glass: Great. I'm Todd Glass. I am perhaps, well I am different because I am not an academic, I am rather a practicing lawyer and we bill by the six million increments so I know how I know how to _____*10:11:33. When somebody is paying for it that really helps. I graduated Cornell in 88 and spent a couple of years working for the EPA, basically moved west and became an energy lawyer and I have been practicing energy law for, I don't know, 17 or 18 years. I represented industrial customers buying large amounts of power and gas, represented utilities, doing everything from transmission distribution, rate cases and that type of thing and for about the last eight years, I have been developing and financing renewable energy projects throughout the country and internationally. I guess the perspective that I bring to the panel is that sort of where the policies, where the money, where sort of all the things come together to actually get things built and financed and that is really where I am going to go today and what my perspective is. I am with a law firm, Wilson Sonsoni Goodrich Rosati. It is the leading technology law firm perhaps in the world. It's based in Silicon Valley. We have over 400 energy and clean technology clients. Most of them are venture-backed. We do a whole lot of venture-backed companies and it is really an exciting time. So one of the other things that I am hoping to be able to lend today is a view towards what is coming next in technology because there are some very exciting things happening.
Al George: I am a professor in the engineering college, although it doesn’t say it in the programming here, my speciality is systems engineering. So I take a look at this from a systems point-of-view. My background is aerospace and automotive systems and I more recently have been working on energy systems. I have got experience working for NASA, for BMW with Germany and Harley Davidson in the U.S. Basically the problem we have ahead of us is that energy is the thing that allows our civilization to exist. If we don’t have energy we are back to basically hunters and gatherers and etcetera. We use a tremendous amount of energy in the united states, about twice as much as they do in Europe for example and about three times in other intermediate countries and the question is where are we going to get this from. We are exhausting what is there as far as fossil fuels are concerned. So what are we going to do about this? What is going to happen now and I am looking at a little bit longer time scale then some of the previous panels and in the next 30 to 100 years so my grandchildren’s grandchildren, alright? We are going to have to make really big changes. We are not going to have the kind of use of oil that we have now. Fifty years from now there is no way we are going to be driving around with the way we are with gasoline powered cars and SUVs, etcetera and the question is how do we make the transition? How do we get from here to there? All the energy sources including to the certain extent the renewable ones have disadvantages. The previous panel there was nice lead in by some of the things with coal. If it is coal versus gas, there is certainly lots of problems. As we know recently, nuclear has problems too, although as I will mention later we have to quantify the risks. We have to quantify what the risks are ______*10:14:59. So we have these problems on here and the thing that keeps me going on all this is looking at all the mistakes we made as a society and civilization recently and energy. So subsides for Hummers and very large SUV’s, flex-fuel economy credits were making cars where essentially 98% of them will never see a flex-fuel in them. We are trying to make corn ethanal and coal methanol, both were basically bad ideas because they weren’t looked at from a systems point of view. That is what I am trying to give you is a systems point of view here. So the main thing to look at is we talk about energy and I will show you a little slide later that you don’t have to understand the details of, but basically is very complex energy. We have first of all how much energy we use is the first question. So a lot of the times we tend to think of energy we want to think our energy we want to keep our exact present lifestyle indefinitely and therefore we have to have the amount of energy we are using in the United States right now per person and not only that we kind of look around and say I guess maybe India and China deserve the same thing eventually too, but that is not possible. So that is the first part of the problem, but then you start saying okay we need a certain amount of energy. Where did it come from? There are a whole lot of different sources that you have to think about. Also distribution and moving the energy around. You know liquid fuel you can move around and put it in the tank of the car. Electricity is more difficult. Emmanuel will say things about this probably, there are other possibilities for transportable fuels coming up and then in anything that we look at we have a whole lot of things to worry about, we have the economics including jobs and taxes, local and national. We have environmental affects, both what you think as normal environment and risks due to events, for example like tsunamis. You have community perceptions and decisions. Basically ranging from very small communities like Ithaca up to a state, like New York State or a country decisions are made by people based partly on logic or partly on perceptions and feelings about things and this is very important and has to be taken into account. You can not just ignore that. You have to take into account. Education may change some people’s opinions. The point is that people have an opinions with you know democracies and that's how it is going to work out and then there is questions of national security that I will get into as well. So I want to quickly go to the first slide here. This is the way you really have to look at a problem that is complicated. You have to look at it starting out what is the context you are in. So the context here includes the opinions of people as well as factual things like how much energy we need and then from there you move down to coming up with requirements. Requirements is a very underestimated thing. Requirements means before you start designing something and you decide what it is you want. So we are not just saying we wants lots of energy, how much energy do we really need, okay. Then also what kind of health requirements do we have? All energy sources have risks. How are we going to spread that risk around? How bad can it be? The risk of having certain health affects for the population versus all of using half the amount of fuel we are using now that has to be evaluated and there needs to be requirements for that. Then you come up with designs, multiple designs and we are talking about multiple fuel sources, energy sources. You come up with a design, you look at it and you study it and you finally make some decisions. Now the next slide, my last slide here this shows a chart that I do not expect anybody here to understand. I can talk about this for a couple of hours, but the idea this is the complexity that is involved in energy choices. All these things matter, okay and it is kind of mind boggling all these things, but if you change any of these that affects some of the others in some way. So the question is how do we deal with it and the way we deal with it we can’t do it all at once.
Glen Dowell: I got a chance to see this yesterday, incredibly complex and interesting and I am sure we are going to get a chance to talk about it because I think we are going to talk about different technologies that we do.
Al George: I wasn’t going to talk about it I was just going to say we have to itemize things groups at a time.
Glen Dowell: Absolutely and interactions. Thank you. Ben?
Ben Ho: Yeah so my name is Ben Ho. I am an assistant professor at the Johnson School, but like Glen, before coming to Cornell I was the lead energy economist for the White House and so my main areas of expertise are behavioral economics which I do sort of crazy experiments with other graduates in my laboratory and try to see how emotions effects behavior, but today I am mostly here as an environmental economist, which is basically using economics tools to understand environmental issues. I teach a class in environmental economics and a student came to me before the first day of class and looking at me like I was crazy. Like what could economics and the environment have anything at all to do with each other and I think a lot of people don’t appreciate that economics actually says a lot. I think in too many of environmental debates people talk about the scientific consensus and what the science says and I was listening to a panel this morning about the science of hydrofracking and I work in climate change and people talk the science and consensus of climate change. What you never hear is economic consensus of climate change and what you barely hear about is you know what the economists think and actually economist have a lot to say. So I am going to start off a little defensively. I just saw the movie Inside Job, any of you seen this movie? Right if you haven’t seen this movie, it effectively sort of blames the economist for the financial crisis and we are all evil and we are collecting millions of dollars. I am a poor academic. I got no money. My car is 20 years old. But basically I think economists first of all, economist, first of all an economist profession there is two things I want to make a point of, one is that we care about the environment. We are not all just sort of re-driven people. We are there sort of to save the world. I work for the Bush administration and people have this image of the Bush administration. I feel a lot of people here are not big fans. As an economist there we are mostly democrats, right what you don’t appreciate as an economic profession as a whole we are mostly democrats. We are out to sort of save the world and I think we have economic tools to sort of get us there. The second thing I think you need to understand about economics is that there is a big difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics and I think the financial crisis a lot of that was macroeconomics, understanding growth, understanding unemployment, GDP. To be honest I think economist have no clue going on. We want the grad school to basically try to save the world. To figure out how to improve GDP, reduce unemployment, all these things that you hear about form the news and I learned that ten years ago that it is hopeless, that we just don’t know. But on issues of sort of microeconomics we actually know a whole lot and the field of environmental economics comes out of the microeconomics tradition and so the main thing I want to make here in microeconomics is that fundamentally what it is all about is maximizing benefits and minimizing costs. I think it is a pretty simple proposition to say that as a society, the goals of society should basically maximize, do a cost benefit analysis to sort of maximize the difference between benefits and costs. So economists sort of believe in markets because we have nice strong evidence and proof that markets are really good at doing this maximization. The exception comes about though in that there is market failures and we know about the market failures very clearly. We could use sort of science and economics tools to go out there and identify where those market failures are in terms of impact on the climate, in terms of impact on water supplies and in terms of impacts on health and asthma and all these other conditions and I think walking in here you get sort of an idea of how economics see the world and how economics can make the market better. I think probably the best way to understand how clean energy policies should go moving forward.
Glen Dowell: Ben I am sure that they were more angry that I teach MBA’s than your economics, but thank you. Emmanuel?
Emmanuel Giannelis: Good morning. My name is Emmanuel Giannelis. I am a professor in material science and engineer here at Cornell and I am also co-director of the center here that focuses on energy and sustainability. As part of that ______*10:23:34, part of the research work that I am doing we are looking at new sustainable or renewable sources of energy, but at the same time we are looking at ways to mitigate against emissions of CO2 with the understanding here that we need to look for new sources of energy, but at the same time fossil fuels we have asked for a quite a bit of time and therefore a good approach is to actually look at a new sources, but also ways to mitigate from existing sources.