Technology and Clean Energy Innovations

Varun Sivaram, senior fellow for energy and climate at CFR, discusses the role of new and emerging technology in addressing the challenges posed by climate change and the future of energy policy in the United States. A question-and-answer session follow his opening remarks.

TRANSCRIPT

FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations State and Local Officials Webinar. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.

CFR is an independent and nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, educator, and publisher focused on U.S. foreign policy. CFR is also the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Through our State and Local Officials Initiative, CFR serves as a resource on international issues affecting the priorities and agendas of state and local governments by providing analysis on a wide range of policy topics. Thank you all for being with us today. As a reminder, the webinar is on the record. The video and transcript will be posted on our website after the fact at CFR.org. And we’re excited to have more than 400 participants confirmed for today’s discussion from forty-seven states and U.S. territories.

So we're pleased to have Varun Sivaram with us to discuss technology and clean energy innovations. We've shared his bio, but Dr. Sivaram is a senior fellow for energy and climate here at CFR, and director of CFR's new Climate Realism Initiative. Prior to joining CFR, he was chief strategy and innovation Officer at Ørsted, a $25 billion Fortune Global 500 company that is the world's largest producer of offshore wind energy. He served in the U.S. Biden-Harris administration as U.S. special—as the managing director for clean energy and innovation for Secretary John Kerry. He served in state and local government as senior advisor to the mayor of Los Angeles and to the governor of New York. He has also authored several books, including Taming the Sun, Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet, Energizing America: A Roadmap to Launch a National Energy Innovation Mission, and Digital Decarbonization: Promoting Digital Innovations to Advance Clean Energy Systems. So, Varun, thank you for being with us today.

I thought we would begin the conversation just first about the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, which are still running their course, and across the West Coast. And if you can talk a little bit about the relationship to climate change and other climate impacts that we're seeing on U.S. cities and states that may be coming in the future, and how SL officials can prepare for these disasters.

SIVARAM: Absolutely, Irina. And thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here with state and local officials. As Irina mentioned, I was a state and local official. I've served the New York state government. And I started my career actually in Los Angeles, and that's why these fires are personal for me. The first official act I made as senior advisor to the mayor was to inaugurate a solar installation at a car wash in the Pacific Palisades. It has since burned down. So my heart goes out to everybody who's lost their homes and lives.

I think the Los Angeles wildfires, which, as you mentioned, Irina, actually last night we saw a fire in the Santa Clarita region. Fortunately, that seems to be better contained. Another one break out in your Bel Air. I think it is a vivid reminder of a couple things. First, that state and local officials, all of you, are the ones on the front lines of the impacts of climate change. And I’ll go into in a moment why I personally think that the attribution of these impacts to climate is relatively clear and will become clearer over time. But second, it’s the whole reason, Irina, that we’re creating at CFR a new strategic initiative called the Climate Realism Initiative. It’s not the climate initiative. It’s the Climate Realism Initiative. And the reason we need to be realistic about this is saying, look, a lot of what we talk about in the climate world—I am guilty of this—is fantasyland. We talk about a fantasyland where we control temperatures to 1.5 or two degrees Celsius. We’re not in that fantasy world.

We’re in a world with three degrees or more of warming by century end. And we better get ready to prepare for this world, even as we prepare America and our local communities to compete in the changing energy landscape with China, and to do our best to avert even more catastrophic climate change than three degrees of warming. But very briefly, I’ll just say, just to answer your question, Irina, of course, this has to do with climate change, but in a nuanced way. Many of the factors we’re seeing that have contributed to these Los Angeles wildfires may or may not have been affected by climate change. It's unclear whether the strong Santa Ana winds this particular season are climate-related, right?

But what is clear is that the underlying trend is that Los Angeles is about three degrees Celsius warmer right now than preindustrial levels. What is clear is that changing precipitation patterns suggest that we’re going to have more of these cycles of extremely wet and then extremely dry climate whiplash seasons, where you have vegetation drenched and therefore growing, and then bone-dry conditions—like what we have right now for the last six months. This weekend will be the first rain in months for Southern California. And of course, all of this is compounded by the fact that we have ourselves shot ourselves in the foot by having insurance markets that don’t fully expose the residents of these communities to the risk-adjusted costs of living there. Which means you have economic development in areas that should have less economic development.

That’s hard for a state or local official to stop because you always want your residents and your constituents to have great insurance. But as we go forward into the 2050s and the 2070s, there will be parts of America where we should not live. And climate realism grapples with those hard truths.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. So, Varun, can you talk a little bit about renewable resources such as solar and wind energy, and the growing sources of electricity that we’re seeing including in states like Texas, Iowa, Florida, Oklahoma. Why have these methods been successful there? How can technology be deployed in other states and utilities transition to clean energy production? How do we make that happen?

SIVARAM: Well, look, I separate the world into two categories of technology in this—there’s a lot of ways to create a taxonomy, but here’s one. There are technologies that are just inherently superior that are going to do very well. And then there are climate technologies that we need, but we’re really going to need to continue to subsidize and pay a carbon tax, et cetera.

Solar energy is in the former camp. Solar energy is an inherently superior technology. The Earth receives more sunlight every hour than the world uses, in energy terms, in a whole year. There is almost infinite—near infinite, abundant sunlight. And solar technology has gotten cheaper almost every year. It is still the case that it’s intermittent, which means you only get to use it when the sun is shining, but increasingly the cost of batteries and other forms of storage is falling as well. I believe that renewable energy is doing well because it’s a fantastic technology.

Therefore, I personally believe we should strongly depoliticize these forms of energy abundance. President Trump is calling for energy dominance. That’s a good thing. We should have abundant energy, both in America and that America can export. It’ll come in the form of many different forms of energy, but solar is definitely one of them. Texas is, as you mentioned, Irina, the fastest-growing source of solar energy in the country. They even surpass California, a very blue state, with Texas being a red state. Similarly, wind energy has been strong historically in Texas.

There’s no reason that we should restrain these cheap and abundant sources of energy. Solar is the cheapest source of energy in almost every country around the world, and certainly the fastest growing around the world, because of its affordability. It has, honestly, absolutely nothing to do with climate. It just happens to be a technology that just makes a heck of a lot of sense. And that’s why I wrote Taming the Sun. I believe that by the end of this century, solar energy will be the dominant energy source for humanity.

And don’t just take it from me. Elon Musk, who is as now, you know, a key advisor to President Trump, says the exact same thing. Solar energy is going to be humanity’s major energy source. So what do we do going forward? Well, I would say the key thing that state and local officials can work on in order to enable their communities to use these brand-new sources of energy is on the permitting side. It’s just so important that we make it easier to build, site, and use clean energy sources. Often, state officials will play a key role in interregional transmission planning.

Sometimes this is national. In Texas, it's a state-level issue. And in many other states, it's an interstate issue. For example, within the ISOs, the Independent System Operator regions in the Midwest, in the Mid-Atlantic, in New England, in New York, et cetera. It's just so important that local and state officials work on getting the resources built, whether it's transmission, or storage, or permitting solar on state lands or—and making it just easier for folks to build solar and wind. That is the key to unlocking America's energy abundance.

I personally, by the way—and I break with a lot of the climate community—I personally don’t think it’s very important to have really lavish subsidies and incentives. You know, one of the first things I did as a Los Angeles state official was I launched a program called the feed-in tariff. It was a premium price for solar on rooftops. And it turned out that that price was just too high. We probably spent more money than we needed to. Solar is an inherently cheap technology now. So deregulation and permitting reform, I think, are the top things that state and local officials can look at to get more of this energy built. Should be completely bipartisan, nonpartisan.

FASKIANOS: How much does clean energy rely on materials from China? And are there viable alternatives?

SIVARAM: Well, it really depends on what technology you’re talking about. Where do you want to start, Irina? You want to start with batteries? You want to start with solar? Where would you like to start?

FASKIANOS: Let’s start with solar. Continue on to solar, and then maybe wind, and then we go to batteries.

SIVARAM: So I’ll share another unpopular view here. I expect that when I—when I say this answer, that Q&A tab you see down there is just going to explode with a bunch of questions, but—or angry retorts. I am not remotely worried about importing solar from China. And, by the way, I am a super hawkish America should compete with China. I’m scared about China, et cetera, et cetera. But on solar, I don’t see the risk. If we get every solar panel from China we don’t create national security risks for this country, and we do benefit from the generosity—the largess of the Chinese Communist Party basically giving money away to Chinese solar factories to produce below-cost solar panels and sell them to us. I would love to take advantage of below-cost energy. It’s as if Saudi Arabia decided to say, hey, I’ll sell you a barrel of oil at a discount. Fantastic. We’ll take it.

In this particular case, if China were to then say, I’m going to shut off the supply of solar panels, you know what would happen? Absolutely nothing. You would still continue to get electricity. You would not have long lines at the pump, like what happened in the 1970s with the Arab oil embargo. Solar is fundamentally different because the only thing that would happen is two years from now a project may struggle to get the panels that it needs. But there isn’t really an energy security problem if we depend on China for solar panels. So I say, open the floodgates.

Of course, this is not concordant with federal policy that’s going to come down. Both President Biden and now President Trump are strongly in favor of tariffs now on practically everything. And they will hit solar panels. Solar panels were the first commodity that President Trump imposed tariffs on in his first term. Solar panels and washing machines. I think it’s a mistake. And I’m being completely blunt here. We should not worry about cheap Chinese solar. It’s kind of a gift to the United States. We should take that gift. Other technologies, though, I’m not so sure.

FASKIANOS: There's a lot to talk about in the AI—(laughs)—field. And there's growing concern about the energy demands of AI and expanding data centers to power AI. So what can be done? What can state and local officials do to ensure that these new technologies do not destabilize electricity markets and new demands for fossil fuels? You know, maybe partner with, you know, fueling the AI beast, and also the energy needs of their communities.

SIVARAM: Yeah. It's such a good question. Look, around the country communities are facing the set of questions that before only a couple of communities faced. Northern Virginia lawmakers—if there any on the call here, if you're a local official in Virginia you've been thinking about this for a couple of decades, right? What are the costs and benefits of having a bunch of data centers in datacenter alley? Because Northern Virginia has, like, 25 percent of the data centers in the whole world. And the answer to that is, well, datacenters create property tax—a steady tax revenue stream. That's good. They don't really create jobs during the operation of the data center. There are not a whole lot of people. It's just a big building with a bunch of humming computers.

There are jobs in the construction phase. And so those are useful. And they're pretty good neighbors. You know, these data centers, they just kind of sit there. They hum. Every so often they use a diesel generator that spews some bad pollution in the air, but they're not used very often. They're used in emergency situations. So by and large datacenters are probably net positive for communities around the country. That's why you're now starting to see Indiana, Ohio, Texas, a bunch of areas where data centers historically have not been considered tier-one markets, now these communities are saying, look, we want data centers and we're willing to bring them in.

But if you're a state and local official, what are the risks here? Risk number one, two, and three probably is that data centers coming into your community raise power prices for the rest of the members of your community. And here's how it happens. A data center comes in and says, look, I'm going to be 400 megawatts. These AI data centers are, like, ten times bigger than the conventional cloud data centers. I want 400 megawatts, or I want a gigawatt, and I want to connect to your grid. And the grid says, my goodness, that's great. We'd love to have you buy our power. We make more money that way. But, you know, we really have to build out the grid and the power supply in order to serve you.

And what do they do? They go—they turn right around, they spend a hundred or two million, $500 million, and they send it to all of the ratepayers in that service territory as rates to pay for all this increased infrastructure. In effect, your grandmother ends up paying a higher bill because Meta brought a data center to a town in Indiana. That's not a great outcome. And so state and local officials around the country are going to have to think about how do we get the benefits of data centers but ensure that data centers also pay the costs, rather than our communities?

But you don't want to make it too expensive on data centers, right, because then you'll lose their business. And, oh, by the way, at a national level America will fall behind China if we can't build data centers fast enough. You saw the announcements. Satya Nadella today in Davos said, "I'm going to invest $80 billion in data centers." Yesterday Sam Altman said, "I'll invest $500 billion." Elon Musk said, "I don't believe you, Sam Altman." You don't have $500 billion. And Satya said "I'm good for my 80 (billion dollars)." And Elon said, "you're right." In any event, how do we make sure America builds all the data centers we need to compete with China and stay ahead in AI?

I think the answer comes down to really thoughtful grid planning, cost allocation, and new technologies that make it possible to connect new data centers, power them with cheap energy whether it's nuclear or geothermal, or, I hate to say it, natural gas, or just better technologies, to more efficiently use the existing grid and the existing resources we already have, without raising rates on communities. That's how I think about this really critical problem. Because we can't afford to not build the datacenters.

FASKIANOS: Great. So we’re going to go to the group for questions and comments. You can either raise your hand or write your question in the Q&A. If you do, please identify yourself. We’d really love to hear your voice, though, and share best practices. But before we do, I want to ask, Varun, you started it at the top of this to talk about CFR’s Climate Realism Initiative. We’re going to formally launch it in March, which is very exciting. So you all are getting a preview here. Is there anything else you want to highlight? And maybe also you could talk a little bit about how you see state and local leadership helping to drive forward the national conversation on climate and energy transition.

SIVARAM: Well, thank you, Irina. Let me just give a quick overview of this super exciting strategic initiative called the Climate Realism Initiative. It’s going to be unlike anything there is, because it’s not a traditional, progressive, left-wing, you know, we need to care about the climate. It’s going to be a bipartisan down the middle of the road pragmatic approach to what I believe is one of the most important issues of our time that’s been unfairly politicized. The Climate Realism Initiative—and I’m delighted that we have some of our staff on the line, our deputy director, Lindsay Iversen, who’s joined us.

The Climate Realism Initiative is, first, going to recognize some hard realities. Like I mentioned, we're going to miss our climate targets. We're in a three-degree or worse world. So we better get ready. We better get ready for those wildfires, those hurricanes. And it'll fall on state and local officials to help us prepare, both within America and outside of our borders—whether America is competing with Russia for the Arctic—supremacy in the Arctic, et cetera.

Second, the clean energy transition is both an opportunity and a risk for America. You know, we’ve got the opportunity to build market share and compete globally in trillion-dollar markets that are growing around the world. But we face a risk. We are the world’s largest oil and gas producer. And China is increasingly the world’s largest electric vehicle, solar, and battery producer. Are we going to be able to compete as the world shifts?

And, third, what can America do to help save the world from catastrophic climate change? It doesn’t really matter what America does with our own emissions. They’re a tiny fraction of the future world’s emissions. A city or state really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if any city or state goes net zero. But what does matter is if state and local officials develop tools and technologies that the rest of the world can use. When I was in the city of Los Angeles, you know, were there policies that we did—and one interesting policy was how to repower coal plants. Were there interesting case studies that then India, or Indonesia, or South Africa can just copy/paste?

Because that's where the emissions are actually growing. It doesn't matter what we do. It matters what they do. Similarly, are there technologies that we're incentivizing that a state and local official is getting—an innovative battery plant or an innovative next-generation clean fuel facility—that can produce products that can then be used around the world? Those are the kinds of innovative advances that state and local officials can make to reduce the impact of climate change around the world. But, again, your own emissions probably don't matter very much.

That’s the Climate Realism Initiative. Love to have the involvement of state and local officials. I hope that answers your question, Irina, on what we’d like to do. And we’ll launch it on March 17^th, ideally with a state and local senior official. So we’re just delighted to invite this terrific class of public servants to come join us. Over to you, Irina.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you, Varun. And we will send out an invitation for that. So now we’re going to go to all of you. And there are already questions in the chat. And do raise your hand because we want to hear your voice as well. But I’ll start with councilmember Anita Barton who is from Conshohocken borough in Pennsylvania.

What is your take on—I believe you were referring to President Trump wanting to drill, and what it will do to the Earth and air quality.

SIVARAM: I don’t think we can hear you, Anita.

FASKIANOS: I don’t—I just read her question.

SIVARAM: Oh, I see.

FASKIANOS: Yeah, I read her question, Varun. That’s her question.

SIVARAM: Oh, I see. I see. Well, thanks, Anita, for the for the question. I’ll jump right in. Look, I believe that the oil and gas industry does, in fact, create what we call externalities. It degrades the Earth’s—it degrades the land when we mine, it creates damage—environmental damage to ecosystems. And when we burn natural gas or oil or coal within the United States, we create local air pollution that, in the worst cases, can kill people. We should be very clear that these are damages.

On the flip side, we create a lot of benefits. We create local prosperity. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of oil and gas job in the United States. Pennsylvania, where you’re from, Anita, is the Marcellus shale. That’s where we have a natural gas gold mine, so to speak. So there are real benefits and costs of oil and gas. And my personal view is that America needs to be as responsible as we can by pricing in the externalities, such as local air pollution, so that, you know, we don’t emit too many of these pollutants. Or we equip, for example, a coal plant or a natural gas plant with the scrubbers we need to limit those emissions and save people’s lives.

President Trump's goal has been energy dominance. And all I'd say to that is let's not limit the definition of energy dominance. Of course more oil and gas will make us more energy-dominant because we can export that. When America exports LNG to Europe, we make it possible for Europe to go off of Russian gas. That's great. But we also have other energy sources at home. We have abundant geothermal energy. We have solar. We have wind. We have the capacity to develop the world's next generation of batteries. Let's be energy-dominant both in clean and conventional fossil fuel technologies. There's no reason, in my opinion, to limit to just one category. And that's what I'm a little afraid of in seeing the new president's executive orders. Thanks, Anita.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. So I’m going to go next to First Selectman Dionna Carlson from New Canaan in Connecticut.

Please discuss the efficiency degradation of solar panels. How much degradation annually? And the environmental impacts of used panels and our landfills.

SIVARAM: Yeah, great question. The amazing thing—Selectmen, the amazing thing about these solar panels is they actually don’t degrade very much. Over the thirty-year lifetime, they only degrade by a percent or two every year. Which means a majority of the energy production of these panels continues thirty even forty years into their lifetime. So solar panels are remarkably durable technologies. And we now have forty, fifty years of data on them. So we know they work for a long time.

Your question about waste is a good one, but let me just be clear. The amount of waste that we create from solar panels is not nearly as much as the amount of waste we create from many other industries. This is a tolerable problem that we can handle. We should of course—you know, some companies, like First Solar give a lifetime guarantee. They promise to take back the panels to recycle them at the end of life. And that’s fantastic and responsible. And we should, you know, encourage or even regulate companies to do this.

But, again, recycling is a solvable problem. I’m not too worried about it. Solar panels, by and large, are not particularly dangerous. They don’t have many dangerous elements. This is a benign technology with a very, very solvable set of problems. Thanks.

FASKIANOS: Thanks. We have a raised hand for Mary Alford. So if you can unmute yourself and identify yourself,

Q: Hi. I’m Mary Alford. I’m an Alachua County, Florida county commissioner.

And my question is actually two questions. One is inspired by the previous question. I live in a university town. And some students have been approaching us. Our community was one of the first to do a feed-in tariff program here in Florida. And we are ending the—nearing the end of that twenty-year cycle. And so a lot of people are saying, well, these solar panels are 20 percent used up and, you know, they need to be disposed of or replaced. And I appreciate your discussion of the fact that, you know, they’re still good, they’re still 80 percent good, about. But on the other hand, we’ve had students that have been working on efforts to treat solar panels in order to regain some of the efficiency. Have you heard anything about that research? And is it viable and clean? Is that something our community should look for?

And then, secondly, given the fact that solar panels degrade, I’ve heard people use that as an excuse to oversize the solar arrays they put on their homes. But conversely, we are seeing more and more energy efficiency every year. So I feel like we are way oversizing solar installations for individual homes. So what are your thoughts on both of those two things? Thank you.

SIVARAM: Yeah. On the first question, look, you’re in a university. Universities are places to experiment. I think it’s wonderful if they want to try and increase the power production of existing panels. It’s a hard thing to do, let me be clear. It’s a hard thing to do. When solar panels are already produced and you don’t have the capacity to get under that front glass and actually access the semiconductor surface, you’re limited to some very exotic treatments, such as painting on quantum dots on top of the solar panels. Could work. Tough to know. But it’s probably far more—I mean, if this were a commercial case I’d say absolutely don’t do that. Just get rid of the solar panels and put new ones up. If you’re really worried about degradation, it’s not that expensive. But wonderful opportunity to experiment. Most of these materials are probably not that dangerous. But in any event, I’m happy to talk more.

Your second question is an interesting one. Should people be worried about putting too many solar panels on their roofs? The answer to that question is—depends on your philosophy in life. I, personally, am an abundance kind of guy. I'm like, look, in many cases there are actually disadvantages to going for the biggest possible thing. You want to buy a huge SUV. That's probably bad because you increase the risk that you'll kill somebody in a collision. A smaller car will have fewer safety incidents for every collision it has. And you create a race to the bottom in terms of if I get a big SUV everyone else is going to have a big SUV to protect themselves. So that's bad.

The same is not true for solar panels. If I get a ton of solar panels and put them on my roof, there’s almost no disadvantage, except in twenty-five years I might have to hire my—the guy who takes them down and recycles them, he might take an extra half an hour to take them off the roof. There’s almost no disadvantage to oversizing your solar panels. So, look, my personal view is you want to use energy, knock yourself out. You want to use solar energy to power your energy consumption, knock yourself out. There is almost no disadvantage here. I hope that answered those questions. I see a lot, so I’m going to pause there and keep going.

FASKIANOS: Great. So Commissioner Nikki Koons from Manistee County in Michigan has several questions. So I’m going to group them into one. And the commissioner does not have access to a mic.

So let's start with: The land that solar panels are built on are most times not combined with other regenerative farming. So that is taking away from other beneficial means. Have you heard of any of the companies who are building solar farms, are they thinking or even talking about other things that can be coupled with solar farms to be dual purpose? And then the second part of the question is, with data centers and tax revenues, how many of them are getting tax incentives to build there for so many years?

SIVARAM: Yeah. Great question, Commissioner.

So I’d say, on your first question, I first want to make the point that the amount of solar—the amount of land area would take to power the entire country with solar panels is a tiny fraction of the total amount of farmland that exists in the United States. So this is not a major land competition problem. Now, I definitely understand the point that, insofar as possible, it’s great to combine both farming and solar. And so agrivoltaics is an emerging field where you build the solar farm in such a way that there’s enough clearance over the ground to allow vegetation or even crops.

But, again, I’m not particularly concerned about the competition for land. I mean, in terms of energy production one of the dumber things we do—forgive me, this will be blunt and provocative and probably not land well with many of our Midwestern colleagues—but we probably shouldn’t have as much ethanol production that competes with corn and soybeans given that—you know, that is a far larger land competition problem than solar against farmland. So I would urge us to prioritize our trade-off discussion. Solar probably isn’t the thing that we have to talk about is that tier.

The second question was on the tax incentive point. I think it's a great question, Commissioner. If a locality says, I'm going to give you so much in a tax incentive for twenty years that I outweigh all the property taxes you give back to me, there aren't a whole lot of net benefits to the community at that point in the datacenter coming. Because the data center is really just going to come, consume power, and be a nice neighbor that doesn't create many jobs except for construction in the first years. So it's a great point, Commissioner, that if you're a state and local official competing for data centers, you may want to try not to offer as many tax incentives that outweigh the stream of property tax revenues that you'll get in the long run. You probably want net positive tax revenue over the next twenty years. Thanks.

FASKIANOS: Next question from Michael Frieber, who’s in the Maryland Office of the Inspector General: In your opinion, is wind energy worth the costs associated with constructing and maintaining the turbines?

SIVARAM: Great question. Michael. Fundamentally—and, sorry, I see OIG, which suggests to me that you—is that Office of Inspector General?

FASKIANOS: Yes.

SIVARAM: In which case, it’s great and good question, because you’re looking out to protect the public’s resources. Here’s my answer. Again, you can kind of tell from the way I’m talking about this, I’m a deregulate and let the free market operate kind of guy. I’ve worked at multiple wind energy companies—one in India, the largest one in the world in Denmark. I fundamentally believe that, absent any subsidies and absent any regulation, it makes a ton of sense to go put on onshore wind turbines, pay the cost of maintaining them, and produce energy for the grid. The revenue from the power more than outweighs the cost of maintaining them, which are far less, by the way, than the operating cost of, say, a natural gas plant, even excluding the heavy fuel cost from a coal or natural gas plant.

So, yes, the operations and maintenance cost of onshore wind turbines is not very high. Every so often you got to send a guy up. In fact, increasingly, we can do this digitally. I led the innovation department at a major wind company. And we’re able to use drones and remote AI-enabled digital operations management platforms to make sure that the wind turbine does very well over twenty, twenty-five years. So, yes, strong proponent of wind. I’m very, very sad to see that President Trump has paused federal lands permitting of onshore wind. I think that’s not the greatest decision, if I’m being blunt.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

So we have a question from Councilmember Rich Kondo from the city of Northglenn. Similar question to the solar panel degradation, except this one is for windmill blades. So if you could talk about that degradation.

SIVARAM: Yeah. Every so often you see a blade fall down, or if a tornado runs through an area it can actually destroy wind turbines. These are regrettable. But the—wind technology is fairly mature now. And so therefore it is rare to see wind turbines fail. The degradation question is a good one. Does the power output of a wind turbine fall over time? It does, at a similar rate—0.5 to 1 percent every year. But that means that after twenty, thirty years, you still have a substantial majority of your power generation. Now we're entering the point where after twenty, thirty years, since the first wind installations went up—for example, the Altamont Pass in California—it's time to repower. It's time to take advantage of these really windy areas that now have underpowered wind turbines, both because they were early generation and because they've degraded, and put better wind turbines up there. And, again, I'm a deregulation, cut regulations kind of guy. Without regulations, it's economically sensible for state and local officials to make it possible for the private sector to invest the capital to repower these sites. Again, it really just depends on us getting out of the private sector's way.

FASKIANOS: Thank you.

I’m going to go next to a raised hand from Aryana Azizi. There you go. And just identify yourself.

Q: OK. There we go. Can you guys hear me?

FASKIANOS: We can.

Q: Awesome. Hi. My name is Aryana Azizi. And I’m representing Commissioner Lesley Briones from Harris County.

You know, we’re interested in floating solar in Harris County, due to a large flooding risk. And so I just wondered if you had any insight in kind of the cost of floating solar versus traditional solar arrays, and kind of what the maintenance of that looks like long term.

SIVARAM: Yeah. And, sorry, Aryana, can you answer two questions? First, Harris County, Pennsylvania? And, second, can you explain the flooding risk thing? Why does that—

Q: Yeah, no, totally, totally. Happy to provide some context. (Laughs.) Harris County in Houston, Texas. So we face a lot of hurricanes. And so, you know, we faced Harvey, and, you know, since then two storms this past summer. And so we know that land that’s owned by the county is very prone to flooding. And so we’re trying to mitigate that risk and have explored some—sorry—floating solar sites potentially in our flood control channels.

SIVARAM: Got it. Got it. Well, look, I have actually built—or, led a team that built a floating solar installation in India. So I’m fairly comfortable with the technology. Floating solar is a marvelous idea, right? Basically, if you’ve got a reservoir, or even a lake—but a reservoir is what works best for this—then you can put solar panels on these floating structures, basically like fiberglass floats, and it’s not, you know, inherently, that much more expensive. But it is more expensive because this equipment is rarer, and you have to customize the installation. And then you send a wire over to the shore to a substation where there’s land.

The benefits of floating solar are you get automatic cooling. It's cool over a water surface. And so therefore solar panels always work better when they're cooler than when they're hotter. So you'll get kind of automatic cooling. The disadvantage is sometimes these solar panels can be exposed to hazardous winds. And so you have to really carefully run the study of, you know, what wind am I rating this float structure for? Because if you fail to rate it correctly and really strong gale force winds hit you, that solar installation is liable to tip over, to fall into the water, to otherwise get destroyed. And then you've really messed up your large capital investment upfront.

Overall, I’m a big fan of floating solar in the—in the potential settings that you’re talking about, Aryana. So happy to talk more about some of the technical specifications. And then I’ll just say, for the group, because it’s fun, floating solar in oceans is now becoming a thing. It’s way harder because then you have real waves. You have salt water that causes corrosion degradation. But you also have basically limitless water area, compared to limited land area. So China has jumped out as the leader worldwide in floating solar, as it is in every other kind of solar. I’m personally following that space because I think it’s super interesting. Aryana, thanks so much for the great question. And I’m sorry I didn’t get the state right, Texas. Thanks.

FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next written question from Councilmember Kalisha Dixon from Bladensburg, town in Maryland: How can the U.S. effectively share innovative clean energy technologies with countries like India, Indonesia, and South Africa, to help reduce global emissions? And I’m going to combine that with another question from Commissioner—or a point that you could clarify. For some hearing the three degrees doesn’t sound like a whole lot. So can you clarify on why the three degrees is detrimental to the world?

SIVARAM: Yeah, exactly. And if you see me glancing down because it's because I'm trying to run the temperature conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, just to tell you what that means. Three degrees—hmm, three degrees is not 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe Lindsay Iversen, who's on the call, can run the quick numbers and tell us why three degrees of Celsius is something like eight eight-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. Three degrees is a lot. It's a lot.

And the reason, therefore, that this is so scary is three degrees is the average global warming around the world. And it’s most accurate when it’s used around the equator. In northern latitudes, like where we are, double the number. You’re talking on average, much more than three degrees Celsius, or eight degrees Fahrenheit. And so if your summer peak temperature was 80 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century you’re up in the 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s a scary world to live in because everywhere in the country you start to see some weird things happening.

By the way, although I’ve given you a temperature number, temperature is only one of the many effects we’re talking about, right? Climate change is called climate change and not global warming anymore because there’s so many other effects. Precipitation becomes more intense and erratic. So you can have, you know, historic rainstorms. You see atmospheric rivers increasing in probability in California. Hurricanes become more intense because the surface temperature of the water increases.

One of the scariest things about the increasing temperature is that going from two degrees to three degrees sounds like, hey, we just increased the impact by 50 percent. That’s false. On an exponential curve—I hope you can see my finger tracing this exponential—going from two degrees to three degrees means your impacts could be ten or a hundred times worse. It’s a very scary world.

In lecturing about how scary this is, I forgot the first part of the question. I’m just going to go pull it up.

FASKIANOS: So the first question was, oh, let me just pull it up.

SIVARAM: And if you’re there, feel free to just say it. OK, well, I’m sorry that I’ve lost it. If it comes back to us, I’ll say it again.

FASKIANOS: The question was about sharing technologies. Sorry, I found it.

SIVARAM: Oh, yes. Thank you, thank you. Yes, I remember now.

FASKIANOS: Sharing innovative clean energy technologies, yeah, and maybe what we can learn from them because, you know.

SIVARAM: Yeah. So the first part of the question I think is the most important question for climate. Thank you for asking it. The most important question for climate is, how do we make sure that other countries reduce their emissions? This is a total reframe because most people in the U.S., whether you’re a state, local official, or federal official, seem to think let’s talk about how America reduces our emissions. That’s not that important, because America accounts for 5 percent or less of future global greenhouse gas emissions. Ninety-five percent of future cumulative emissions are coming from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria. They’re the countries that we care about reducing their emissions.

Just left on current course and speed, America, Europe, Australia, and Canada are broadly going to reduce our emissions and go towards zero. We’re not the problem anymore. Historically, we were the problem, but that’s irrelevant for what has to happen now in order to solve the problem. How do we get India to reduce their emissions? Well, one way is by developing technologies that they will use. Well, what technologies do they need? It starts with looking at where their energy is growing. Their energy is growing from air conditioning. So they need super-efficient air conditioners. American research universities happen to have some of the coolest technologies for super-efficient air conditioners.

What else do they use? They use, in the transportation sector, a lot of two-wheelers, motorcycles. Electric motorcycles? Electric battery swapping? Super-efficient batteries? These are all things that America can develop. But we should develop them with an eye to where they’ll be used, which is the developing world. What about industrial technologies? By far the largest source of emissions growth in India, as well as Indonesia, as well South Africa, is industrial load. It’s steel mills. It’s cement plants. It’s fuel production, refineries. All of these are areas where American technologies, if we develop really good ones, can be repurposed and used in emerging economies.

I can’t stress this more, the biggest thing America can do to reduce emissions and help stop the worst effects of climate change, going from three degrees to four degrees, is by developing technologies with an eye to what everybody else needs to use, not to what we use. That’s controversial and provocative, but I hope you might agree that it’s a better way of thinking about the problem than almost everybody has historically.

FASKIANOS: Thank you. Lindsay says that a three-degree Celsius change is equivalent to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

SIVARAM: And that’s a global average. Now double it, and then you’re talking about northern latitudes. Triplet it if talking about the Arctic.

FASKIANOS: OK.

So we have a question from City Administrator Phil—let’s see—Green: What is your perspective regarding the realistic outlook for next-generation nuclear power?

SIVARAM: Yeah. Great question, Phil. I’m such a big fan. In my opinion, there are three things that have to come together for this to work. Number one, there’s got to be someone who really wants to buy the power. I think that’s there. AI datacenters. They really want power, and increasingly they want clean power. So that’s there. Number two, technology. This technology has been around for a long time. This is actually not very next generation. Some of the next-generation nuclear technologies were invented in the 1950s. I personally believe that if you—if we put our minds to it, this is a solvable technical problem.

Thing number three, the hardest obstacle, can we have a regulatory regime—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC, regulates nuclear—can we have a nuclear regime that allows us to have next-generation nuclear at low cost? That is by far the hardest challenge. We're not on track for this. The NRC makes it almost impossible to build a new nuclear plant because you have to do decades of studies, you need to build an emergency planning zone in case the whole thing melts down, where you have miles of a radius around that no one can build anything in. That means that if you want to build a small modular reactor that's powering a data center, you're not actually allowed to put the data center next to the nuclear power plant. That's not going to work.

Next generation nuclear, the reason it's so exciting and the reason, I think, Phil, you asked the question, is next-generation nuclear is inherently safe. There is no meltdown risk. For example, it might be passively cooled in such a way that even if power were cut and a chain reaction took place, the water or the other coolant on site would automatically just absorb the excess energy from the nuclear reaction. It cannot melt down. It can't send radiation into the air. Given this, we need to have regulations that allow you to build next-generation nuclear right next to civilization, and without a lot of the safeguards that traditionally we have done because of scary incidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

I don't have a lot of faith that we will have an NRC that does this, but if we do it'll probably happen because you get commissioners over the next four years who are super, super pro-nuclear and super deregulatory. You've heard me, throughout this hour-long discussion, tell you that regulation has caused so many difficulties in energy abundance. But I want to say that all of you really are stewards of the quality of life of your citizens and making sure that catastrophic events really don't happen. So there is, of course, a very important role for regulation. And I know this, as a state and local official myself.

Over to you, Irina.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.

Going next to—let’s see—Vice Mayor Newell Arnerich of Danville Town, California. Let me get it: Recycling solar panels is considered difficult due to the complex construction of the panels, which require separating various materials like glass, aluminum, and sometimes potentially hazardous metals like lead and cadmium, making the recycling process expensive and technically challenging. While not inherently dangerous, proper handling is necessary when recycling solar panels. There’s only one company in California that can do partial recycling. So is there any capacity being developed, Varun, to recycle? Or is the life cycle so far out that, you know—

SIVARAM: No, no. Look, I think the point that—first of all, Newell, and everybody else who's asked about solar recycling, it's meaningful to me that this is on the minds of so many state and local officials. It's not on the minds of national officials. But that's because they're not in the communities like you are. If this is such an important thing, then I think we should all be focused a lot more on it. I will say, from a technical point of view, I agree with you that in some cases, cadmium telluride, which is only one kind of solar panel made only by First Solar, and it's less than 10 percent of the world mix. But anyway, one kind of solar panel is tough to recycle. But First Solar actually takes care of recycling cadmium telluride panels. And they do it well.

I agree with you that, you know, for all the other—the Chinese panels, for example, the silicon solar panels—that it is an involved process. You have to separate glass from silicon from silver paste. But I continue to believe that this is kind of a solvable problem. And so long as a developer is responsible and puts money aside for the decommissioning and recycling of the panel at the end of its life—and that’s something, by the way, we absolutely should regulate; that’s a good regulation—then it’s a solvable problem. By the way, one way this sometimes ends up getting solved is the waste ends up getting shipped offshore, out of the United States, and it gets recycled in another country. That may ultimately not be great for the environment, but it is a good way to get the solar panels out of your communities. And that that can happen. And it’s an effective way to take waste out of your communities.

FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.

Just checking to see if we have any raised hands, or if I continue to read questions and comments. From Kim Janus from the Illinois attorney’s office: Can you talk about the role of battery storage in enhancing solar? Should it be subsidized by ratepayers? And it’s the Illinois Attorney General’s Office.

SIVARAM: Great. I’m just trying to read that question. Can you tell me where it—is it in the answered—

FASKIANOS: No, it’s in the—it’s the first question on open. Can you talk about—yes.

SIVARAM: Oh, OK. Kim, that’s a great, great question.

So battery storage is important. But this is a nuanced answer. What’s important, in my opinion, is that market signals drive the battery storage deployment, not government subsidies. So if you ask me, should it be subsidized by ratepayers? Probably not. I think that market signals can create adequate incentives for battery storage because in many jurisdictions, the price of power will be very high at some points of the day when solar cannot generate—for example, 5:00 p.m. or 7:00 a.m. And the price of power will be very low at other times. So it’s cheap to charge and expensive when you sell the power back. And that makes for a great business case.

Now, a lot of companies invested in battery storage in ERCOT, in Texas, after August 2023, when they realized, oh my goodness, there’s a huge spread. I can make money by charging cheap and selling expensive. So many batteries got built. But in August 2024 that arbitrage disappeared. But you know who took that on the nose? It was the developers of the batteries. That’s the point of a functioning private sector and market, that private capital takes risks. They make a ton of money sometimes. But they also take it on the nose when their investment turns out not to have been a good investment, in retrospect.

I’d like to see that market functioning just like it happened in Texas happen all across the country, where developers have the incentive to invest in batteries precisely because solar causes price volatility, not because communities decide to subsidize the batteries. Now I will say, communities are, in some implicit or indirect sense, subsidizing the battery because they pay higher rates until the battery gets deployed to lower prices. But I think that’s an efficient subsidy. An inefficient and awkward subsidy is when taxpayers or ratepayers have to pay an actual incentive payment to get battery storage projects off the ground and on the grid.

FASKIANOS: And I’ll take the next question from Mayor Daniel Kirkpatrick of Fairborn, Ohio: Why don’t we build solar panels over parking lots versus taking up farmland?

SIVARAM: I think again, Mayor, it’s great to build them on parking lots. It’s also great to build them on ground mounts, which are typically the cheapest way you do it. The cheapest solar is the largest solar that takes up much more land than a parking lot. You get your cheapest economies of scale when you can rinse and repeat. You just have acres and acres and acres and hundreds of acres of repeated rows, infrastructure that’s super standardized, and that gets you your lowest cost per kilowatt hour of solar. Is it going to compete with farmland? Sure, on a small basis.

But at a large scale, I told you the there are many other things that compete with farmland that are far less useful than the abundant energy from solar panels. Ethanol is one of them. Probably shouldn’t have ethanol in this country. There are many uses of farmland that are much less value-creating than using solar. That’s my provocative opinion. But, Mayor, I’m sure you have a very well-reasoned reason for asking that question. So thank you for the question.

FASKIANOS: Next question from Joseph Furnari, community liaison with New York State Senate for Senator Dean Murray: Is carbon recycling picking up any interest in the U.S.?

SIVARAM: Joseph, if you’re—if you’re on the line, I’d love for you to define what you mean by carbon recycling. I wasn’t quite sure.

FASKIANOS: I don’t know. Let me see if—he may have dropped off.

So let me go to the next question. And this is from Commissioner Nikki Koons: If the U.S. is only 5 percent why is there such a big push for us to move toward the solar and wind? There are some people that do not want to have that in their local community. And, you know, citing, you know, it’s—they’re ugly, and all of that. So the commissioner wants us to understand that being supportive to individuals doing this, doing solar, to save them dollars, but on the large scale, what’s the pitch here? Why do it?

SIVARAM: It’s a great question. Commissioner, first of all, I just want to understand—oh, I forget, I think, Commissioner, you don’t have access to a mic. So I’ll have to—

FASKIANOS: I think that’s right, so you’re going to have to—(laughs)—

SIVARAM: Commissioner, look, I struggle to answer this question because, first of all, I think it should be in every community's decision remit for what kind of community they want to have. Maybe, you know, if you're a local zoning official you want all houses painted pink, and your constituents vote for you to have all houses painted pink, then that's your prerogative. I will say that large-scale solar and wind installations are typically out of sight. They're far away. And even for communities that can see them, look, in the worst case maybe it's an eyesore to see a lot of solar panels or wind turbines, but the actual nuisance they pose is pretty minimal. If you're not literally right next to the wind turbine, it's not making noise. Solar makes absolutely no noise. On the scale of public nuisances, I much would prefer to live next to a solar farm or a wind turbine than to live next to a natural gas plant or coal plant that produces particulate emissions that will kill my baby. So this seems like an open-and-shut case to me.

Now, again, communities should have—I’m a deregulation nut. So communities should have the choice to make whatever choice they want to. I think communities probably will choose to have cheap power. A lot of folks say, hey, I would love to have the cheapest electricity bill I can possibly have. And you’re going to get that if you live in a community that allows you to have both natural gas power in your grid but also solar and wind power on the grid. And zoning laws can make it possible for it to be built as out-of-sight as possible. Offshore wind has been a polarizing topic, but I don’t anticipate there’ll be a lot more offshore wind built. So if you’re in Florida, you’re probably never going to see an offshore wind turbine.

FASKIANOS: Great. Well, with that we—I’m sorry we couldn’t get to all the questions, but, Varun, we will just have to have you back. And with the Climate Realism Strategic Initiative, there will be much more being produced and coming out of CFR that can be—that will be useful to all of you. And, of course, we welcome your input as well. So, Varun Sivaram, thank you very much.

We will be, again, sending a link to this recording and transcript. You can follow Varun on X at @VSIV. And we encourage you to visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for the latest developments and analysis on international trends and how they’re affecting the United States. Right now the Climate Realism Initiative launch is slated for March 17. Somebody noted that’s St Patrick’s Day, so we will take a look at that. And we welcome your future—your suggestions for future webinars, you can email us at [email protected], as well as your thoughts on how we can be more of a resource for you, given the important work that you’re doing in your communities. And you are on the front lines of, obviously, the natural disasters shaping your communities. So please be in touch. And, again, thank you all for joining us.

SIVARAM: Thank you.