You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC. This is Matt Matern, your host. And I’ve got two guests on the program today Dr. Leslie Field and David Rosenfeld. Dr. Leslie Field is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer, officer of the Arctic ice project. She teaches at Stanford University. And David Rosenfeld solo writes science. Welcome to you both.

Thank you very much for having having me here.

Thank you.

Well, I’m gonna start off with you, Dr. Fields. And tell us a little bit about your organization, the Arctic ice project, and what, what kind of work are you doing there?

Yeah, so this is a nonprofit actually originally named Ice 911 When I started working on it, and it’s really dedicated to trying to intervene in the Arctic melt. It turns out that arctic ice is extremely important to our planetary climate. And I wanted to find something that was important to do to help provide a habitable planet for my kids, is really the motivation and to, to go ahead and try to make an intervention with as much testing and, you know, rigorous evaluation of whether things worked as possible. So create a bit of a new opportunity, new solution in the space and see if it works. And if it turns out that after a lot of work, it looks like it could be important.

Well, that’s great. Can you describe for us what testing you’ve done to prove this concept that you have? And how far along are you? And how long? Is it taking you to get to that point?

Yes. It we’d like to test among many dimensions. So I’m an engineer have long experience. And one of the things I believe in is Test test test. So what we have done initially was to test various materials, would they help to cool water, thereby making it more likely they could preserve ice, you know, in the Arctic is is our focal point here. And, you know, it started out in tanks of water on my deck at home, and thermometers, you know, just testing and then got permissions to go to a lake in the Sierras, which is near where where we live in California, and test things there on the surface of the lake with the permission of the water district.

And it you know, we’ve gotten to test up in with Catholic, which is as far north as you can go in the US, it’s in Alaska, it’s old name, it’s still the airport name is Barrow, and work with the indigenous organization, scientific organization there to do our field tests up there. So we’ve done very small scale field tests everywhere, always with transparency and permissions. But what we found is that we can preserve ice. We’ve done a lot of testing on a pond in Minnesota. And that’s probably that that was this last season’s best data that we’ve seen yet in that we had the most fully instrumented and quantified, you know, delay of ice melt pond in Minnesota.

So we’ve been doing a lot of field testing, but it isn’t just about that, you know, if you do a small field test, what does that mean? You need climate modeling, then that we feed the data into we work with expert climate modelers to see what effect would that have in the world. We’re now working with a Norwegian, very credible group of marine biologists SINTEF ocean to evaluate more about these are well known materials, what we’ve chosen as our front runner materials. But everything we we have tested and see is that it’s safe, but to have marine biologists looking at that and make sure that we understand, you know, what would happen if we were to help preserve sea ice with this.

At the same time, we work hard on trying to help establish the ground rules for governance and policy and funding frameworks that could help climate interventional solutions, not just this one. But you know, there are many in the world for various aspects of climate that could really help together to do what we’re trying to do, which is to make some more time to decarbonize, you know, our, our fuels and energy, you know, it’s a very complex problem.

And what we’re trying to do is give some more time by slowing down one of the key drivers and following on that really why the Arctic is really, when Arctic ice melts, we are actually accelerating temperature rise global temperature rise by losing that reflectivity we used to have in the Arctic. So that’s our goal is let’s increase our reflectivity. And we’ve done a lot of tests and labs as well, so many dimensions that we work on at once to make this thing work.

And you asked how far we’ve gotten. We have some NASA retirees high level NASA retirees who volunteer with us. And they assess us at something called TRL. Three, which means technology readiness, level three, which means we’ve gotten through proof of concept in just about every area, that’s important.

So that that’s fascinating, I guess I would ask you, you know, to, to walk us through where where does the next phase of this go? And how can we roll out this, this project to the next level, and just kind of have the listeners bear in mind that Dr. Field, has an undergraduate degree from MIT, and then went and has taught at Stanford and the electrical engineering department on climate change has 42 patents to her name, as well as 17 patents pending. So she’s a very, very well credentialed scientist. So we’re not talking to a guy in the diner talking about climate change here on the program.

Well, I’ll add a little bit to the bio there, I can see I should have sent it up to date bio. It’s up to 60 patents. Now. I have a PhD, a second master’s in a PhD from UC Berkeley as well, which is in electrical engineering specializing in sensing and things like that. So yeah, it’s a, I’ve got a long career behind me.

And, yeah, I’ve been looking into climate quite a while I’ve taught at Stanford now for 11 years, I’ll be doing it the 12 year this year, on teaching a class on and engineering, entrepreneurship and climate change. So that’s, that’s also helped connect with a lot of the climate solutions in the world. But yeah, so.

So what is the work that you’ve done as far as collaborating with climate informatics on climate modeling? And the supercomputers you’re using at NASA, with the earth exchange? How are how are you using those and and what are the results to date?

Yeah, that’s, that’s exciting work. So as mentioned, you know, you can get some information from small scale field tests. But what does it mean to the world? These people at claim informatics, they’re they’re a small team, they they worked at one of our major national labs, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and they then decided to get entrepreneurial as well, and formed a small but mighty consulting company to do climate modeling.

And they are true experts. And so what they’re doing is looking at various regions, one of my big wishes in everything I do, as far as thinking about any sort of climate intervention is what’s the least intervention you can do to get the maximum benefit? And they’re helping us see, do we have an effect at all? You know, and the answer’s yes. If we model making an intervention like this, we’ve been focusing on Arctic sea ice for that.

So do we have any, any effect? Yes. What’s the key area or two that we could look at and model and see what the effects are? And so they’ve gone through modeling, the Fram Strait, which is an area that has been exporting a lot of ice over the last several decades. So a lot of ice is lost through there. And they’ve modeled, they did a global model just to detect if there was any effect. Of course, of course there was.

And then they, their most recent work is modeling in the Beaufort Gyre. And that’s a very useful place to look at because it’s the historic nursery for multi year ISIS, the historic place where you would grow this bright ice which we have so little have left, you know, where and where is that exactly.

Okay, so the Beaufort Gyre, it sort of extends between Alaska. So we’ve been testing at the northernmost point of Alaska onshore, but has extends from there across to Siberia. It’s a it’s a big circulation pattern historically, where ice would reside for like five After seven years on average and keep getting brighter over time, that’s that’s the great magic about letting nice persistent in areas that gets brighter over time up to about four years, and then it’s about as bright as it’s gonna get.

And what’s been happening in contrast is that we’ve melted so much of it that increasingly we have first year ice there, which is thin, not very reflective, and and not very thick, and it it disappears then earlier in the Melton in the summer, so here is the opportunity to try to rebuild that inventory. That’s been our historic heat shield in the Beaufort Shire as my large area and their modeling treating just a little bit, I’m sorry. Sure.

My understanding is that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet or even more so. And so obviously, the intervention is needed there. We’re coming up on a break, but you’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we’re talking to Dr. Leslie Field. And who’s with the Arctic Ice Project. We’ll be back in just one minute to talk to her about what she is doing what her organization is doing to save the Arctic guys.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern your host. And we’ve got a talker from a Dr. Leslie Fields. Who is the founder of the Arctic Ice Project. And Dr. Fields, again, wanted to ask you the question of how we can roll this project out? What’s the next phase of this? And where does it go from there? And maybe a second phase, third phase, fourth phase kind of an maybe budgeting of what did what does that look like in terms of cost, and tying it in to something you had alluded to earlier, which is that if we do this well and do it right, we can maybe extend 15 years of the time that we’d have to decarbonize the environment or the economy to which will be obviously extraordinarily important here.

Yeah. So one important place to start here is that it’s been predicted that the Arctic may become ice free in the summer by 2030. So that really is kind of our deadline, we could still do some good after that time. But we really have to get things implemented before the end, if we possibly can, it will help avert some big risks. So what are we doing next?

We’re building collaborations, I’m collaborating with folks around the world actually, to try to get on terrestrial ice as soon as possible. Maybe through an additional nonprofit to to help address that. There are urgent problems in the Himalayas and Greenland. And permissions may be easier to obtain there than in the ocean where you have to negotiate international treaties. So that’s, that’s one of the you know, with the International Maritime Organization, getting permissions, there is a slow process. We talked with them a few years ago.

So if you want to go fast, there may be other ways to get there faster by addressing some of the really urgent, glacial ice melt problems in Himalayas in Greenland is, is one of the things I’m concluding these days funding to do these things, it depends how large you want to make your tests. It depends how much climate modeling you need. climate modeling can be a year two to enterprise four, some of the major questions we’re asking and can take a million dollars or so field testing, again, depending on the size you’re doing, you can have tiny tests that don’t tell you quite as much.

But that could that can cost something like $100,000 or $200,000. Or if you want to do larger things you might be able to detect by satellite, and you know, it could be quite a bit more. And so that’s the that’s really the strategy right now is trying to get through all these questions that I’d outlined a little bit of earlier of, does it work? You know, the efficacy? Where do you want it to work? How safe is it all of that? We think is…

Let me interject here for a second to just say, say if you’re getting to the point of doing kind of more massive tests, like miles and miles or 10s of miles or maybe even hundreds of square miles. How far are we away from doing something like that?

Yeah, I’d say that a very important step in And one that excites me, especially about working on glacial ice is you really need to do co development with the people who live there. If you’re going to do a big test, it’s really imperative to make sure that we’re working with the indigenous people who live in the who tend to live in Arctic areas. And this is going to be absolutely essential to get permissions and to make sure that what we’re doing works for that area.

Not all, not all, ice is the same. There’s there’s ice that gets darkened by various mechanisms, there’s ice, that’s really a problem that as it melts, you’re destroying nearby buildings or villages, or you’re losing your water supply over time, as is happening in the Himalayas from that melt. And so it’s a, you know, to get a very large scale test, you’re really going to need a lot of buy in from the community, a lot of permission there to make sure and certainly quite a bit more funding.

Sure. And I can understand their reticence in that. Humans don’t have the best track record at altering the environment for the good. But also they are the biggest beneficiaries of this if it works. So because their lands are being despoiled at a rapid rate, maybe you could explain to the audience what the technology is of these hollow grass micro spheres that you’re using, that could help refreeze the Arctic.

My understanding is they’re made of silicon and oxygen, which are plentiful elements in the natural environment. And as such, you don’t think they would be a great risk to the environment? What’s, how’s that playing out in your testing?

Yeah, yeah, thank you. So the way that we’re addressing this is trying to avoid those unintended consequences. Or if there were an unintended consequence, you could reverse it pretty quickly. And that’s why we work at the surface. So surface albedo modification is the term, we’re just putting a thin layer of a material that as you said, is hollow glass microspheres, basically it looks like and acts like and compositionally is much like floating white sand, very foot friendly, very round. And these have been used in widespread applications in many, many products that you’ve seen every day.

So they’re very well established. As said, there, they’ve been tested to be safe so far, but we’re proposing to use them in a different way. And that’s why it’s important to be working with marine biologists to make sure you know, this end by doing it in small areas first, and then building up, we can be looking to see is there some unexpected consequence that’s been happening because of this, the climate modeling helps us to are we influencing weather, if we get to a large scale here are we influencing whether in some way that we better know about it’s going to advantage somebody disadvantage someone else.

And that’s part of why we need some external decision frameworks to for what’s in the best interests of humanity and what’s not. But these, these materials have been choice chosen, because they’re pretty small size granules, so large, large enough that you’re not going to be breathing them or hurting, you know, anything they’re made out of silica, as you said, si o to silicon dioxide, which is one of the most abundant materials on the planet.

And it doesn’t pick up oil based pollution, it’s it’s something we all evolved with, just not in quite in this manufactured form. But chemically, so it’s not, it’s not expected to cause a risk to pose a risk, this sort of materials, you know, all around anywhere and all our rocks and oceans anyway. And so that’s, that’s part of why we’re thinking that this is a, you know, as safe as possible type of type of way to try to restore and rebuild and preserve ice.

So how would you explain the difference between geoengineering and climate intervention?

Yeah, so by its nature, geoengineering has been has come to mean things where you’re trying to do a very large intervention in in a very large part of a system. So for instance, proposals to affect the atmosphere. In fact, we’ve unintentionally geo engineered our atmosphere with all this CO2 emissions. So you know that that was not something anybody intended to do.

But there it is. And some of these proposals, geoengineering proposals are trying to reverse that in the atmosphere as a whole, sometimes locally, what climate interventions tend to be things like restoring kelp forests, building mangroves, you know, trying to do things with resilience, and in our case, doing this modification should have a surface adding a very thin layer, you know, pairs with several hairs which 10s of hairs would stick to make things more reflective in a given area, with this material that, as far as we have seen so far is benign. But we do need to be working with the marine biologists and confirm that.

Now, just kind of pivoting a bit. If you were, say, the climate czar here and had authority to do whatever was necessary to to deal with the climate crisis, what would be the top five things you would do in that position? Or have the world do?

Yeah, I’ve actually participated in some discussions like this with the AGU, one of the scientific organizations in NSF trying to figure out, you know, what are the best uses of the money, if if funding comes for this sort of thing, really critical is research and development money, so that people can, in nonprofits or for profits, who are exploring these things are able to develop the solutions farther, get that evaluation done more quickly?

That would be really fantastic. Establishing these governance and policy frameworks and funding framework so that this work can get done. And so you know, what the rules are? Having a framework so that people can evaluate what’s in the best interest of humanity, what might not be what might be too high risk. Really, I think encouraging this active thinking people are brilliant around the world, it stuns me how many terrific ideas are out there. And letting people understand this is a certainly a concerning situation, right?

I mean, we really need to act as though our lives depend on on dealing with this. But that there’s hope there’s so many hopeful solutions and getting them connected with each other funded surface so that we can see what’s going to work best what’s not, what are the risks, what aren’t, what are the risks of doing nothing, which is certainly a huge risk that we’re already seeing the outcome. So I don’t know if that was five things. But those are top of mind the list.

Those are those are great. And I appreciate it and appreciate the great work that you’re doing. Dr. Field. Pleasure having you on this show. I wanted to just have you tell us where people can find your organization on the web and how they could get involved. And if you can give a little pitch for your organization, that’d be great.

Okay, yeah, so we’re Arctic Ice Project. And that’s, we’ve got a website, arcticiceproject.org that has a list of other, you know, handles, you could get active on Facebook, LinkedIn. You know, just just the usuals. Right, YouTube, Twitter. We need, we need more people to hear about this work. We need more funding, people who want to amplify us on social media, please do.

And as said, we’re collaborating with more groups right now healthy climate, India, Healthy Climate HCI. India is really healthy climate initiative. India, sorry to be healthy climate initiative. India is a partner in that I’m working with now to try to start work in the Himalayas. There’s a lot of, you know, there will be more in this space, more collaborations that will be important to look at.

Well, that’s great work. One last question. Before we go, I wanted to ask you is what the Biden administration is doing on on this front air? Are they cooperating collaborating with you or with other organizations that are doing similar work and what more could or should they be doing?

We’re trying to find our way in there. Certainly, they they seem open with some of the appointments they’re making to this sort of work, which is really exciting. Having Jean Luc chenko in there in the administration, as part of the former head of NOAA is a really good sign. You know, I hear all the time about appointments that are very exciting to me that these are people who I know to be knowledgeable, who are and know to be very science based getting increasing visibility in the administration, John Kerry has won awards for for climate as well.

So these are these are very hopeful as far as the money flowing, it’s beginning to come for some solutions through NSF calls. DOD calls for for innovative solutions Its climate intervention is beginning to get on the radar for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and medicine.

And that would be really pretty key to start to have climate interventions be something that is regarded as fundable. And it looks like that may be fundable by the US government, that that’s something that looks like it may be beginning to grow. So we’re hopeful for that.

Well, that’s good news. And I appreciate you again, being on the show. And I like your message of that there are a lot of hopeful solutions out there. Thank you again, for your great work. Dr. Field. Thank you for being on the show. This is Matt Matern. We’re Unite and Heal America KABC 790. And we will be back in just one minute to talk to David Rosenfeld, who is with the solar Rights Alliance and talking to him about solar here in California.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we’re talking to David Rosenfeld, who’s with the Solar Rights Alliance. And my understanding is that the PUC is proposing reducing the payments to residential rooftop solar owners, and David’s organization is is against that. And so, David, thanks for being on the program. And tell tell us a little bit about the work that you’ve been doing it the solar Rights Alliance.

Yeah, thank you, Matt. So so California, there’s 1.3 million solar rooftops, it’s pretty amazing. 15 years ago, there wasn’t very much rooftop solar at all, that 20,000 systems, thanks to the million solar roofs initiative that was put in place, thanks to the leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger at the time, there’s now 1.3 million systems. What’s remarkable is back in the day, if you wanted solar, you had to be either wealthy, technical or very, very, very committed.

And today, you don’t have to be any of those three things. And just under half of all new solar is going into working in middle class neighborhoods. And that’s only getting better and better every year. So that’s good news, because we need it in order to be able to meet all of California’s very ambitious climate change goals and clean energy and electrification goals. And we need it because consumers need some way to control their energy bills with rising electricity bills the way they are, we can get into that a little bit more later.

The California Public Utilities Commission, however, just made a proposal last month, that would virtually make solar unaffordable for almost any middle or working class, California. The details of the proposal are as follows. Number one, what we call a solar tax is basically a penalty fee on anyone that’s putting solar panels on their rooftop, the fee would vary depending on how big your system is, and also which utility serves you.

But it averages about 650 $7 a month, again, just for putting the solar panels on your roof top. So that’s the first component of the proposal, we’re calling it a solar tax. The second part of the proposal is to reduce by 80%. The credit that solar users receive when they share their extra solar energy with the grid. That’s a key component of the way that rooftop solar works. It’s called Net Energy Metering or net metering. And it’s a foundation, you make most of the solar energy you make you’re using right there on the spot.

But oftentimes you make extra. And rather than wasted energy. Net metering lets you send that energy in real time, back through the grid, literally into the community, the utility sells that energy to your neighbors, and then credit you for that extra energy as well. So they are proposing to cut that credit by 80%. And then the third part of the proposal that the CPUC made, is to basically go back on the commitment that the state has made to existing solar users to to let them stay on their current net metering program for 20 years from the date that they initially turn their system on.

That’s been a longtime component of the system. And the CPUC is proposing to move that from 20 years to 15 years. And so those are the three parts of it. And we estimate, as do many others, that if anything even close to that goes through. It makes solar it takes us back to basically where we were 15 years ago, where the only people that could afford to go solar would be the very wealthy. And in our view, this would be just a catastrophe from all from many different angles from a consumer protection angle, and also from a climate change angle.

Well, it’s certainly a very challenging situation and I I had read a little bit about this and it seemed as though the the utility Companies were behind this and they would prefer to kill rooftop solar any way they could, because it is the competition to to them. And so my understanding is that they the accounting that they did have this, they said that it was a cost to ratepayers for the electricity generated and used by homeowners have their own row, rooftop solar.

And to me, that seems like a big red flag when you’re saying that’s a cost to California. When I say for instance, if I had rooftop solar, unfortunately, I don’t. But maybe at some point in time in the future, I will, that the solar energy that I generate is a cost to California i To me, it seems like it’s a net benefit to the California and and from a utility standpoint, they’re calling it a cost, which, which raises a big red flag for me when when the utilities are saying something as ridiculous as that but I also don’t like them moving the goalposts.

So if you promise that you’d give 20 years of a certain revenue stream or whatever you want to call it a subsidy to people who adopted rooftop solar, I just don’t think that we should take that away from people because that’s just a breach of contract. And that’s, that’s just wrong. And and it erodes the trust that people have in our government, when you change the rules like that on them midway through the, their, their deal.

Now the question I have for you is what kind of boils down to what’s the governor gonna do? And my understanding is that your organization and other organizations came up to Sacramento with 120,000 public comments and 1000s of people demonstrating on behalf of the positions you’re taking and the government kind of took us Governor Newsom took a stood, took a step back from his the see the Public Utilities commission’s findings and said, Hey, we’re not going to do what they’re going what they’re asking for, but we’re going to do something. So do you have any sense of what the governor’s going to do? That’s maybe some compromise position?

Yeah. Well, no, we don’t. But we can speculate a little bit about the situation. First, just to go back to something that you mentioned. So yeah, so over 120,000 members of the public have put in a formal public comment on this issue, you know, all about growing rooftop solar, not slowing it down or making it less affordable. In addition, we have a coalition. So my organization, the solar Rights Alliance, is one of over 600 nonprofit organizations, elected officials, community leaders, cities, and schools and businesses that have all basically aligned with the principle of we should keep solar growing, we should not penalize anyone for putting solar panels on the rooftop.

And we should certainly not go back on our promises to the people that have already invested in rooftop solar. So it’s a big coalition newspaper editorial boards have also weighed in, almost uniformly in our favor, Sacramento de Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and so forth. All of that pressure culminated to about two and a half weeks ago, reporters were pressing the governor just hey, where do you stand on this?

And the governor said, I think changes need to be made. As a result. The proposal, which was supposed to be voted on by the CPUC, yesterday, got pulled from the agenda. And as far as we know, now, there are everything is happening behind the scenes, we don’t really know who’s talking to who about what. And for us what we believe is most important here, even if it’s the CPUC decision, it is very important to know where does the governor stand, and we don’t know where he stands. So what we have been doing is encouraging members of the public to be very, very clear with him about what is an acceptable alternative?

Because and the reason why this is important, is because the CPUC is original proposal is so extreme, that the governor could literally cut it by two thirds or more. And it would still make solar unaffordable for your average working and middle class person. And so things that we’re trying to be very clear with him about is no solar tax. No, we should never penalize people for doing the right thing. And in this case, never penalize people for putting solar panels on their rooftops. So that’s number one. Number two, is we’re seeing a no brainer. No one would think.

And yet in California, we’re discovering things that would be no brainers to the average person are don’t seem to be no brain, no brainers to government officials and those who are in charge, just underline that for the listeners, this would be a fee that only rooftop solar owners would have to pay, and no other utility users would have to pay.

Correct. Correct. And fee is basically $8 per kilowatt of your system. So if you, for example, I have a 10 kilowatt system, that’s 32 panels, the average size system is six kilowatts, and you pay $8 per kilowatt per month. So the bigger your system, the more you pay, in other words, the more money that you invest with your own dollars to generate clean local electricity, that you can then also share with your community so that we can increase the amount of clean energy on the grid and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, the more money you’re going to then have to pay the utility.

Wonder if the utilities had anything to do with coming up with this. I wonder how like, you know, here’s our competition. Right now.

It’s right. It’s the classic example of collecting rents, right? Like, oh, you figured out a way not to pay me, we’re going to make you pay anyway. And we’re going to lobby and use our influence with the government to make you do that.

I mean, it’s just classic cronyism, corruption, the whole thing was in this kind of one of those backroom deals of a century ago, where the see the Public Utilities Commission is going to make some some ruling with without a chance of US citizens being involved. Isn’t that kind of a bit of a dirty deal? Are they going to have to then put that new proposal up for public comment?

Yes, they have a public process. I will just say Mike’s I mean, I organized the public, this is what we do. Their process is terrible, just absolutely terrible. It’s opaque. Their website stinks. You know, but nonetheless, there is a process and there was a time, and that’s what we’re utilizing right now. I mean, that’s why those 120,000 comments actually do go into the official public record, and have to be weighed as part of all the other things that they’re doing.

But honestly, it’s just all politics. And the way the decision is going to get made as the governor is going to feel like, you know, do I have more to gain by sticking with my campaign promises, and listening to the people and following through on the things I said I stood for? Or do I have more to gain with taking the utility side? And so that’s what it’s going to come down to?

Well, you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America. We’ve got David Rosenfeld on the program, who’s with the Solar Rights Alliance. And we’ll be back in just one minute to talk to David, about the battles going on in California on regarding solar.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America, and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got David Rosenfeld, with us today with the Solar Rights Alliance.

And, David, is it reasonable to be giving a subsidy to a rooftop solar homeowner who owns a million dollar home or a multimillion dollar home, or a person who has an income of $200,000 a year or more? Can’t they afford the car cost of a maybe slightly higher electric bill is that the argument on the other side of this equation?

So first off to understand, net metering is not a subsidy. So all it is, is a billing arrangement. It’s just like, if you grow your own vegetables, and you bring it to a market to sell it, people are investing of all different income levels, to put a power plant on the rooftop that makes solar energy, they use that solar energy, right there on the spot to power the refrigerator or what have you. They also make extra solar energy.

Rather than giving it to waste, it goes out to the wires, the utility sells that energy to your neighbors, and then credit you for the same amount that they sell it to your neighbors, which makes sense because the utility didn’t spend any money making that energy. And they spent almost no money to basically transport it locally. And you already paid for that local transportation anyway, through all the little non bypassable charges.

So it’s a common sense transaction. And it makes perfect sense. And it’s a key way with which people will make that investment. If we start kind of going oh, well yes for you and no for you. It just undermines the whole idea of like, why, you know, why would you go ahead and do it anyway. So there’s no reason to bifurcate the thing that we should be focused on is how do we make solar grow even more among middle and working class people precisely where it is growing the fastest, so we shouldn’t get distracted by the millionaires.

They’re becoming increasingly the minority of folks who are adopting solar. And we should be focusing on making it even more affordable for working and middle class people.

Well, it kind of makes sense that the top 1% is still only 1%. So there’s only so many of them that can put solar on their homes. So, of course, in LA, we have plenty of people who own 10 homes. So now, I agree that we should be encouraging homeowners to install rooftop solar, the question is, what’s the right amount of subsidy?

And who would you be going going to? And maybe you can address that in terms of the Are there ways to put even more money into the hands of lower income folks to encourage them to adapt it even faster?

Yeah, there are. And this is what I think the question really should revolve around. So first off, let’s just leave net metering alone, like, we need to get so much clean energy onto the grid. In order to be able to reach California’s decarbonisation goals, the state itself says we have to 3x triple the amount of wind and solar, both large scale from solar and wind farms, and rooftop solar.

And at the same time, we’re trying to get all these people to switch to electric cars and electric appliances. So we need a lot a lot, a lot of clean energy. And we’re going to need to get it as fast as we can. So it’s good, we’re going to need a lot of solar farms and wind farms, we have a lot of rooftops that are not being used, we have this very efficient way where people can invest in putting solar energy on the roof, sell that extra energy back to the grid, it’s really efficient to do it that way.

Because it means we don’t have to build as many solar farms as many wind farms, we don’t have to build as many long distance transmission lines and distribution lines to do that. So it makes the whole system cheaper, it makes it more resilient, it gives consumers a stake in the whole clean energy transition. And we’ll just be able to get to that 100% more quickly.

So that’s the first thing then, for people for whom even the market price no matter how low it goes, might not be able to afford it, then we should be that’s where we should be directing subsidies to to be able to buy down that price, incentivize lower income homeowners to get it and then also renters. And there’s a numerous ways with which we can be incentivizing property owners, especially in places where people are a little bit below the median income to be getting the rooftop solar there and accruing those benefits to all the renters in the building.

We’ve been proposing all of these policies, actually, for several years to both the legislature and the CPUC. And it’s notable that their proposal doesn’t include any of them. And so you know, they talk a good game on equity, but when they actually get real proposals in front of them, that would help accelerate the already equitable expansion of rooftop solar, they instead go with what they went with.

Yeah, I mean, that that’s common sense is that we should keep in place the measures that we have currently and expand upon them with new measures, because clearly, the amount of money that we’re spending on current measures are not really that substantial visa vie the cost to the entire state and the world at large of having an environmental disaster.

So it seems like a pretty efficient way to invest in a good solution. I guess the question is, how much are we investing as a state through the current programs that we have to roll out rooftop solar, say in a in a given year?

Not very much, because, again, net metering, which is what we’re talking about, right? The credit that solar users get for sharing their extra energy back to the grid. It’s, it’s it’s a net benefit, as you said, unlike what the utilities and the CPUC claims, it’s a net benefit to the state. And the reason why is because yes, even though the utility has to pay you for that extra energy, they’re still selling it to your neighbor for that exact same cost an average of 25 cents a kilowatt hour, you pay for the poles and wires through a minimum bill and non bypassable charges and that kind of thing.

And every single solar user reduces their use of long distance power lines. And long distance power lines are actually the primary cost driver of electricity in this state that’s unbeknownst to most people. And rooftop solar,

also create a greater risk of fire, right? Because those, those are the lines that have caused the fires, right?

And are and in addition to reduce it is right. And it also because we’re reliant on them, when they go down, because now the utilities are trying to reduce the wildfire risk. Then we have all these rolling blackouts that sometimes extend for days at a time. We need them, and we’re going to keep needing them.

But they’re very, very, very expensive. And incidentally, although not coincidentally, the way that’s the way that utilities make their profits the deal that they have with the state as a regulated monopoly is for every dollar that they spend building and maintaining long distance power lines.

They get a guaranteed seven to 10% profit on top of that, that they can collect for ratepayers. rooftop solar, no one no wonder why they want to crush the potential of micro grids at the neighborhood level, because this is where they make their money.

This is where they make their money and rooftop solar users reduce the wear and tear on that infrastructure. And because there is 1.3 million systems, the savings are actually quite significant. In 2018, alone, the state cancelled $2.6 billion worth of long distance powerline projects that were going to get charged ratepayers but didn’t. And they attributed that to both rooftop solar and energy efficiency. And that’s not a one time thing, it just continues to happen in a bigger and bigger number.

Well, we’ve only have a little bit of time to, to wrap this up. And what’s the average cost of putting solar up on a on a home these days, you know, depends on the size. But you know, it’s like between, let’s say, it’s between, like 12,020 $1,000, to put solar up on your rooftop. And, you know, you get a federal tax, like there’s no subsidy anymore in the state, there is a federal tax credit that you can get.

And you know, for that, and then obviously, then there’s, you know, net metering. So that’s the upfront costs. And for people who want a battery, then you know, you’re looking at in between like five and $15,000, depending on the size of the battery, if you want to get that as well.

So tell people how they can get involved in work with your organizations, your organization, and also lobby, the Public Utilities Commissioner, and the governor to him say, Hey, this is a bad idea, don’t change the current policies we have, and just add to them with the better policies and to help rollout so or even faster.

Yeah, so they can go to my organization’s website. We are the Solar Rights Alliance. That’s solar rights, one word, solarrights.org, and we’re the nonprofit association of California solar users. And we believe everybody has the right to make energy from the sun.

Well, I do too, and everybody, please contact your representatives and the Public Utilities Commission to to make make sure that our voices are heard and, and we help roll solar out even faster than ever before. David, thanks for being on the program. It’s pleasure having you and Dr. Leslie Field from the Arctic ice project.

And it was great, great having you both and doing amazing work out there. So keep up the great work and I look forward to checking back with both of you and in the months to come to see how things are working.

Thank you.