Cecily Meets an Energy Insider | Years of Living Dangerously

Hi, how are you? Thank you for meeting me. I was right away very, very excited to be a part of this. We just shot an interview at Joe Allen's restaurant, which is an old Broadway landmark, with Cesal Strong from Saturday Night Live. She was talking to an amazing guy named David Crane, former head of NRG, one of the nation's largest energy companies, explaining what the forces are out there that are keeping renewables from being massively deployed.

If you want to make electricity with the smallest carbon footprint, you can. Solar is the way to go, but we're not doing it. The basic thing we were discussing is why has solar, even though it's grown fast, not grown even faster, so that we have solar on every roof in America that should have solar up. As someone in the industry, could solar actually solve this crisis? It could provide 50% of the electricity in the United States, which is huge—50%! 50% without putting a single molecule of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's insane!

I learned a lot from David Crane about the whole story of utility companies blocking solar energy efforts. I didn't know the extent and how far it went in the states where the utilities are very powerful. They basically get the regulators and the legislators in that state to go along with what they want to do. Do people know this, though? It makes my head explode.

There are solutions, and there are very specific things blocking those solutions. I really think it's just a matter of people not knowing. Oh wow, nationwide there's less than a million American homes that have solar on the roof right now, and people say there's roughly 55 million American homes that should. Why is that? What's stopping it?

The industry is structured as a series of statewide monopolies that support pay for the large power plants and the high-voltage transmission lines. When people start to put solar on their roofs, it upsets that entire system. This is really a setback. I don't think we could have gotten a more vivid picture from anyone than we did from a guy like David Crane, who was really one of the top insiders in the energy world. Climate change itself, global warming, it's hard to talk about without being confused. And so, it's nice to have a very accessible way to understand something that's pretty huge for all of us.