Jane Flegal has worked inside philanthropy at the Hewlett Foundation, industrial emissions policy at the Biden White House, and carbon-removal market development at Frontier; she's now a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, writing some of the smartest climate policy analysis around. We cover a lot of ground: industrial policy versus market approaches, what the IRA got right and wrong, philanthropy's proper role, data centers and the case for an infrastructure fund, and behind-the-meter gas, among other things. This is a long one, and spicy!
Why do green groups seem to have no plan for data centers or for accelerating the build-out of a low-carbon grid? Why aren’t governors using hyperscaler money to grow and strengthen state grids? Why are Democratic members of Congress faffing about on permitting and transmission reform?
These questions and many others like it haunt Jane Flegal, one of the most interesting, prolific, and peripatetic figures in the clean energy world today. Jane has [deep breath] worked at the Bipartisan Policy Center, been a program officer at the Spitzer Charitable Trust and the Hewlett Foundation, led work on industrial emissions in Biden’s White House climate policy office, led market development for Frontier’s carbon-removal initiative, and worked as the founding executive director of Blue Horizons, a charitable foundation focused on climate. She is now a senior fellow at both the Searchlight Institute and The States Forum, a fellow at both the Energy for Growth hub and University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and the principal at Flegal Energy Advisors.
That is, if you were following along at home, an inside perspective on philanthropy, private-sector climate finance, government, and non-profit policy development. On the bright side, she has gotten a uniquely wide-angle view of clean energy work; on the darker side, she’s also been forced to become intimately familiar with the various ways that lots of people in all of those worlds are — and these are my words, not Jane’s — dumb and wrong about stuff. It’s a lot to carry.
Nonetheless, Jane spends her time thinking about how the US can rapidly build out a low-carbon grid, which is more or less the founding vision of this podcast. I always find her writing insightful and stimulating — she is the rare commentator who seems to care less about team sports or personal aggrandizement than about figuring out what’s true and what works — so I’m excited to talk to her about all kinds of hot-button stuff, from data centers to permitting reform to utility incentives. Let’s get into it.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
03:11 – Flegal's thesis: building a clean grid fast enough to power growth
06:29 – Why she rejects degrowth
09:27 – The Roosevelt essay: climate as more than a market failure
13:30 – Why clean energy underuses its political muscle
15:24 – Industrial policy and the green spiral theory of change
20:40 – Was IRA the right approach?
22:12 – Lily Bermel's paper and the fight over what survived
23:21 – What she would have done differently under IRA
30:11 – Philanthropy, Silicon Valley, and what government is for
33:29 – The epistemic crisis inside environmental NGOs
39:09 – The abundance movement and what each faction misses
44:16 – What establishment Democrats get wrong on climate
46:06 – Why issue polling misleads
50:34 – Republicans and the Cold War analogy
52:47 – Data centers and the American Grid Infrastructure Fund
59:13 – Affordability politics and who pays for the grid
1:08:14 – Emissions, behind-the-meter gas, and flexible load
1:13:57 – The clean firm debate: storage plus transmission?
1:20:14 – Capacity markets, ERCOT, and the case for planning
1:24:32 – Utility incentives, public power, and affordability fixes
1:35:55 – Permitting reform and the land footprint asymmetry
1:41:05 – NEPA reform and the political window
1:48:21 – Where fresh policy thinking comes from
Resources
People & Organizations
David Roberts (Substack - Bluesky)
Volts (Apple Podcasts - Spotify - YouTube)
Company & Industry News
New Texas data center projects frozen until state audits them
New report says Trump hasn’t squashed Biden’s clean energy buildout
Books & Articles Discussed
Related Volts Episodes
Making data centers flexible so they can serve the grid rather than stress it out
Sen. Brian Schatz wants permitting reform, but not like this
Transcript
David Roberts: Okay. With no further ado, Jane Flegal, welcome to Volts. It’s long overdue.
Jane Flegal: Hello, David. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.
David Roberts: I practically lost my voice reading your resume.
Jane Flegal: It’s really, like, doesn’t speak particularly well to my ability to hold a job for any sustained period of time, but-
David Roberts: Yes, you’ve seen it all. So I thought, you know, it’s funny, my whole career when I had bosses, journalists, they would always say, “Start with something specific, start with a hook, start with a person, grab interest, don’t get abstract.” But I don’t have any editors or bosses anymore, so I wanna start at the top, at the sort of 30,000-foot level, and just tell me, maybe describe for us your thesis. What are you trying to do? What do you think the US ought to be doing at the highest level?
Jane Flegal: Well, defeating fascism would be up there on my list of objectives, I have to say.
David Roberts: [laughs] Yeah, you don’t have to do the whole list. Maybe let’s narrow that down to energy. We can bracket fascism. That should be the subtitle of this post. Bracketing fascism, comma.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, yeah, okay. Look, I mean, I have devoted my entire life to the issue of climate change, which you’ll note that I am not hushing about. And that remains something that is, like, centrally motivating for me in the way I think about what we ought to do as a country on energy. I also think that you are not gonna decarbonize the global economy, which is ultimately what matters for climate change, without enabling a bunch of other good things that people care about, including economic growth.
And so I think what’s become quite clear is that objective number one, if you, like me, care about climate, is to rapidly build out a clean electricity system in the United States capable of powering not just today’s demand, but the demand growth that if we are lucky, we will see to meet our climate objectives.
That is, like, sort of thing one. I think another thing that, like, is perhaps a slightly unique undercurrent in my own work is that my academic training is in science and technology studies, which is a sort of bizarre field that spends a lot of time thinking about the ways that social systems and society and politics and technology and science are sort of co-produced, and the ways that science and technology are kind of infected unavoidably with politics and values, and vice versa. And what that kind of has meant for me in the climate problem is that I really do think that climate change is an incredibly complex challenge that has multiple dimensions, where uncertainty is often quite high, and the stakes of decision-making are quite high.
And so I try to push for both epistemic humility in the face of that. You know, I think we need to, rather than trying to pick one path that is optimal and blast it through, given all the things that have to happen for us to achieve our goals, I sort of adopt more of a risk management frame around, like, how do we adopt plural perspectives? How do we move forward to address climate in a way that mitigates the risk of failure, which in my view is like trying to pursue one optimized path that some engineer cooked up in a lab or whatever, or a model. Anyway, probably longer than you wanted, but for me, those are the two like orienting principles probably for my worldview.
David Roberts: Those are great. Those are great. And two things I would say about both those. One is I do appreciate the latter perspective, ’cause especially early in the climate fight, the climate thing, it was dominated by a lot of people who were just, “Let’s twiddle the knobs on the model until the model says just the right thing, and then we’re gonna heave it over the fence with some prayers about political will,” right? You know, we invoke political will. Let’s get political will, everybody, and make this model into reality. And boy, has that not worked.
So yeah, the sensitivity to politics and to just epistemic humility for its own sake, because this is a very big thing, and we don’t really know. We genuinely don’t know how to do it, and we’re figuring it out on the fly.
The second thing I would say about it, and I don’t know if you really wanna get into this, but it’s a pretty explicit rejection of what’s called degrowth, basically. Rejection of the idea that the way to approach climate change is to shrink down humanity’s footprint, humanity’s ambition, humanity’s, you know, reach, I guess.
And I guess I’d just quickly ask about that. I mean, there’s two reasons you might reject degrowth. One is you might just say, “Well, it’s not realistic. We’re not gonna do it. Whatever you might think about it, we’re not gonna do it.” And the other way is, like, you genuinely share those human ambitions and maybe really do want to, like, grow and become ever more prosperous and desalinate the oceans and go to Mars or whatever.
Like where do you come down on that?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. I subscribe to the normative case against degrowth. I mean, the obvious answer to this, which is, can feel like a little bit of a cop-out, is like, the vast majority of economic growth and emissions growth that we are likely to see in the coming decades is from developing economies, right? And, like, that is just a fact. That in and of itself, and candidly just I care very deeply about climate change and the risks of climate change, most of the way you solve that problem is to get emissions to zero as quickly as possible.
But we also are, as we are already seeing, going to have to adapt to the impacts of a warming world, and that’s gonna require development. And so, like, in general, I just think global equity is a rationale for rejecting degrowth logic, which almost always falls hardest on the people who need more growth.
I also just think, like, I’m also not, like, some pro-growth, like, GDP go to the moon, and that’s the only thing that matters. You know? Like, surely we can hold a couple of things true at once, and I think we’re living in a moment where income inequality and anxiety about wealth distribution in this country in particular, I’m sort of empathetic to the anxiety about, like, okay, just more more more while we are not dealing with like, in my view, the very real imperative to redistribute more effectively.
David Roberts: Right. Okay. And so moving down a level from that then, you have this essay for the Roosevelt Institute back in 2023, just when you were coming out of the White House.
Jane Flegal: Mm-hmm.
David Roberts: Which I think is sort of like a little bit of a mission statement about what kind of policy problem this is and what kind of policy approach to take, and I think this is probably tied to your background in science and technology. But one of the things you say in that essay is this is not just a market failure that you are going to correct by turning a few knobs on your market approach, on your economic approach. It’s gonna take industrial policy. Just say a little bit about what motivates that, what you mean by that.
Jane Flegal: Yeah. Unlike the way you framed the degrowth question, David, there are, like, two things going on here. One is that what you will find in most of the kind of academic or theoretical literature around the rationale for just, like, pricing the externality of climate change assumes that you can actually do that effectively in the real world, which of course confronts all sorts of real challenges that I know you’ve talked to Danny Cullenward and David Victor, who’ve done a great job sort of describing all of the ways in which that fails when it hits reality.
So there is just kind of like a practical argument about this. But I also just think, like, one of the original sins in my view about the way that we came to understand climate change as a problem was that.
You know, we had all this great success with the Montreal Protocol and HFCs where... Which was a certain kind of problem, you know, a relatively well-bounded one in a couple of discrete geographies with a handful of producers where we had cheap substitutes, or at least rapidly becoming cheap substitutes. And so, like, the mechanism for managing that was, like, kind of a conventional pollution control program, right? Including at the international scale, and it worked, and it’s awesome. And it’s like, I actually worked on HFCs in the White House for Biden. There was a bipartisan ratification of a treaty on HFCs during that period which everyone seems to forget.
So that worked. That is not, though, the same shape of problem as climate change. Carbon, unlike these other pollutants, is embedded deeply kind of everywhere in the economy.
And so the expectation that price signals alone are gonna move it is, I think, just, like, basically incorrect.
David Roberts: And you talk about trying to generate a green spiral. What does that mean?
Jane Flegal: You know, I think this is really misunderstood. Useful question. I was really compelled when I was in grad school by the work of Nina Kelsey. And she’s a political scientist, and her sort of framing of green spiral is a positive feedback loop where investment, often government investment, though not only, makes clean technologies cheap enough to deploy at scale. That deployment then creates industries and jobs, and those industries become a powerful political constituency with real power to demand more climate action.
So you need a couple of things, right? You need, like, falling costs, which, you know, we have 90% cost declines for solar and batteries, and incredible... Same for batteries, 70% for wind. Like, crazy. So that was true. I think the other two pieces kind of were closer to failures in my view.
I still think it worked in the IRA, which we can talk more about, but, like, one part of the hypothesis is that you deliver tangible near-term benefits in communities. That one we should really unpack because I think my view is that too many in the climate advocacy community thought it was mostly that and not the industry power that was gonna move things, and I think that was wrong. And for me, I’ve always been a little bit more focused on, like, even if your hypothesis, which is not mine, but some people’s hypothesis is that, like, the single barrier to climate progress is the evil of the fossil fuel industry, and they have done very bad things, so I’m not minimizing it. I wish it were that easy, frankly.
But if you believed that, you are not gonna roll them with, like, a coalition of the marginalized. It’s the same way that the New Deal worked. You gotta have some part of capital on your side.
David Roberts: Tell me if you think this is right. Like, we have had these incredible cost declines and incredible growth in these industries, but I at least have been frustrated, as you probably know if you ever listen to the pod, that it doesn’t seem like the industry is using even the muscle it has. I mean, it’s still obviously not anywhere near as big as the fossil fuel industry, but it doesn’t seem like that side of the equation has worked, and I don’t totally understand why the industry is not acting on its own behalf more concertedly.
Jane Flegal: It’s totally fair, and I totally agree. To the extent there was a failure mode on IRA defense, it was, like, largely this. And interesting, I think there are a couple of possible explanations. One, to your point, like, it is just a more nascent industry, and they’re, like, trying to grow up very fast, and so, like, that is somewhat understandable. I think there’s also just these issues of, like, how do you exercise political power effectively and are trade associations the best way to do that, which you’ve also opined on.
And I think, like, another piece of this, and this is not to, like, blame the green groups, but I think for a long time, while these industries were quite nascent and it was very expensive, they relied on environmental nonprofits to be their advocacy muscle.
Do you know what I mean?
David Roberts: Yeah.
Jane Flegal: So we kinda had these, like, training... We had this, like, support structure. But over time, that resulted in, I think, the industries not building enough cross-partisan audience, which is like, whether you want that to be true or not, like, we obviously live in a country where Republicans are gonna control parts of government, and any mature industry is, like, engaging on both sides of the aisle. And I think that, you know, Republicans won the election, and many of these industries did not have strong relationships with those offices.
David Roberts: Yeah, so what you’re describing basically is, I mean, sort of the contrast to the market correction, tweak the externality approach. The more active approach is generally known as industrial policy. And I will just say I’m older than you. I’ve somehow come to a place in my life where I’m older than everybody. Like, for the first 15 years probably I followed US politics, industrial policy was just verboten. It wasn’t just sort of, like, neglected. It was the bad guy. Democrats strove to distance themselves from it. We’re not about command and control anymore.
Now we’re all neoliberals. We’re all about the market. We all respect markets. That’s what the whole Waxman-Markey sort of carbon pricing push was about. And just, it seemed like things flipped on that question on a dime.
And I still, I’m not even sure to this day I totally understand it. Like, all of a sudden from one day to the next, everyone across the political spectrum was like, “Yeah, we do industrial policy now. Like, this is the thing.” It’s wild.
Jane Flegal: Yeah. I have a couple of hypotheses here. One is like, it’s interesting, I’ve talked to some people who are like, “Well, the US was doing industrial policy during the peak of neoliberalism. It was just for financial markets.”
David Roberts: In reality, it was always doing it, right? I mean, it never really went away.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, exactly. But the willing embrace of it on, like, explicit terms, I think is like, yeah, a relatively new phenomenon. And I think for me, like I’ve thought about this a lot, I think there were a couple of things that came together at once. You know, I worked at the Hewlett Foundation at the same time as Jennifer Harris, who was leading this kind of beyond neoliberalism program, and I was like this nerdy climate person, but I immediately was like, “Aha, this is the answer to our problems.” Because for those folks, for the kind of economic policy, you know, economic thinking, geopolitical scholars and activists, there were a set of rationales for embracing industrial policy that had more to do with, like, competition with China-
David Roberts: Yeah yeah.
Jane Flegal: among other things.
David Roberts: That’s obviously, I think, if you’re listing causal factors, China not just using industrial policy, but very effectively and successfully using it, I think shook things up.
Jane Flegal: And then, like, so much of this is just, like, luck. Then, this is horrible. I do not feel lucky that COVID happened, let me just say. But then COVID happened, and so, like, as the window for federal action on climate specifically was opening, you had both stark competition with China, philanthropy’s role, frankly, in, like, seeding a bunch of ideas on that front in a bipartisan way, including a lot of the work that Jen did, frankly.
And then the Sunrise Movement kind of shaking things up on climate and leading with a more investment-led strategy. And then, like, the piece that often doesn’t get attention, and I’ll just give these guys a shout-out ’cause I think they don’t often get credit, is, like, there had been a set of organizations in clean energy and climate world who had been kind of not as focused on turning up the salience of climate politically, for better or worse, but much more focused on just moving the needle on things like innovation investment, including in the industrial sector.
You know, it’s like Clean Air Task Force, and the energy team at Third Way, and, like, the Great Plains Institute, and ITIF, and, like, these smaller NGOs. And, like, that’s not gonna solve the climate problem, but there were groups who had been working on just defending and reforming DOE’s energy programs while most of the climate community was much more focused on EPA as the locus of climate action. Those guys also deserve some credit, I think, for at least having some stuff to bring to bear on, like, what would big demonstration projects look like, blah.
David Roberts: Well, I say this with some chagrin, but it does kind of look like, in retrospect, the green spiral theory of the case, which is let’s do things, change facts on the ground, and then that will change politics, and we’ll turn this ratchet, does seem, in practice, to have produced more fruits than the let’s create a civil rights-style movement-
Jane Flegal: Yeah.
David Roberts: browbeat politicians into caring a lot about climate. Maybe you could say it was a pincer movement, and there was both, and it’s hard to disentangle them in retrospect. But I do think you’re right that the industrial policy side of things was a little neglected.
Jane Flegal: It’s also definitely true that, I mean, I was in the Biden White House, the Democrats in control really care about climate change. They like-
David Roberts: Yeah...
Jane Flegal: they really cared about climate change, and I think there’s two things. One, like I think there was a belief, which I think proved to be false, unfortunately, that like there were a bunch of climate voters, you know, who were gonna change the electoral outcomes. I think that that post most recent election has probably been deflated, but the belief that they were there definitely impacted the fact that we prioritized climate as much as we did in that White House, I think.
And then also, like this is kind of crude, but there’s a lot of political money in the climate space that flows to Democrats. Democrats feel accountable to those constituencies, and like it’s not particularly Democratic, but like it is what it is. And in truth, like I don’t know.
We did spend the vast majority of our funding opportunities on climate for a reason. So yeah, maybe we did need both. I don’t know.
David Roberts: Yeah. We’ll return to some of that a little bit later. But on the industrial policy tip, so let’s just talk about IRA. This is one of the big hot topics. Was IRA the right approach? The Inflation Reduction Act, sorry for everybody who does not get that by now. IRA, was that the right approach? You know, it was explicitly an industrial policy approach, I think, and originally I think was a much broader, more comprehensive industrial policy approach. Of course, it got whittled down and whittled down.
But still you, I think, have defended the basic approach. Everybody wants to discuss, like what was wrong with IRA? Should we deem it a failure because it didn’t stick as much as we thought it would, right? The theory of the case, it’s like you shovel these benefits to red districts, you’ll blunt opposition to the whole thing.
That maybe didn’t turn out to play out the way we might have liked. So what’s your sort of retrospective case on IRA?
Jane Flegal: The IRA was a historic law with much more durability than it should have had, having been passed by Democrats only in a reconciliation. It was, as a durable climate intervention, I think it did very well, and it was the right thing to do at the time. There was... I would love someone to articulate an alternative to the IRA that would have met the mark on climate ambition, and much of which would still exist today. Like, it certainly wouldn’t have been a regulatory agenda.
David Roberts: An alternative that, you know, Manchin would have signed off on is the relevant...
Jane Flegal: Well, yeah. Well, that for sure, but it wouldn’t have been a regulatory agenda. Carbon pricing, let’s just not even discuss really at the moment. Like, the, these things were not options then. Like, you just have to be kind of realistic. And I do think my view, and Jesse and I went on Ezra Klein a long time ago now, just to sort of say, like, “Look, here’s what the IRA did and what it did not do,” and that’s not to be poli- whatever. I can’t even get into, like, the modeling wars about whether the glass is, like, half full or half empty or a quarter full, like, whatever.
David Roberts: But that was my next question. I want you to get into those wars. There’s a fight, or not a fight, but there’s a question about... Lily Bermel had this paper where she’s like, “Glass half full, more of it survived than we thought.” And I don’t know if you saw, but the sort of NRDC people recently came out with a piece, and Heatmap is like, “No no, the glass is way less than half full. It destroyed a lot more than you thought.” I’m sort of curious, like, where you see industrial policy now post O-B-B-B-A, stupid Big Beautiful Bill Act. Like post Trump’s ravaging, what’s your assessment of how healthy the green industrial policy is today?
Jane Flegal: Look, I mean, the vast majority of that law remains intact, and I think all of the modeling... Like, okay, part of the problems with these models is that, A, they’re fake, and B, they’re like they are all asking different questions, right? And like, I know Lily well. I think she was very clear about the question she was asking, and I believe she is, was correct on the answer to the question. I think part of the reason it was so triggering for everyone, because one of her kind of normative takeaways was we probably shouldn’t throw down to reinstate the solar and wind tax credits. And like that’s why everyone got obsessed with the fullness of the glass. Leaving that aside, I think that that is true.
Other things have happened in the world. Demand growth has gone through the roof as a consequence of the data center build out, among some other things. Interest rates are extremely high. We are in multiple wars. Things are different, and so like if you try to account for everything, there are certainly all sorts of headwinds that, you know, there were not in four years ago.
But I don’t think any of that detracts from the fact that the IRA was a quite durable and important intervention that put the US, even today, on a much better trajectory than it would have otherwise been on. I believe that is true. I also think one thing that models are terrible at capturing, so as a consequence we just like are never allowed to talk about, is that there were a lot of investments in both the infrastructure law and the IRA in more innovative clean energy and industrial technologies that are going to be absolutely crucial for global decarbonization, you know, including tax credits for geothermal and other forms of, I won’t say clean firm, ’cause then we have to fight about what clean firm is.
You know what I mean.
David Roberts: We’re gonna fight about that later. That’s coming up. But just before we leave IRA behind… Looking back, are there things you would’ve done differently under IRA? Realistic things. I mean, obviously, like there’s a million things you could think of. Do you think there were things on the table that were possible that we should have done? If you were tweaking IRA in retrospect, is there things you would’ve... dials you would’ve turned?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. Well, okay, one thing is just like there’s the law and there’s the implementation of the law, and like much has been made about how slow we were to implement the law. So like across the board, I would try to do better on that, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later too, but I think there are implications for our current permitting regime that are related to that. I think that in the design of the IRA, many of us were overly focused on satisfying every member of the Democratic coalition rather than thinking about like the actual theory behind the green spiral.
So there was, you know, a lot of pressure to do... And this is like gets a little bit into like the everything bagelism, although I like the everything bagel, and I like think that if we’re spending public money, we should try to make sure it’s going to good things, and that’s legitimate.
But, you know, I do think there was a lot of funnel a lot of money into disadvantaged communities, and make sure the EJ groups are never mad at us, and make sure labor’s never mad at us, and make sure the enviros are... And like, it was just a lot of co-optimization and like kind of unwillingness to just say no and like make some tough trade-offs. That was kind of a problem.
And then the other thing I’ll say is like I was in charge of industry, and I think in part because the IRA is sort of remarkably, the IRA, you know, we kind of created this nationally determined contribution for the Paris Agreement. We came up with our domestic NDC, and then like there are a bunch of nerds with spreadsheets on the Hill and in the White House trying to like quote, “Find the tons.” And this is a bigger anxiety I have around like that is A, like a not a very global way to think about a global problem, particularly in light of the fact that we no longer live in a world where every country has like a binding emissions target.
So I think calling the question of how does everything we’re doing in this bill relate to global decarbonization, and maybe your theory is the US just needs to meet its NDC because it needs to be a leader, blah blah blah. I’m not sure that holds anymore, frankly, but I think we should have had a clearer theory of the case of how what we were doing here related to accelerating global decarb. And also these find the tons exercises bias you toward near term large tons. In that framework, like incremental subsidization of commercial solar is really good ’cause it delivers a bunch of tons.
But investing in clean steel or clean chemicals or a clean cement is like the immediate impact of those more innovation-oriented investments don’t show up in the models.
But like industry is supposed to overtake electricity as a source of emissions. And like we gotta-
David Roberts: Right. And it’s very difficult to model the effects of US innovation on developing world. The causal chains are so long, it’s very difficult to quantify that stuff. And so, I mean, there were political reasons they were counting tons, you know what I mean? They were trying to satisfy... They were trying to impress upon a lot of dimwitted legislators, “You can’t kill this. You can’t kill this,” you know, “You’re gonna kill a bunch of tons if you kill this.” Like, I understand why they were doing it, but-
Jane Flegal: I get it, but, like, in this moment, isn’t it kind of crazy? Well, I am sort of saying parts of it... It’s not that it was bad, but there were things that got left off the table, at least until the very last minute, in our search for near-term tons. And I think that bias is not always useful.
David Roberts: And I wonder also, like, how politically potent, if you’re in DC and you’re trying to persuade a bunch of legislators to go along with you, how politically potent is it saying, “Look, if we invest a bunch in this innovation, it’s gonna have enormously positive consequences in the developing world”? You know, is that compelling to people?
Jane Flegal: Well, yeah, now we don’t have USAID. How compelling is it to be like, “We made up a spreadsheet, and this is how many tons we have to reduce, and then for climate in the name of climate.” You know, it’s weird. I think all of it is a little... I just think, like, on the substance, there are a bunch of things that we need to do outside of the power sector that are really important for global decarbonization that kind of got left on the cutting room floor because it wasn’t legible in the same way other things were. There was a big obsession in the industrial sector with, like, demand side tools, buy clean. You know, these ideas that we were gonna basically subsidize the purchase of cleaner goods to buy down the green premium, so to speak.
And I kept arguing, like, “We don’t have cleaner goods to buy.” Like, I feel like we should’ve spent probably more time on the supply side, because otherwise these demand side incentives don’t end up pulling truly novel clean technologies into the market. They just basically turn into a version of buy American.
David Roberts: Hmm. Interesting. Okay.
Jane Flegal: So, like, that’s the other thing. It was, like, so much buy Amer- Yeah anyway. The buy clean, I think, I wish we’d have done more on the supply side on industry.
David Roberts: Okay. Well, Jane, I have like 10 clusters of questions, and we’ve made it through one of them.
Jane Flegal: Okay. Okay. Okay.
David Roberts: Not your fault. It’s totally-
Jane Flegal: I’ll be faster.
David Roberts: I could talk about any of these for an hour. Let’s talk a little bit about philanthropy in a couple of different ways. One of the sort of interventions you’ve made, I forget if you wrote a paper on it or if this was just stuff on Twitter. But I think there’s an enthusiasm for private philanthropy in Silicon Valley these days, and almost a sense among that crowd that, like, government is dumb and slow and incompetent and run by nannies who won’t let you take risks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so private philanthropy is gonna step in and do things government can’t. You have sort of pushed back against that a little bit. I wanna come at this philanthropy question from two different directions. That’s the first. Like, why is it that you still think that government has a central role.
And do you agree with that assessment of sort of the Silicon Valley mindset?
Jane Flegal: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s fair. And it’s gotten even worse actually now, because now we’re in this weird moment. And even if you would think that government should have a more robust role, Trump is now in office, and so he can’t be trusted. And, like, I actually think you see this a lot with the AI conversations where it’s like we can’t have state ownership of these companies because, like, then Trump is in charge, and it’s like, well, wait, didn’t you guys, like, help elect... You know, it’s just kind of like what’s happening.
So I do think that some of this is true, the sort of like more kind of libertarian skepticism of government impulse. And I think it’s really unhealthy. I think we need government.
We need a functioning government that can do lots of good things. It’s actually, like, the most beautiful thing about being human in my view, that society has, like, come together to acknowledge that we have, like, shared interests that can only be achieved in partnership with one another. So, like, I’m quite enamored with the notion of a government that does good things.
David Roberts: And specifically if you wanna do industrial policy, you need a big, active, competent, well-staffed government.
Jane Flegal: Totally. There’s, like, a really instrumental argument for this which is like, you know, I remember even getting in some debates with folks about philanthropy funding things like methane satellites directly, where it’s sort of like that’s a really expensive-
David Roberts: Yes.
Jane Flegal: Surely you could do an advocacy campaign to get the government to build some methane sats. You know what I mean? I always found myself kind of calling... I’m not making a judgment on methane sat. I’m just saying, like, there was an example of, like... And that didn’t even come from Silicon Valley, but the sort of like-
David Roberts: Yeah.
Jane Flegal: are we being thoughtful about what are the functions that we want an effective government to have? Where is philanthropy crowding in the public sector rather than crowding it out? And to me, that’s a really important question that’s always informed the way I’ve thought about grant making. But I think it’s a real challenge right now with this influx of kind of AI and Silicon Valley money.
David Roberts: Well, the other way I wanted to approach this, you know, you worked inside philanthropy for a while making grants, and so you had a lot of intimate behind-the-scenes interactions with green groups, with big green groups, small green groups, the environmental community, let’s say. And my impression is that you came away from that rather disillusioned.
Jane Flegal: Careful, David.
David Roberts: I know, I know. I don’t know how much you wanna get into this, but I think a lot of this, I think it’s helpful, I think, to air a lot of this out. So I’m curious, you know, you’ve said on Twitter and I think maybe elsewhere that you think there’s something like an epistemic crisis going on in that world, inability to distinguish expertise from advocacy. However much you feel like getting into it, I would love to hear your critique of the environmental NGO complex.
Jane Flegal: God. Okay. First of all, let me say, I have long funded, when I have been in philanthropy in the environmental groups, and I adore many of them, and there are great people working at those organizations. Let me just say that. Also, you know, they are all different. They are not all the same. Let me also say that.
David Roberts: Gotta use the monolith line.
Jane Flegal: One way to frame this, I think, David, is like, okay, I’ve been thinking a lot about our current political moment and, like, what’s next on the federal agenda for climate, and we can get into that later. But I remember being at the Hewlett Foundation before the 2020 election and having a similar feeling of, like, what the hell is the plan?
What are we gonna do? We’re obviously not gonna do cap and trade again. Like, are we really gonna do the Clean Power Plan 7.5? Like, what are we doing? And thank God, honestly, for the Sunrise Movement, because I think we needed some insurgent energy to sort of, like, reframe things, and I think that is kind of a symptom of one of the problems I see, which is just that in any domain, if you have a bunch of really big organizations who share kind of the same large funders and have kind of, like, a shared way of viewing the world and kind of coordinate and have really big staff and have all sorts of interests they have to manage institutionally, it can just be hard, A, to, like, generate novel ideas and, like, generate alignment across a large organization about what should, you know, so and so’s organization’s posture actually be on federal permitting for reform, for instance.
Like, it’s just really hard. And many of these organizations, like, grew up in a different time, where, as everyone has pointed out multiple times, the chief objective was to, like, stop bad things, the sort of pollution paradigm that I pointed to as problematic in international climate governance also I think applies here, where it’s just maybe, as Steve Rayner would say, kind of a wrong trousers situation. And, like, you know, a lot of litigators and blah blah blah. That’s just, like, kind of core to their institutional DNA.
And then I think… Maybe the last thing I’ll say is just we’re in a kind of a new era. Like a lot of the work those organizations did to advance clean energy standards in states, for instance, I think was incredibly valuable.
And now we’re in a phase where like, turns out you gotta actually meet those targets somehow. The world evolves, things change. It’s really hard and like you can’t... Simply enacting legislative targets of like expressive climate ambition is not enough. We gotta like actually build this stuff, and that is just kind of like a different moment.
And then there’s the broader political anxiety I have about someone who is climate obsessed. I’m also concerned about the rise of fascism, not just here, but everywhere around the world. And like, as much as I would like my party to prioritize climate change, I also think it’s very important that they get elected and need… that ought to be the first priority.
And so like anything that I think, and I don’t think climate always is in tension with electability, but there are some cases where like running on climate is not a...
We’re talking about climate hushing. I have to stop, but like-
David Roberts: You told me not to bring it up. I didn’t bring it up. Here you are bringing it up.
Jane Flegal: I know. I guess I think like so much of the posture has been pressure for more ambition at every moment. And on the epistemic issue, this is where this has really shown up for me is just for a while things were really wacky and you couldn’t even say like, climate change is a risk management challenge without being told you were a climate denier. And so like this notion that there like are in fact real trade-offs on the path to net zero, we need people in the world who are able to like inform policymakers and decision makers about those trade-offs so that those people can use their judgment to make the right choices. That capacity, academia I’ve also worked in and is kind of broken, obviously.
Maybe I should blame you for this, David, ’cause you were always like, “This is a political problem. You gotta like elect Democrats. That’s the way to do it.” And so like everyone kind of did that, but I do think we kind of lost this functionality of actually just doing really balanced, careful analysis to like help people make decisions in a credible way.
David Roberts: Part of me returns to the thought that like you want a group defending old school environmental stuff, air and water. You want a group pushing for clean energy industrial policy. You want a group doing sort of disinterested careful empirical policy analysis, it’s just a little crazy that we’re looking to these groups to do all these things.
Jane Flegal: Yeah. You want industries who can get Republicans to say yes. Like, they’re not all the same thing, and this is why I get so frustrated when people say that I’m, like, punching the enviros or whatever. The only argument I have ever tried to make is that is a necessary but insufficient part of the overall funding strategy that a philanthropy should take. We don’t have enough state capacity. We d- all these things that you’ve described, like, we are gonna have to build some new institutions now that we’re, like, in this era of climate policymaking, and I just feel there is a real reluctance to do that because it’s viewed as, like, a threat to the status quo.
David Roberts: Well, speaking of punching left, I think there has been some concern in some circles that you’re over there on Twitter, you’re over there hanging out with the abundance people, and the centrist bros, and over time, that just pulls you into this world where the left irritates you, and you become consumed with your irritation by the left.
And I certainly, like, I don’t think that’s actually true of you, but it is definitely true of some of the people with whom you are in proximity, who have let that vibe, that dynamic just consume them to the point that, like, fascism is raging around our ears, and we’re still scolding the left about language questions and stuff like this. You know, I won’t get into that whole thing, but I’ll give you a chance.
There are other factions involved here, and, you know, as we have discussed in-
Jane Flegal: Yes, I hate them all, David...
David Roberts: in private, as we have discussed in private many times, everybody is dumb and wrong. So I’ll give you a chance to say this new abundance movement. I like a lot of it. I’m irritated by some of it. I’m irritated by some of the people involved more than I’m irritated by the ideas. I’ll give you a chance to just say on some of the other factions what do you think they miss? What do you think that crew, that crowd misses? What do you think their weaknesses are?
Jane Flegal: Maybe because I’m, a nice way to talk about myself would be that I really value epistemic humility. Like, the truth is probably that I’m, like, deeply insecure and believe that I don’t know anything, and so I’m like, I really have a hard time subscribing to, like, any one ideological worldview. And, like, I really think pluralism is good. Like, I genuinely think that. And when it comes to the sort of... I don’t self-identify as, like, an abundance person. I identify as someone who has, like, a bunch of problems they’re interested in helping to solve, and, like, I try not to become, like, reverse polarized by the stuff I’m overexposed to.
But I have spent, like, more than a decade in climate nonprofit world. So, like, there is something kind of refreshing about someone having the courage, in my view, to, like, alm- have my back a little bit and be like, “No, she’s not crazy.” Like this isn’t to say that, like, all of these other tools aren’t important, but we have to pay attention to this stuff over here, too, or, like, we’re not gonna achieve the goals that we all claim to share.
Like, we all just have to be more open-minded. A good example of this is, like, I know you had Todd Tucker on recently, who I have a ton of respect for, and you know, I’ve written for Roosevelt. I think they’re great. But you know, they put out this thing all about, like, more state capacity and what to do next and blah blah blah, and there’s a lot in there that I really agree with and like. And just to, like, as one example of the way I would like these worlds to be brought together, yeah, I’m also really good friends with Grayson Flood. We, like, joke that we’re kind of frenemies, and he’s been writing about, like, a public grid and a public financing authority and whatever. I think those are great ideas the left should be pushing forward.
And if you bring together the kind of abundance people and pro-growth left that cares about public power and these kinds of things, there’s a bunch of shared stuff. Part of the abundance agenda, as you have pointed out, is, like, increasing and enhancing state capacity and how do we do things more effectively and what are all the, how do you rebuild all of these capacities and build them better? That’s a huge part of the agenda that I think the abundance movement sometimes leaves out, although there are people like Jen Pahlka who do a lot of work on this.
On the other side, I think it’s kind of nuts, frankly, to put out a bunch of proposals about the public sector doing very large, big investments into things directly and also claiming we don’t need to reform NEPA.
Like- Do you know what I mean? It actually is the case that if you wanna have very large public infrastructure projects, you need to grapple in a serious way with the permitting constraints. But anyway, the point is just, like, why can’t we be more normal about this?
David Roberts: That’s well said. This is also my frustration. Like, people, put your eyes on the target. It’s, so much of the fighting seems personalist, personality-based, and, like, tribal and, like- team sports.
Jane Flegal: And people are just like mean. Like, I’m like very sensitive. When people are mean to me on the internet, I get really upset, and I want... And my, you know, your inclination is to like curl up and go back to a tribe that you know will defend you. But half the time I’m like, “Well, I don’t want you to defend me. I think you’re wrong about a lot of stuff too.” Like, it just seems that everyone hates me.
So I do understand the impulse around this stuff. And I do think it probably is fair that, again, you know, where we stand depends upon where we sit, and I spent a lot of my life in climate philanthropy and nonprofit land. I developed a long list of annoyance.
David Roberts: I think we share this quality in that we get irritated by and want to argue with whoever we happen to be around.
Jane Flegal: But the one thing that I would push back on a little, Dave, is like, ’cause I get annoyed with all the infighting too, and like keep the eye on the prize, but I do think we’re having some pretty important intraparty fights about we do have to actually defeat fascism. So like we need to kind of air out and like experiment. Like, what are the best ways to do it? Is it running Democratic Socialist can- Like, I don’t know, but I’d rather have that fight than like not have a primary or whatever.
David Roberts: Yeah. While we’re taking on various factions, what about just establishment Democrats? They’re not really the same as green groups. They’re influenced by green groups. But like what do you think the sort of modal Democratic Congress person is missing?
Jane Flegal: On climate?
David Roberts: Yeah, on specifically on this stuff, on industrial policy and climate, clean energy. What are the Dems getting wrong?
Jane Flegal: You know, right now they’re not in control at the federal level, so like hard to blame them for very much. I would like them to do, especially after the midterms ideally, do like much more kind of oversight on the corruption. I mean, Trump is just like doing state socialism now. And there’s a lot of really bad stuff that’s happening, and I think there are a bunch of things Democrats could be doing there. I think the actual tension is not that they don’t, the modal Dem doesn’t understand industrial policy. It’s more like where are we gonna land on this sort of fight between populism and industrial policy. Do you know what I mean? Industrial policy does require a certain amount of technocratic skill and expertise and state capacity.
David Roberts: Technocracy is out of fashion, but if you’re gonna do industrial policy, you need competent, informed technocrats at some level to make sure you do it right.
Jane Flegal: And they’re gonna have to sometimes say no to things that pollsters tell them are popular because they’re bad policy. And so, you know, I’ve been in a bunch of conversations lately about rate freezes, like in the electric power sector, and I think like, okay, sure. I also have this... I mean, I hate polling also, and issue polling, and I’m like, everyone is like, “Oh, but freezing rates poll so well.” And it’s a little bit like, okay, yeah, if you asked me if I wanted to not pay my bill, I would say yes. This is not revealing of any, like, interesting truth about the electorate. It’s just like-
David Roberts: I hate issue polling so much. I hate it so much. It’s one thing to use it as a piece of propaganda to try to get what you want. That I kind of understand. But when you start, like, smoking your own supply, when you start believing your own issue polling, I think it’s bad. I mean, this is- I’ve been following issue polling for 20 years now, and you can get people to say almost anything. You just... They want more good stuff and less bad stuff, and so you just tweak the question. Do you want more of this thing that sounds good? You’re gonna get them to say yes. The public just doesn’t know much. This is another thing you’re not really supposed to say out loud, but, like, they hardly know anything.
So, like, they don’t have deep, fixed opinions on flavors of industrial policy. They’re just gonna, like, say, “Yeah, that sounds good,” if you phrase a question to make it sound good. Same with, like, climate and all this stuff. Like, should we do something about this big, bad problem? Well, like, yeah, they’ll say yes to that.
And then do you want me to take $5 out of your wallet to solve this big, bad problem? Of course they’re gonna say no to that. But none of that tells you anything about how they’re gonna behave in the wild in actual politics. Anyway, okay. So finally, let’s talk about Republicans briefly. I mean, fascism’s bad. I think we agree on that. Another big fight is like, are there promising green shoots somewhere in that machine that are worth expending a lot of resources.
Obviously, like, if there are Republicans who are sympathetic to this stuff, you want to cultivate them. I think that’s coming to the issue polling. If I just ask people that, well, like, yeah, that sounds good. But the question is, like, how to prioritize and should you tamp down or moderate your own message to your own people in the name of not irritating these possible Republican allies? You know what I mean? There are trade-offs. So I wonder, like, what’s your take on whether or how much to sympathy there is somewhere in that machine for what we wanna do?
Jane Flegal: Sympathy, wrong word for me in my feelings about this. On the other hand, like, look, I try to start with what are we trying to achieve? On climate, like, this is gonna be a multi-decadal problem we have to manage. It’s also just the case that the Democrats winning elections into perpetuity feels unlikely given all the structural disadvantages among other things. So, like, I care about this problem. I don’t think you can solve it by, like, never having Republicans do the right thing on it. That seems really hard to me, so-
David Roberts: But on the other hand, look at the Republicans, right? This is like-
Jane Flegal: Right. Like it’s, yeah...
David Roberts: this is the rock and the hard place here.
Jane Flegal: And like, look, I’ve been in philanthropy. Like, I think two things can be true. One, I think efforts to cultivate Republican champions on this is- set of issues have been woefully underfunded, but also, like, some of it’s been crap. Multiple things can be true. I think part of the frustration I have is that it’s never been clear to me... I actually think the way in here is to be much clearer about what the actual policy agenda needs to be as a first step. Like, having this vague goal of, like, getting Republicans to care about climate change is just... It really depends what you think they need to do. If what they have to do, for instance, is, like, defend tax credits for nuclear power, I think there’s a way to get them to do that.
If what they need to do is vote for embedding CO2 emissions in trade policy, I think there’s a way to get them to go there. You know, I think there are ways to move them on certain issues.
David Roberts: But if you’re trying to get them to endorse grandiose targets, I think that’s probably fruitless.
Jane Flegal: Well, that’s the thing. Like, what are you asking them to do? And I think, like, we’re often unclear about that, and I think step one for me is, like, what is an actual agenda that is, like, authentically Republican? You know. And I think there is space there, in part because of competition with China, but also because of broader geopolitical stuff.
And I don’t wanna be Pollyanna-ish here, but I think if you’re clear-eyed about what you’re trying to get them to yes on, I see more space for progress. On the other hand, I will say I was incredibly surprised. Of the many things that I’ve been wrong about in my life, the degree to which there has been such cultural backlash to solar and wind power specifically.
’Cause one hypothesis I had back in the day was like, I don’t know, man, maybe, like, this climate could be like other public policy problems where there’s, like, a Dem answer and a Republican answer, and, like, we kind of agree there’s a problem, but, like, we have different solution sets. But, like, the way the technology polarization has played out has freaked me out a bunch. So I don’t really know totally what to do with that.
David Roberts: Well, just, like, the epistemic environment over on that side is such a smoldering wreckage. One sort of analogy I’ve been playing around with, and see if this rings true at all to you, is I often think about the Cold War, and I often think about the fact that Republicans, at least in the post-war era, kind of went along with democracy reforms and clean air and a social safety net kind of things, in part because we were trying to compete with communism in Russia, and we were trying to say, “Look, we do better by our citizens than they do.” This was a big undercurrent in the Cold War. Capitalism produces better results for ordinary citizens than communism does, and so that sort of led, I think softened at least Republican opposition to sort of public provision and stuff like that.
And I have been wondering if a Cold War with China could have a similar dynamic on the clean energy thing particularly. Like, could we try to get that dynamic going where we’re like, ”No, we, capitalism and free enterprise is better for clean energy and good technology and advanced this and that than communism is. It kind of seems to be going the other way, but-
Jane Flegal: I know. Yeah. I mean, I also think that the thing has cha- that one of the things that has changed is, like, demand growth. It’s kind of a diff- the problem is structured slightly differently when we’re all fighting over a small pie and, like, a pie in decline. But, like, when there’s a growing pie, I think it feels a little less zero-sum. I don’t know. I think that there’s some room for maneuvering there.
David Roberts: Okay. Let’s pivot. Let’s take a big pivot.
Jane Flegal: But I really, just one last thing, I really think the industry needs to, like, give Republicans money to advocate for their stuff. That’s also just true.
David Roberts: What do you think also about the solar PAC that is just going out and shooting intransigent Republicans in the head, taking them out in primaries? Like, I think that’s extremely promising.
Jane Flegal: Great. I think it’s awesome. Also, the more uncomfortable piece of that is, like, we can’t only do the accountability stuff. We also have to cultivate champions. So I think that piece of it is still a little under attended to.
David Roberts: Okay. Let’s pivot and talk about data centers. Everybody wants to talk about data centers. There’s a lot of aspects of this, but let’s start with your proposal, which you wrote up in a paper for something called an American Grid Infrastructure Fund. And the idea I think here is just let’s get these hyperscalers who have all this money, who desperately want to build these things, to pay into a fund in exchange for the social license to build them, and the fund, well, you describe it. I’ll let you describe it. What is the idea there?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. I have been kind of thinking about this in two pieces. When it comes to data center anxiety about electricity and energy, right? There’s, like, a couple of things going on. One is just basic good governance. How do we make sure that data centers are not screwing other ratepayers on cost, right? And, like, we’re seeing a lot of innovation at the state level around, like, large load tariffs and other kinds of rulemakings around trying to ensure that that is not happening, right? And we can talk more about that. My view is that is, like, a necessary but insufficient condition because these tariffs were not designed to handle all of the issues associated with the scale of the data center build-out. Leaving aside, like, managing the downside risk, like, there’s a ton of upside opportunity here, I think, in terms of having new revenue to invest in a grid, and that is sort of what I’m trying to capture here.
On the, like, what doesn’t get captured in the tariff thing, I think a really good example of this is, like… It’s relatively straightforward to be like, “Okay, this one gigawatt data center has these direct associated costs, this substation, this distribution line,” blah blah blah. But the further you go upstream to, like, regional and interregional transmission cost allocation, it’s just kind of a nightmare.
David Roberts: Yeah. One of the premise of this whole discussion is that we can actually measure and quantify those things. I always bump up against that. I was like, “Well, that’s a lot of fuzziness and uncertainty there about what exactly is causing what.”
Jane Flegal: I think we cannot, and in fact, I actually think it would be potentially bad precedent to do that. I mean, one good example of this is that these ways of managing these cost allocation fights for regional and interregional transmission are brutal, as everyone I think knows. And so, like, you know, when Maryland was doing a bunch of clean energy laws, Virginia was really pissed at them because they claimed they were paying for transmission upgrades caused by Maryland’s clean energy laws. Now, Maryland’s really pissed at Virginia for their data center policy for causing them to... You know, like, this is just not a way through building out shared infrastructure that benefits the entire economy and climate.
David Roberts: Yeah. I’ve been worried about these, about the hyperscalers playing the states off one another, too. I- this is happening to some extent already, I think.
Jane Flegal: And they’re already... Like, even the ones who say, like, “We’ll pay our fair share,” like, if you look at the rate cases, they’ll often be like, “We don’t wanna pay for that transmission upgrade.” So anyway, this fund idea, the premise is just that there’s, like, a bunch of potential upside here that’s not gonna be captured through these, like, quite opaque regulatory proceedings, and there’s an opportunity, and I think an imperative, to, like, capture some amount of the generational wealth these companies are going to acquire and use it for something good.
David Roberts: So it’s a federal program that you have in mind?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. The... Well, the initial idea I proposed is a federal program. Sam Ricketts actually put out today a kind of version of this at the state level, and I have been talking to some state offices about a version of, like, a state level fund. New York, you know, when Hochul announced the pause, sort of said that they were looking at launching a fund. I think other states, as they grapple with some of these questions about cost allocation, are also like, “Huh, maybe a fund could be helpful.” So I think... You know, and Virginia has passed a charge on electricity consumption by data centers that’s just going into, like, the general fund, which I think there are problems with that approach.
But in any case, yeah, I just think there’s a lot of potential here.
But it’s funny, the politics have gotten, have shifted. Like, I think when I initially wrote that, which was in like March or something, I was sort of like, “Even if the companies did this voluntarily,” like now it’s like, “No, you must contribute to a fund or like you’re banned forever.”
David Roberts: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the politics a little bit. You have sort of criticized, I think, green groups and others for-
Jane Flegal: Stop telling me I criticize the green groups, David. You’re gonna get me in trouble.
David Roberts: For approaching this with a kind of scarcity mindset. Talk about what you mean by that.
Jane Flegal: Here’s where it gets a little complicated, and like this is probably why I get like abundance coded. I think in my view, we are in a very unique historical moment where we have significant demand growth, the kind of demand growth that we could only imagine in our decarbonization models, but could never grapple with seriously. We have the richest actors in the economy with apparently a willingness to pay quite a bit of money to power compute.
And so like I think there’s a lot of opportunity here. The question is, what are the most catalytic things that we can and should be doing in this moment? And the truth is, there are kind of two imperatives that are sometimes kind of intentioned, but both really important. One is affordability politics, right?
And that’s where all of the stuff on like get more out of the existing grid, peak shaving, VPPs and DERs, all of that stuff is really important. I have in fact written about policy ideas that states should use to like do better on that front. So I am not at all dismissing those things.
But it is also the case that, as you know better than everyone, we are not going to rooftop solar our way to a decarbonized economy. It is an important part of it, but it is not actually the bulk of it even in under the most optimistic scenarios. Like, we need interregional transmission. We need a lot more utility scale clean power. These things are just true. Batteries are great, but they’re not gonna solve this problem on their own.
And so my big issue is, are we kind of penny pinching? Are we overly focused on penny pinching at the expense of generational big thinking on like rebuilding our grid for climate?
David Roberts: Well, I’m glad you’re raising this about the affordability politics, ’cause I feel like everyone in the Democratic world and associated groups is just herding in this direction, but we need growth of the grid in the long term. We need a lot of investment. And that’s gonna cost money. So, like, there’s a lot of things you could do to save money in the short term that would forestall or delay or cut off that investment that you need in the long term. I think that’s basically the dilemma you’re raising. And of course, this is where, you know, the voice of Jigar comes in saying, like, the stuff you’re talking about, the grid utilization and stuff like that, is how you navigate that dilemma. That is how you get short-term affordability while still allowing for long-term investment.
And I kind of feel like nobody really disagrees or, at least like, informed people don’t really disagree. This is another one of these sort of fake fights between do you want grid utilization or do you want investment in new generation and transmission? Obviously you want both, right? Both is the obvious answer, is it not?
Jane Flegal: Yeah, I think that’s totally right. The one other thing that I, the layer that I would add here is, like, that kind of assumes that you have two options, which is reduce or increase the amount that we’re spending on things. A third option is, like, change who’s paying for stuff.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Jane Flegal: And, like, that’s where some of Grayson’s ideas about the fund is one version of this, but I think in general, like, you know, if you look at the LBNL report on actual drivers of electricity affordability, in many states the sort of grid hardening costs and wildfire mitigation and that kind of stuff is not a not an insignificant part of the bill.
David Roberts: We’re gonna get to this later. Let’s bracket that for the moment. A final question about data centers, though, is, you know, the politics have shifted dramatically, I think, even since you wrote this proposal, even since, like, months ago, in not necessarily a great way. So, even the governor of Texas now is putting a moratorium on new data centers. Do you... What do you make of the politics? I kind of think or fear or wonder whether the anti data center thing has become something that is beyond individual, specific, answerable objections and has become kind of a synecdoche for just, like, people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the world and the state of income equality and, like, it’s just something that everybody can sort of read their own dissatisfaction into and thus, like, is no longer something that can be brought under control by these sort of concrete technocratic answers to the specific objections.
Do you know what I mean?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. Yeah. There is a part of it that, like, feels a little, like, mass his- hysteria driven. And the funniest thing about this, by the way, is that I have wondered, like, to what extent this is how real this phenomenon... Like, it obviously is real, but, like, to what extent is it fed and perpetuated by our broken information environment that is created by the same companies trying to build the data center? You know, like, there’s something funny happening there.
But I think, like, I hear you, and this is why I’ve been pushing back on, like, “Oh, we’ll do a large load tariff, and, like, that will resolve the politics of electricity afford-” It’s like, no, it won’t. No one understands that, and, like, it’s not responsive to the political moment.
I think one thing that we could do much more effectively is… I think we’ve done a ba- like, whatever. There was the ratepayer protection pledge, and then, like, all these individual states doing weird stuff. But, like, Democrats or Republicans for their part, or the data center companies themselves have not put out a clear, like, four clicks of more granularity beyond the ratepayer pledge that’s like, “Here is what good grid citizenship is, and, like, this is what we are doing. We’re all aligned on, like, this is the thing.” And I think in the absence of, like, a clear set of asks that we are making of these companies and securing, it’s kind of like, yeah, this feels like a mess.
David Roberts: Yeah, what’s maddening to me is these companies have so much money. I listened to a presentation by a guy, I can’t call his name to mind, so great story, Dave. But anyway, he was talking about data centers can have the capacity to, and some have, can come in and say, “Not only will we make the investments such that we don’t raise your rates,” that’s the electricity piece, “but we can install bioswales, we can spend the money to improve the air and water in your town, and we can spend the money to improve your tax base, and we can build you better schools, and we can install rooftop solar and batteries in your basement so that you have more resilience.” Like, they have the money to do all that stuff.
Like, they could spend the money to do all those things, and it would still be a fraction of what they’re spending by being delayed, by having the data centers being delayed, by not getting the compute. It’s just like they could be... There is a world in which a data center coming to your town is a boon. It improves water, it improves air. There are mechanisms by which it could do that. It’s hard for me not to see just, like, tech bros being douchebags, some kind of at the root of their refusal to do this. It seems like there’s a win-win-win there on the table waiting to be grabbed, and they just won’t grab it.
Jane Flegal: I agree with much of what you said. I also think they’re also not like morons, right? And I think one of the things that I had sort of undercounted is just the degree of competition within and across the industry. And so like, you know, maybe initially they were like, “Well, sure I could do the bioswales, Dave, but Company X is gonna just like go as quickly as possible with their like rolled up gas engine, jet engines. And like in the meantime I’m like painting my facility green. Like what are we doing here?” So like I do think some of that, and I think what they have learned is like they don’t have a choice. They’re all gonna have to like take a beat and slow down or they will be forced to.
I mean, the other thing I will say is I’ve now found myself occupying a very weird corner of the world in this discourse, which I’m, where I’m like pro data center under the right set of conditions and like maybe now anti-AI. Like I’m like the hugging face thing freaks me out so much and I’m just, wait, so like there’s no plan and like what are we doing and like should the state own these co- Like I’m having a much bigger... Now, I also happen to think that blocking the data center build out is probably not the best way to deal with the issues I find most concerning, so like-
David Roberts: But it’s the only tool the public has in its hands. I mean there’s so much of this is like you poll people and they say, “Oh, it’s water,” or like, “It’s the noise.” But I think there’s just so much of like generalized angst about like the world is hurtling off into some dystopian sci-fi future and we have no control over it. They’re not asking us. It’s just a handful of rich guys doing it and like this is the one thing, the one place where we can kind of throw ourselves on the gears of the machine, and there’s just a lot of that generalized angst around this. Well, let’s talk about also behind the meter gas plants, which is, you know, I think the initial hyperscaler response to the slowness and the inability of these institutions, utilities, and regulators and etc.
To move quickly was just like, “Okay, we’ll build our own stuff.” Curious how you feel about that. I mean, one strain of thought, and again Jigar is a big proponent of this, is just that it’s a lot harder than it looks, and these machines are gonna be breaking down and maintaining them is gonna be incredibly difficult and they’re just not gonna do as much of it as they say they’re gonna do. That’s one of the big arguments going on right now, like how much is realistically possible.
And then there’s also the question of like what should the attitude of public policy makers and regulators be toward this stuff? Should we ban it? Should we force them to commit to a schedule to hooking up to the grid.
What’s your thought on that whole thicket?
Jane Flegal: We gotta get ’em on the grid, man. That to me, like, is the climate challenge, frankly. Like, that to me is the biggest risk for decarbonization and emissions. I think, like-
David Roberts: Why? Spell that, just briefly spell that out why.
Jane Flegal: Well, first of all, like, on the size of the behind the meter gas build out, I do not know the answer to this, but, you know, semi analysis is saying that behind the meter could account for more than half of new US data center capacity by 2028. Not because it’s, like, the preferred solution of anyone, but because headroom on the grid is gonna run out soon in the most congested places, and, like, they can’t get interconnected fast enough, and, like, that’s what’s happening. Now, I don’t know, maybe Jigar’s right, I have no idea, but the prospect of this freaks me out quite significantly. And Cleanview also put out-
David Roberts: I mean, the gas build out happening right now is huge. Like, I don’t-
Jane Flegal: No, it’s for real happening...
David Roberts: it’s a macro phenomenon at this point. I think people are perfectly within their rights to be freaked out about it, to view data centers as kind of coterminous with a giant build out of fossil fuel generation. That’s a legitimate thing to be freaked out about, I think.
Jane Flegal: Totally, I totally agree. I mean, the two, on emissions, I think there’s like two reasons I’m freaked out. One is a kind of like dilution of the resource mix. So if you have a grid connected data center, you’re drawing on a shared pool of generation. That importantly includes whatever like zero marginal cost renewable energy, nuclear or hydro happens to be running, plus efficient combined cycle gas, right?
So like the effective emissions rate of that facility is the blended rate, right? Whereas an off-grid facility’s emissions rate is 100% gas ’cause gas is the only thing powering it in most cases. So like that’s bad, and I have high confidence in our ability to continue to put a bunch of low cost, zero marginal cost resources on the grid, and the more that we can keep things on the grid, the more we can outcompete them.
So like that I think is really important. The second thing that I think is really bad is that like a lot of these off grid projects are optimized for speed, not thermal efficiency So you end up with these crazy inefficient, like arguably worse than coal gas plants, like these simple cycle or like aeroderivative turbine stuff running at like 100% capacity factor.
David Roberts: And a lot of diesel and kerosene back up. It’s a nightmare.
Jane Flegal: It’s so bad, and like some of the modeling I’ve seen, like you know me, I love modeling to a- only when it confirms my priors, that like the net effect of those two things means that grid connected data center load, you know, without making assumptions about new stuff, new generation, produces like a much lower cumulative emissions by 2040 than behind the meter gas.
So like that is really, I think, quite important. I also think this notion that like, “Oh, they’ll connect eventually,” because it’s like they all wanna be connected, is like, I don’t know man, if you built a 400 megawatt gas plant to power your data center facility, and then like in seven years you get interconnection, why wouldn’t you just like double the size of your data center?
David Roberts: Well, some states, some countries, like I think Spain is it, probably should’ve made a note of this before I launched into it, but I think it’s Spain who’s basically saying, “If you wanna build a data center, it’s gotta be 80% clean energy fueled.” Which would basically statutorily ban giant behind the meter gas plants. You know, I don’t know that there is the political will to do that in the US, ’cause that would basically just like jam to a halt an enormous amount of data center building. But like what should governors do behind the meter gas plants specifically. Is there a public policy tool here that you would recommend?
Jane Flegal: Okay, there’s two ways to answer this question. One is like, what do we do today given this is where we are? The other, which I would like to talk about at some point, is why are we in this position, and what would’ve had to have been different for this demand growth to not be met this way? Which I think is actually a really useful exercise.
But on the, like, near term, what do we do? I mean, there are a couple of things. One, I think Tyler Norris has been aggressively advocating for a willingness to, you know, like non-firm interconnection, basically. Like, if you have a data center accept some willingness to, like, accept that they’re gonna partially reduce their load at given times, can they get connected far faster?
David Roberts: Yeah, and I’ve done a couple of pods about flexible data centers that are capable of doing that, capable of accepting that sort of variable hookup, capable of reducing their demand on, you know, at a moment’s notice kind of thing.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, totally. So I think like non-firm capacity, and like FERC has been pushing this and, you know, some RTOs are sort of trying to figure this out. I think that that is probably useful and important way to get these things connected to the grid faster. If they’re willing to accept like non-firm interconnection, that seems good.
The other thing is like Travis Kavulla has been proposing this idea about like having kind of an open season where you have an RTO or a utility sort of say like, “At this specific node, here’s the spare capacity, come get it,” which is a way of pre-screening planned interconnection locations and cutting the timelines to get connected.
So like that seems like a basically good idea to me, but what do I know?
I think SPP might be doing something like that. And then I think like- At some level, to the extent that a lot of this is symptomatic of how hard it is to interconnect, right, and how slow, you know, there are people who are focused on interconnection queue reform and connect and manage and that kind of thing, and, like, that’s useful, I think, on the margins and, like, worth exploring. And a lot of this is downstream of the fact that we just don’t have enough capacity and transmission. And, like, for me, that means that we ought to take the permitting reform conversations a lot more seriously. And that’s not a fix overnight, but I do think it really matters.
David Roberts: Okay, we’re gonna get back to permitting reform in a minute, but let’s talk then about what kind of grid would we need to have where a data center could just come hook up and be fueled by clean energy? Like, why are they reverting to behind the meter gas plants? What is missing from the grid? And I’m guessing your answer is some clean firm and some transmission. Is that right?
Jane Flegal: I think that’s probably right. But here’s what I’ll say, like, I think the piece that is missing is, like, not a particularly sexy one, but again, this is where I’m not an abundance person, just exclusively, is, like, we have lost our ability to do meaningful planning in this country on these issues. So, like, you know, in regulated states you have IRPs and whatever, but that’s not great always. And in deregulated states we’re basically like the market will decide where you should build whatever. And, like, what this has meant in practice, among other things, I think, is that it has been very hard to plan a grid for growth.
And so I think if you look at the states where data center development has happened and put downward pressure on rates, it has mostly been in states that had like a lot of spare capacity.
In other words, there was stuff that was built in advance of demand. And this is where I think I have some issues with the paradigm the affordability politics is pushing us toward, which is like invest less, build less. I think the risks of under-building are way bigger than the risks of overbuilding, as long as you’re careful about who’s bearing those risks, right? As long as it’s not all on ratepayers, which I think there are tools to manage that, including taxpayer funding and, you know, all sorts of things that states are already experimenting with.
But like what you wanna do is have a thoughtful electricity system that is built in advance of demand, I think, like anticipating demand. And that’s like an unthinkable proposition in much of the world.
And notably, Texas did this with their transmission when they did CREZ, right? Like they built out a bunch of transmission lines in the state that enabled both a lot of low-cost clean energy to connect to the grid very quickly and a bunch of demand to grow, including oil and gas stuff. Anyway, I think that is a piece of this, in addition to just like having more transmission and having more clean firm would’ve gotten us in a slightly different position. So I don’t know. I would like a real analyst to like do that exercise.
David Roberts: I have questions about all pieces of that, but let’s talk about clean firm. This is a vexed debate for me, but it seems like the conventional wisdom at this point is that we need an immense amount of clean firm, and that’s why we need to be investing in nuclear and geothermal, and people are still even talking about gas plants with CCS attached and all this.
And I guess I just wonder, you know, I talked about this a little bit with Lily. If you have a bunch of new transmission, right? If you get serious about transmission and maybe even like, say, link up America’s three big grids and like, et cetera, and then you have batteries which are getting cheaper, and then you have longer duration storage, which is also getting cheaper and also starting to come online.
You got your flow batteries, you got your iron air batteries, you got smaller and more nimble pumped hydro people are proposing and starting to build. Why do you need so much clean firm? Why won’t more transmission plus more storage satisfy a lot of what people think you need clean firm to do? This idea that like storage is like not firm enough or not firm in the right way or not manly firm, I guess I just don’t get it. Like, what’s wrong with storage plus transmission as a answer to the problems that clean firm is supposed to solve?
Jane Flegal: This is where, maybe this is a cop-out, but I’ll go back to like the very beginning of this conversation where I asserted that I take kind of a risk management frame to this. In the real world, doing any of this is basically impossibly difficult. So being able to like plan, permit, pay for, and build the transmission system you would need to do what you’re describing would be very difficult.
David Roberts: Yeah.
Jane Flegal: Innovation in battery technology I’m very bullish on, but that’s a real challenge. Like, there’s a bunch of stuff that siting and permitting all of these renewables, very hard. Very hard actually. So like that path, it has its own set of potential failure modes and frictions, as does the clean firm path, you know? Maybe advanced geothermal doesn’t work everywhere we think it will be. You know, like whatever, like maybe the costs don’t come down, that maybe advanced nuclear never amounts to anything. Like, there are real questions about all of this.
David Roberts: I mean, the whole history of the nuclear industry seems to point at a very large risk just relying too much on that for clean firm.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, but I mean on the other side, in the history of the world, the handful of economies we have that have actually decarbonized tend to rely pretty significantly on nuclear power, you know? So like that’s not to say we should go full nuke here, but like when I hear skepticism about this, I do feel like compelled to kind of point out like, I don’t know, look around the globe at the places that have actually decarbonized, and it’s usually on clean firm.
David Roberts: Yeah, but come on. I mean, all that was before solar fell 90%. All of that was before cheap batteries. All of that was before we were even really trying in earnest to decarbonize.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, but maybe that’s the point, Dave. Like, they did it. Like, it still is a fact in the world. And again, I’m not advocating for, like, a nuclear maximalist path here, but, like, I do think it’s relevant. So for me, it is just like, I don’t know what path is going to be most plausible, and I think we need to try a bunch of different things.
And I do think that it just, like, actually is true that, like, while clean firm, the term, is, like, kind of a modeling convention, and you can, like, discount capacity credit and try to, like, you know, use ELCC and capacity accreditation to, like, figure out how to make all these things equal. Different resources just do different things in different ways, and, like, that’s good.
It’s actually good that they have different failure modes and, like, a good system is diversified. And then imagine a world where we don’t solve all the transmission stuff. This is why I want someone to actually study this. Like, say we didn’t solve all the transmission stuff, and you still have this demand growth, and we were still able to meet it with clean power. It would probably have to be what we call clean firm behind the meter because, like, the physical footprint of powering these data centers with, like, solar and batteries alone is just, like, very difficult to imagine. And, like, the amount of redundancy you have to have, which is why it’s not really happening.
David Roberts: Well, you know, I think one of the critiques people have of the sort of electricity market is that having that firm capacity. If you have privately owned utilities and you have these markets, you have these energy markets, it’s kind of hard to price it such that the system produces enough of it. You know, the sort of the two options here are like you have PJM, which has a capacity market, which tries to sort of do this, and it has many flaws that we don’t have time to get into.
But then on the other hand, you have ERCOT, which is just pure energy market, which is whereas the sort of scarcity is supposed to drive investment in spare capacity also doesn’t seem to be doing a great job.
You have sort of floated this federal strategic reliability reserve. I realize this is like a quarter-baked idea, but what do you mean by that and what is the need for it?
Jane Flegal: Again, like this is where like maybe I’m the socialist, you know, who’s to say? But I guess most of my like real electricity market nerd friends think that Texas is a better model than PJM. But these, again, like none of these are perfect. It’s almost analogous to the issue with climate pricing, which is like in order to have a price signal in any of these versions of the world that actually does what we want it to do, people are gonna probably be kind of pissed off.
David Roberts: Yeah. To me, this is the flaw of ERCOT. Like it would work if you really allowed electricity to get as expensive as it needed to be to do the scarcity pricing. But like the minute it gets that expensive, politicians intervene. Like no one has the guts to let that work.
Jane Flegal: Totally, and it’s the same at PJM right now. You know? Like this is like people wanna cap the price, and like I understand this. So the strategic reliability reserve is basically just like a very not even quarter-baked idea around could you imagine a world where the federal government like procures on behalf of RTOs and states enough kind of dispatchable capacity that, and pays for it to be available, that we’re not asking every state and market to figure out a way to like have kind of backstop capacity. And I have no idea. This could be like a totally insane idea, but I’m just kind of like surely someone should think about it.
David Roberts: Let’s just surface this ’cause you sort of gestured in this direction several times, which is we need more planning. We need more central planning. We need arguably more central control of things. And I guess there’s a faction of people out there who will just say, “Well look, you’re just working your way around privately owned utilities and trying to compensate for the many, many failure modes and things that they don’t do well. Why don’t you just embrace public ownership? You know, why don’t you just turn around and really like full-throatedly embrace “we need public...” Like, it seems like there are a lot of reasons and justifications for private ownership of this stuff that I understand fully in history, but a national decarbonization imperative and imperative for massive demand growth, which is a macroeconomic phenomenon, not a state phenomenon, just all points toward lots more public ownership of the grid, of utilities, and public planning.
Are you willing to just throw your hat in that? I don’t know what the metaphor I’m groping for is, but like are you willing to embrace that idea?
Jane Flegal: Yeah, I mean I think it is precisely the kind of thinking that folks should be offering right now. Like, look, at the moment, nobody is structurally in most of this country in charge of planning anything on the grid. You have FERC Order 1920 that’s trying to get RTOs to plan transmission at least like 20 years in advance, and that’s great, but it’s like barely taking effect and blah blah blah, and there’s nothing really on the generation side.
So like this is the result though of choices we made decades ago. So we either need to like figure out, in my view, how to rebuild planning capacity inside the system we have, and there are like some ways to do that. But I agree with you, it’s like is the more ambitious correct thing to do, just change who owns and directs the assets?
David Roberts: You wrote a piece about grid enhancing technologies, for instance, and these are all ways that we could make the existing grid work better and cheaper. But, you know, I’m not telling you anything, like- If you implement a bunch of technologies that moot the need to spend more, utilities who have a very basic incentive to spend more are not going to embrace them. It’s hard for me. I’ve come back to this virtually every pod I do, but like, it’s hard for me to envision a long-term sufficient solution to these problems that doesn’t address the basic utility incentive, malincentive problem squarely. Do you agree with that?
Jane Flegal: Yeah. Okay. Well, let’s talk about the utility incentive problems. But like, I do think on this point, you either need some kind of better planning processes layered onto the stuff we have. Massachusetts actually has this kind of interesting, like, grid modernization advisory council process that I only recently learned about that is their attempt to kinda like bring these things back together. I have no idea if it’s working or not, but like, whatever, at least they’re trying. You either need that, some like dedicated funding mechanisms, like the GRID Fund or whatever, or public power. We may need a combination of all of those things, depending on where you are.
But like, that I think is the issue. On the utility incentive problem, okay, this one really frustrates me, I’ve gotta say, because I think the way that this gets talked about is not clear about the goal we’re trying to achieve, and often, like, bundles together a bunch of different problems.
The goal that I am trying to achieve is like building out a grid capable of enabling decarbonization and economic growth, right? So like, I, again, like I’ve been very clear, I have a kind of pro over-building bias here, so long as we can mitigate who’s on the hook for any risk of over-building.
So for me, at a paradigm level, I am just not as worried about over-building as everyone else seems to be right now. So like, let me just put that on the table. And if it were the case that I thought, this is where the like, on the one hand, I totally agree, we should be doing all of, like, the efficiency and demand response and DERs and GETs as possible, and I’ve written about that, and we should build a bunch of stuff.
The difference between those two things is that you could, if affordability were not an issue, build a bunch of stuff and solve climate change. You can’t efficiency your way to solving climate change. And so, like, for me, that’s sort of where I come at from this stuff.
David Roberts: But, like, if affordability weren’t a problem is a pretty big caveat. I mean, this is whole Jigar’s point. Like, if you just do this inefficiently, if you do this without doing it in a at least somewhat optimized way, you’re just gonna drive rates through the roof and get political blowback, and you can’t do it that way.
Jane Flegal: I totally understand this, and I think that that’s totally fair, but that is a different kind of argument than, like, we can get there with just this set of things. And I agree, like, I am in favor of doing all of these things. Now, I do think it raises the question of, like, okay, what are the problems here? There’s the problem of utility political influence. There’s the problem of the incentive to overbuild. There’s the problem of the incentive to build the wrong stuff.
And then there’s the issue of just the cost of capital, right? That is how I think about utility incentives and these sorts of issues. And my frustration is that the popular fix here seems to be like suppressing return on equity or performance-based rate making, and I don’t know that that solves these problems.
So for one, I think there’s a category of stuff that’s like good governance reforms, which is just like, of course we should ban ratepayer-funded utility lobbying and trade association dues from the rate base, right? Like, of course. And we should try to address like all of the weird political economy dysfunction around the ways that utilities influence regulators who set their returns. Like that’s real, it’s worth doing. We should like say that it’s bad and like fight that fight with the utilities.
David Roberts: And it does kind of seem like public power just moots all those issues in a much more direct and efficient way.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, totally. But to me that’s like populist and correct, and we should just like do those things. Then there’s like the incentive to overbuild thing, where it’s everyone’s like utilities earn a return on the rate base, so they’re biased toward cap intensive solutions. And that like theoretically is real, but I just am not yet convinced based on the evidence that it’s doing as much damage as people claim. And in this moment, I think the bigger risk, again, is under-building.
So like I’m really amenable to like, you know, I know you had. Pete on to talk about like more transparency into how local transmission and distribution spending is being done. Like I think all of that stuff is good and important to do. But like treating utility overbuild as the central problem to solve right now is just, I don’t think that’s the fight that matters as much right now, and like people are gonna disagree with that.
And if I believe that having that fight would lead to outcomes that would solve climate change or meaningfully help us solve climate change, I would be more open to that, but I have skepticism there, which you may or may not share.
David Roberts: Well, it’s all just like if people could just be normal again and not play team sports with this, like obviously if you want to overbuild, if you want to build big and fast, just on a political economy level you need to use capital the most efficiently as you can while you’re doing that so you don’t create political backlash. Like, there’s a obvious synthesis of these perspectives.
Jane Flegal: And it is really frustrating, in part because of the opacity around how they’re actually spending the money in parts of this, to your earlier pod. It’s hard to e- for me to even, like, get the evidence of, like, how much gold plating is actually happening. It’s just, like, really hard to know, I think. But that is a thing that I think matters. And I do think I buy the version that, like, given a choice, they’re gonna gravitate toward... utilities are gonna gravitate toward the stuff that’s easiest to get into the rate base, which means local transmission and distribution. And, like, that stuff is often also not that risky.
David Roberts: Yeah, to the extent they build transmission at all, it’s within their territories, so they you know-
Jane Flegal: Totally... So there I’m like, yeah, more transparency and governance over those decisions, but, like, this slam down ROE just feels to me like a pretty blunt instrument that discourages CapEx more generally, not just the CapEx you don’t want. And so, like, I just think there’s downside risk, and it’s, like, not even solving the right problem.
Two more things. The one other thing is, like, in theory, I’m really supportive of the move to performance-based rate making or, like, TOTEX or whatever, where you’re decoupling utility profit from CapEx and trying to reward outcomes. But genuinely, I have now talked to people in Massachusetts and Hawaii and the UK where they’ve tried this, and it is, like, not been clearly vindicated by the results.
And I don’t know exactly why that is.
I think what I’ve heard is that it’s just really hard to define the outcomes that matter, but, like, it has a real mixed empirical track record. So, like, I’m not opposed to it, but I’m just like, I don’t think it’s a panacea, which I don’t think anyone argues it is, but, like, I am a little confused about why it’s not working where we’re trying it, so I would love to know more about that.
And then the last idea that I hear less of that I do think is important is that to me, if we’re worried about affordability, the issue is the cost of capital, which is about capital structure, not return on equity. And so if it’s like utility investment costs ratepayers too much, I think another way to do this is to try to push utilities to finance more of their CapEx with debt rather than equity.
What’s interesting here is, like, the Trump administration is doing a bunch of like, you know, they basically gave a giant grant to Southern Company to, like, pay for their stuff. And, like, I do think this question of whether it’s securitization or LPO funding or whatever it is, like, trying to get utilities to use more debt is another way to bring down costs.
Anyway, this makes me sound like a utility stooge, but I’m genuinely just trying to, like, understand what we’re trying to solve and what’s going on here. And I do get a little eye-rolly at, like... And I love Jigar, but this kind of like, “Utilities are evil profit seekers, but all third-party VPP developers are, like, aligned with the public interest,” is just, like, bullshit, you know?
Like, these are all corporations with incentive problems and, like, I’m not saying utilities don’t have their own unique challenges, but they all need to be governed appropriately.
David Roberts: Yeah. Everything we’ve talked about for the last 10 minutes, I just keep coming back. It all sounds like kludges and Band-Aids over the fact that we have granted infrastructure to private companies. Like-
Jane Flegal: Yeah, like just do the national highway. Yeah, I agree.
David Roberts: Before we leave this topic, the one other thing about affordability that you have promoted that we should at least discuss briefly here is getting BS off bills, I believe is the slogan, which is we have larded up electricity rates with a lot of goals and programs of general public benefit. And I think the basic idea here is if something is of general public benefit, it should come out of the general tax base. And is there a more concrete... Like, are there people trying to do this? Are they s- actual bills involved? Like, how far along is this idea?
Jane Flegal: There’s like some really smart people... Where this is at really playing out is in California, which I haven’t followed closely enough, but the wildfire stuff is a really big thing, and I think it’s gonna be big across the country. So Melissa Roberts at the American Flood Coalition has been doing some thinking about like how to grapple with multi-hazard mitigation and grid hardening in a less regressive way.
David Roberts: Yeah, I mean, we should just say just in case any listeners don’t know this already, but just like one of the things motivating this is that paying for things out of the rate base, making electricity ratepayers pay for things, is the single most regressive way to pay for anything. Whereas the tax base, because you have a progressive income tax involved, puts much more of the burden on people who can afford it. That’s part of what’s driving all this.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, totally. Like the standard energy burden literature says that I think low-income households spend 8 to 17% of their income on energy, where it’s like 2 to 3% for higher income households. Like this is my view. I mean, look, the reason people hate it, advocates of many of the programs that are covered in these sorts of programs, is that like it’s a more opaque way to fund stuff. Not just more opaque, but like you’re not subject to the whims of like fights over the general fund.
So I understand, and like many of these programs are very good and very worth doing, so I’m not making a judgment about that. It’s just that I don’t think they should be financed on bills, and in some cases they’re not a huge part of bills, but in some states they really are, and especially this grid hardening stuff.
David Roberts: And I guess maybe this goes without saying too, but I’ll just say it like if your goal is to electrify everything, and if all your decarbonization hopes come down in the end to having cheap, abundant, available, clean electricity the last thing you wanna do is make electricity more expensive. Like, you should be trying to make electricity as cheap as possible to encourage its spread. And so paying for wildfire mitigation costs on electricity bills is squarely in contrast to that. Like, squarely against that goal.
Jane Flegal: Yeah, this is why you’re pointing out some hypocrisy I have in my desire for my, gilded grid that is like yeah, like I do think we have to pay attention to affordability, for sure, and this is a big part of that.
David Roberts: All right. So only two clusters left. We’ve blown through our time limit a long time ago. Let’s talk about... Maybe I should’ve done this earlier, since I know it’s a big thing for you. Let’s talk about permitting reform. I think your thesis, and I think the thesis of a lot of people, and this was of course Lily Bermel’s whole conclusion from her paper, was that the real binding constraints on the build-out of a clean grid today is not cost, it is these regulatory barriers. What are people getting wrong about permitting reform, and what ought they to be doing? Like, what is frustrating you about that whole discussion right now?
Jane Flegal: Yeah, I mean, A, everyone’s really vague about it in a way that it was probably enraging for everyone. So, like, let me just say, I think the deal that people are likely contemplating at the federal... So there’s a federal conversation and then there’s state and local stuff, and we gotta do both. And the federal stuff is there are some reforms to NEPA and the Clean Water Act, and now the National Historic Preservation Act that are being contemplated alongside very important reforms to interregional transmission siting, and then permitting certainty.
So it’s like permitting certainty, NEPA, Clean Water Act, NHPA, and then transmission. Those are, like, the three big moving pieces, I think, at the, of the federal deal. So, like, one, everyone should just be more specific about what they’re talking about.
I think the thing that I will say is, like, a couple of reasons why I think permitting reform really matters for clean energy. One is the land footprint asymmetry. So solar and wind require roughly 20 and 200 times, respectively, the permitted land area of gas per unit of energy delivered, and that includes drilling. And transmission rights of way run two to three times wider than a comparable gas pipeline.
So, like, more linear, more dispersed siting means categorically more permitting exposure. That is, like, just true. So from that one would take the permitting reform that makes it easier and faster to build stuff is likely to asymmetrically advantage clean. I also think there’s, like, a lot of fights about, like, whether NEPA actually matters for clean energy.
All of the data I have seen suggest that, like, one of the dynamics that people often miss is federal land avoidance, despite the fact that there are often better resources on federal lands. So federal lands are 21% of the lower 48, but they host only 3% of US onshore wind, solar, and geothermal capacity, even though the desert Southwest disproportionately federal land has, like, the best solar and geothermal resources in the country.
So, like, there’s something going on there. Third, we’ve surveyed a bunch of developers about, like, what the deal is, and over 85% of transmission developers and over 65% of solar developers rate federal permitting more onerous than state or local, and 82% of developers surveyed this year said they’d intentionally sited a project to avoid triggering federal permitting.
So, like, that’s, they, this is what the developers are saying.
David Roberts: Yeah, th- I was gonna ask you to sort of try to rank federal permitting versus interconnection versus our state and local permitting as kind of like in their degree of severity, their degree of difficulty. So you think federal permitting is the top of that list?
Jane Flegal: I think federal permitting is like really the top, followed by state and local, followed by interconnection, just because like I really think some of the interconnection stuff is downstream of like a lack of capacity. Which isn’t to say that like you don’t need process fixes to the interconnection process, but like fundamentally that is largely a consequence of the fact that we don’t have enough transmission capacity where it needs to be.
The other thing is like on transmission, exposure to these permitting challenges is gonna get much bigger, so only... You know, it is true that only 3.5% of new transmission lines required a full environmental impact statement in the last decade. It was 26% of new line miles in 2024, and of the 26,000 plus miles of transmission now planned, an estimated half of it are likely to trigger NEPA, and that has to do with like a lot of the transmission had been built in the East, we are likely to build a lot more transmission in the West.
It’s gonna implicate federal lands.
David Roberts: Well, and a lot more regional and interstate. I mean, that’s kind of the whole point, right, is the bigger, longer line.
Jane Flegal: Exactly. That is the point. So you can’t just look at historic NEPA implications for transmission and project forward. And then the last thing, the state level stuff is really a problem, which again, like may push people toward wanting to build on federal land and they can’t. So like 17% of the continental US county land mass now heavily restricts wind and/or solar, which is double the share only a few years ago.
So like that’s bad, really bad. So that’s why like it all has to happen. I think the permitting certainty thing is like, candidly, I think my view is like lawless presidents are gonna lawless president, and so like that just is what it is. But if that’s table stakes, and there are things we can do in law to try to constrain them.
David Roberts: Let me articulate some of the pushback, some of the questions people have about this. First, I’d say there’s NEPA reform and NEPA reform. A lot of different kinds of things can sneak in under that banner, and I think one of the things, one of the, I think, fair criticisms is the concrete proposals you tend to hear for NEPA reform is just put arbitrary limits on the amount of time it can take.
And I think a lot of people will just say if you don’t, as opposed to let’s better fund and better staff the agencies that are assigned to do these things, right? Let’s do it more competently and quickly by having more staff and more funding of the people doing it. That asymmetry, I think, makes people suspicious.
They’re like, “It just sounds like you’re trying to cut short the process rather than make the process work better or more rationally.” How do you feel about that one?
Jane Flegal: You gotta do both. And, you know, I was in the White House when this bill passed that gave EPA a bunch more staff capacity and money, and Republicans championed it actually, to do permitting for CO2 injection. And one of the things I found was that, like, I think that stuff is totally necessary, but if you don’t have the kind of... If you don’t have the political and/or policy change to enable it to move more quickly, it just won’t, even if you have more state capacity.
So, like, it’s a necessary but insufficient. And I guess on NEPA, I think the thing that is probably most likely to happen, and is important in my view, is that you gotta have some litigation reforms, especially to kind of judicial remedies.
Because right now, basically, the default resolution for litigation under that law m- it means that courts can just, like, hold up a project indefinitely. And, like, we should just have time-limited review. Like, I think we should just have time-limited review, and I think that’s, like, not a threat to outcomes. A more fundamental argument about NEPA that I’m not sure I totally am convinced of, but I... Jim Connaughton often makes, is like NEPA was one of the first environmental law. And we now have a lot of other environmental laws, and any project has to comply with the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and ESA and whatever. It used to be the case that NEPA was necessarily the workhorse of all of our environmental planning and compliance, and now it’s kind of like, I don’t know, man.
Like, well, the role that it plays is kind of interesting to contemplate in a world where we have a lot of other environmental regulations, I would say.
David Roberts: I take it to be your position that Democratic politicians should get engaged in this and try to pass it now, try to pass it in this session. One of the other things people push back about, which you waved away a second ago, but I think deserves at least a little discussion, is you have Trump now forcing his agencies to very selectively intervene and shut down clean energy projects specifically. They’re doing all this nonsense with offshore wind. They’re doing nonsense with onshore wind about supposed dangers with national security drones, some BS they dreamed up. They’re denying solar permits on public land, where, as you say, that’s most of the solar resource. It’s the idea that you’re gonna create a fair playing field and that clean energy will win on a fair playing field, which is kind of the whole pitch for permitting reform, doesn’t really seem to apply if you do not in fact end up with a fair playing field.
If in fact you end up with a playing field where you’ve made it easier for oil and gas, but then it’s still hard for clean energy because you have this rogue administration shutting everything down. Like, you could imagine people making the argument, this is not a political environment in which it’s fair to ask people. So like, at the very least, we should wait until we don’t have a crazy fascist trying to shut down clean energy.
Jane Flegal: Or we can only pass this in this exact political moment is the counterargument. And like, I totally hear this and I understand the frustration, and A, I think that’s why the ongoing federal conversation as far as I am aware can includes quite significant permitting certainty provisions that are reforms that can close off like many accessible avenues to willy-nilly do what this administration is doing and empower developers and courts to respond more quickly and reduce investment uncertainty. Like those are all good things worth doing, which you can only do in a permitting bill and the status quo is the status quo.
So like I just am a little... The other thing is that barring things I’m not in the mind to discuss right now, like he’s not gonna be president forever.
And in fact, if you imagine a world where there’s a Democratic administration in 2029, a lesson I have learned is that, you know, these reforms are going to take years to work through the system. We’re gonna have to build state capacity. They’re gonna have to trickle down to the courts and to judicial decision-making and all of these things.
And I really think Democrats are gonna wanna be in a position to hit the ground running on their governing agenda. And I also, for more like arcane reasons, I’m highly suspicious that after the election it will be easier to pass this bill. Right now you have a very rare moment of both Republicans and Democrats being highly motivated to get this done. The one other political wrinkle that I think is actually important is that.
You know, the transmission provision, which we haven’t talked about, which is actually, you know, one of the things that’s most exciting, is historically has been blocked by states and utilities, right? And like right now, both parties, utilities have much less power with both parties right now than they have historically had.
David Roberts: Yeah, they kind of are on the back foot a little bit because of the data center stuff, affordability stuff.
Jane Flegal: Yeah. And so, like, this is one of very few moments where you might be able to roll them on federal transmission planning and permitting, and like that feels really important to me.
David Roberts: And I will say, like if there’s a Democratic administration, Republicans are gonna try to block everything. They’re not gonna help them do anything. They’re gonna block everything, period, full stop. That’s just what they do. That’s just their mode, and they will absolutely shoot themselves in the foot to prevent Democrats from accomplishing anything, whereas there are some sane Democrats. The final question about the politics of this is, and this is something that’s mystified me, the reason, as you say, hyperscalers are resorting to behind-the-meter gas and all these workarounds is that they can’t get enough clean energy, and they can’t get enough clean capacity on the grid. And if you agree, as I think a lot of people do now, that permitting is one of the primary, if not the primary barrier to building more clean grid, why on earth aren’t hyperscalers beating on doors in Washington, D.C. supporting this?
Why aren’t they using their political heft more sensibly? Why are they not in the front of the line pushing for permitting reform?
Jane Flegal: Look, I think many of them are. It’s just been a very quiet negotiation, is the honest answer. Like, I don’t think that Republicans certainly would be at the table in this way, frankly, if that constituency weren’t meaningfully pushing for this. Yeah, I’m not so sure they’re not.
David Roberts: Interesting. We’ve talked two hours. I have one final question, or at least final topic, which is you and I have talked before and are frustrated by every group and faction kind of being dumb and wrong about various different things and refusing to kind of look past their institutional imperatives to see the bigger picture. It just seems like there’s no, like everybody’s groping at the elephant and like there just doesn’t seem to be like a coalition sensible people, you know what I mean? Who are, like, pursuing the big picture in a way I think you and I agree would be sensible, which is, like, a lot of these disputes we’ve discussed, as we’ve discussed, the answer is both/and. The answer is to do all of it.
There’s just a lot of silly fights and silly parochialism. Everybody’s got their blind spots. It just doesn’t seem like if you’re a person who wants rapid build-out of a clean grid, there just is no clear answer to, like, what group or what faction you should join and throw your efforts behind. It just doesn’t seem like there’s anybody that’s quite aligned on doing the sensible things in a sensible way. You know what I mean? I talk to people, a lot of people in my audience who, like, wanna get involved, and, like, I don’t always know where to tell them to go. There’s not a clear group or faction that I think I really, like, can endorse with a clear conscience who seems to be... And we’ve discussed, like you, I think, are out kind of trying to assemble something like this coalition.
But I guess my question is, like, why isn’t there such a coalition? And is there something about coalitional politics as such that prevents people from taking this broader, longer term view? You know what I mean? In some sense, is it only possible for sort of independent individual to be good on this stuff? It’s almost impossible to create a group that’s good on this stuff. Like, how do you think about that? Like, how do you think about coalitional politics and assembling a coalition behind what we’re trying to do here?
Jane Flegal: Man, this is such a good question, and it’s something that I’ve really been grappling with lately because I’ve been working a lot on, like, what does a federal agenda over the next few years need to look like if you care about climate in this new moment? And my response to answering that question has basically been to, like, identify the 30 smartest people I know… On, like, the topics I think matter and been like, “Tell me what you think we should do.” And that is because I think I share your frustration or skepticism about the ability of, like... I think, A, I’m sort of... The sort of, like, obsession with consensus-based coalitional politics within the Democratic Party, I think does us no favors because it elides the trade-offs and it, like, just makes it really hard to, like, say true things, honestly, sometimes.
And it can, like, be constraining on creativity. ’Cause, like, if the answer is public power, like, what 70-year-old organization is gonna, like go on the record and say... You know, like, people are risk-averse, and they depend on, you know, a certain set of funders, and they have their own institutional constraints. It’s just really hard.
So I think, like, on the question of, like, maybe there’s two pieces. It’s like, where does the fresh creative policy thinking going to come from? And I wish I had an answer like, “Oh, there’s this five amazing groups, and they’re gonna just gonna figure it all out,” but I don’t think that’s the truth.
And I think some of it should come from academics too. You know? Like, some of it should come from workers.
So I think I don’t have an answer to that. But then there’s the question of, like, how do you actually implement the policies that you think and the actions that you think are high priority?
David Roberts: And I wanted to emphasize this too, like, in terms of that consensus, that sort of obsession with broad coalitional consensus, that is sort of the everything bagel critique and everything. Specifically in 2029, assuming things go well and there’s a Democratic president and maybe even Democrats have Congress, there is so much to do. There’s so much that has been broken. There’s, like, accountability for the scumbags who have done all these horrible things. There’s, like, dismantling ICE. There’s, like, building back up institutions that have been broken and destroyed. There’s the federal scientific apparatus that’s been pulled apart. All the agencies are now underfunded and, you know, they don’t have enough people. There’s just, like, the list of things that need to be done is almost infinite.
And so that means one outcome of that is prioritization is going to be everything because as we know, like, you gotta get a few key things done, and generally that’s all you can get done with a new administration.
Like, for whatever reason, however much you might lament that, it’s generally a few big things. And so, like we’ve got to specifically on this clean grid question, need to prioritize a few key things. And like how does that work? Who does that work? Who decides those priorities? And who pulls everybody along?
Jane Flegal: Well, this is political leadership. This is actually like one of my biggest critiques of Democratic politics right now, is like the standout electeds, I think, have this quality of not listening to polling on everything, not being like true DSA member or true moderates. Like, there is this quality of just like judgment and taste and leadership, and like willingness to say true things that I do think people value. And people are going to have to do that because we can’t say yes to everything. And just on the fiscal question in 2029, like Brendan Duke at CBPP has just been tracking, you know, how much undoing SNAP and Medicaid alone is gonna be, and it’s crazy. Like, we are in a real bind.
So anyway, I mean, I think the phase of policy development we are in right now is, in some ways, my favorite phase I think, which is like we are and should be in a battle place of ideas, and we should like that right now.
We should just be like, “Everyone say your best idea. Maybe it’s public power, or maybe it’s limit ROE, maybe it’s VPPs, maybe it’s state-owned nuclear.” I don’t really even care. I just want people to say with their whole chests what they think the correct answers on the merits are to a bunch of different problems so that we can have like an informed, smart discussion about what the right answers are on the merits. And then the question of like selling it-
David Roberts: That is the fun part.
Jane Flegal: That’s the fun part, and like that’s where we are. So like my anxiety right now is that I’m not seeing enough of that. And including from some of the like big groups. I’m kind of like, “Get out there.” Like, “What do you got?” Let’s just not be afraid of fighting and like eventually we will come together as Democrats around a shared agenda. But right now, this is the time to like, have robust debate. That’s democracy.
David Roberts: Yeah. I mean, I really like your idea ’cause, like, there are good people in the green groups, there are good people in the abundance world, there’s good people in establishment, Democratic circles, there are good people in academia. It just seems like a lot of them get muted or distorted by these coalitional dynamics or by the dynamics of sort of group factional warfare, and I like the idea of just plucking the 30 best people out of all those worlds and making, like, a super team. But when I think about doing that in practice, like, then you’re a group. You know what I mean? Like, then you’re a group, and the other groups are yelling at you because they want their territory. You know what I mean?
Like, they want to be the top group. And, like, I’m so frustrated by those dynamics, and I just really have no idea how to get out of it. And maybe you’re right. Like, maybe the only way out is through, and we all just have big fights and come to some sort of consensus.
Jane Flegal: Not to be, like, conspiratorial about this, but I think that’s right, and I think, like, the one dimension of this that doesn’t get enough attention that I have witnessed is, like, there’s this sort of intergroup warfare that is, like, itself, like, frustrating and hard. But the real issue is that you have a very large donor class that is itself putting pressure on electeds with and through and informed by the groups. And, like, that is another constraint. If the electeds don’t have courage, that’s another constraint on their ability to just, like, use their judgment and, like, hone their skills around judgment and, like, just make decisions that they think are right because you have all these weird accountability structures, some of which are, like, not actually aligned with the electorate.
So it’s like, that’s weird.
David Roberts: Yeah, it’s like the donor class is almost the most influential group in practice and the least transparent, the least involved in these public fights because they don’t speak up for themselves, and they just work their... So people end up fighting over the downstream consequences of donor decisions without seeing why they’re made, why they ended up that way, because it’s, like, traces back to the donor class, you know, who’s very opaque.
Jane Flegal: Yep, and have concerns that are sometimes out of touch with the electorate in all kinds of ways.
David Roberts: Well, I think we’ve officially talked about everything.
Jane Flegal: Okay, great. Done.
David Roberts: Done and done, unless there’s anything else-
Jane Flegal: No. God.
David Roberts: You think we missed. All right. This has been lovely and fun, as I knew it would be. Congratulations to any stalwart listeners who have made it here with us. The true hardcore people, you’re the best. Yeah. Thanks, Jane. Good luck with all your work.
Jane Flegal: Thanks so much for having me, Dave, and hopefully I’ll be back again at some point, and we’ll talk for a shorter period of time about more fun things.
David Roberts: All right, thanks.
Jane Flegal: Thanks.
