Nobody in their right mind would build a grid we have today. But if you had a clean slate, you'd build a different grid. And so what we're trying to do is build a new cleaner, more efficient grid to meet really different needs in the 21st century. But on top of a 20th and even 19th century technology, sometimes. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to MIT. Learn. Today in the studio we have David Hsu an associate professor of Urban and Environmental planning here at MIT. And together we're going to find out Why THIS Matters. But before we get to this. Thanks for being here, David. Thanks for having me. So, you were on the Environmental Climate podcast, and now you're here, have you been getting a lot of buzz around your research?

It's kind of interesting, actually. I, took a year and a half leave from academia last year. So, actually, I thought of myself as very much out of academia for a year and a half. I was, working for the Department of Energy. But I've been at MIT for about 11 years. And so, I think of myself as, very much back in academia, but also restarting my interests or re bringing what I learned outside of academia back to academia. I wanted to start with a little bit of a bigger question to get get some interest for our listeners. Today we're going to be talking around, you know, what the grid is, or an energy system at large.

And from your perspective, how do you how would you make an electric system be more resilient or serve the people more today? Okay. Big question. Yeah. Really fun questions to talk about. You know, you have to start with what the grid is. The grid is basically the technology that connects the sources of energy to the uses of energy. And so when we talk about, solar and wind and nuclear and hydropower and natural gas, you know, creation of electricity or coal fired power plants, those are all sources of energy. The users of energy are generally classified among, buildings, both commercial, residential and industrial users.

And that intermediate step is taking some of those resources, whether or not they're renewable or nuclear or fossil fuel based. Creating electricity and then transmitting and distribute electricity to people. And so that's, you know, again, we can unpack that as 150 year history. But to your question, you know, this is something we've been developing over 150 years and how people use energy at the end of the system. You know, the grid is kind of funny when you think about it. It's basically we built this giant grid and supplies electricity, but you turn on your devices or your lights whenever you want. Right.

And so there's this interesting thing where the grid, you know, we have to build a discrete power plant to serve 50,000 people. But then we have to control that power plant to serve the whims of 50,000 people turning off electricity whenever they want. Yeah. Now we all kind of know from our daily behavior that you do things actually in a fairly routine way. And a population of 50,000 people do things statistically kind of similar at the same time, sort of like they do the same thing day to day. And so that makes it possible to run the grid. But to your question like how are these things going to change?

You know, depends on that steps. There's the sources of energy, there's the uses of energy, and there's all the technologies in between. I think that's yeah, you're asking about definitely warming me up like that. You were talking about, the habits of the everyday user on the, on the end of these, these, these grids. How how does that single source know when to, you know, make more energy or or deal with the habits are there are there patterns? And. Yeah, there's definitely patterns. Most, most energy systems, if you look at them, at the city level or the state level or utility utility level will have two peaks.

Usually the first peak happens when people wake up in the morning. So around like 6 to 8 a.m. you'll see electricity use ramp up drastically from the night. And then you'll see, that'll go down a little bit in most homes. And then it'll go back up around 4 to 7 p.m. when people get home from work and they turn on all the devices, and cook dinner, and then they'll start to ramp down as people will start to get ready for bed and they'll go down quite, the load profile for the city, state or utility will go down to its level, lowest level at night. We know that different appliances and different uses electricity are kind of, operate in different ways.

Like your refrigerator has little spikes because of cycles, as is kind of the the heat pump is basically, only making the keeping the food cold and needs to be cold. So you'll see these kind of spikes, but you can also see things like, you know, people turn on lights at a certain time. They leave the lights on until they go to bed and turn the lights off. So you'll see these different things. But I guess the point is, in every house, these things average out to, you know, a fairly predictable pattern for a household, for neighborhood, for a city like these things are all average out a little bit. And so you start to see this lower peak in the morning, higher peak in the afternoon for residences, for buildings or commercial buildings.

Most of the load will go up middle of the day when workers occupy the building. And the really interesting thing is during Covid, those patterns changed a lot. So you'll see these kind of cool graphs online where city state utilities will actually report how much their energy use changed during Covid because people shifted where they're working. And then some of those patterns haven't gone back. So, some of the things or patterns we're controlling for have changed. Now, what happens is you can see through sensors or you can see in the control room in the utility what parts of the system are using energy?

A lot less control rooms will actually be a big room. And there will be like 5 or 6 people sitting in desks with like, eight monitors each. Okay. But on the side of this room, it's like the size of a high school gym. Yeah. There always be a giant circuit diagram. And the circuit diagram is actually literally the circuit diagram for the city or state or city. I'm envisioning, like red LEDs lighting up for switches that. Yeah. Okay. That's right. And there's actually a big clock, but the clock doesn't say the time. It says the frequency of the system. And the operators are trying to operate different parts of the system to keep that system operating at 60Hz, which is a standard in the US.

Wow. Okay. Now that sounds some like some complicated electrical engineering at that point. It is. But, you know, in a way, the, system was built to be analog. And so by keeping the entire system at 60Hz, it keeps all the generating plants and the appliances in sync. And so this analog way of controlling the system was what we had before we had digital technology. Now that's digitized used. But some of the principles that were put in place, like really 100 years ago, are still the principles we have today. So that's kind of something I always try to emphasize to students, which is, you know, some of these technologies were building in ways that were determined a hundred years ago.

That's super interesting. I guess cycling back a bit to how did you end up here? How did how did your your path to talking about what we're talking about today really come to be? Yeah. Thanks for asking. I, I grew up in western Massachusetts, in Amherst, which is a college town, and my parents were scientists. And I went to university and I studied science, and I just started a PhD program in physics. And I got really interested both in architecture in of itself. All my friends were living in bigger cities, and I kind of saw them living in big cities, not like where I grew up, but then also, I used to work in the basement a lot as a physicist because the lasers have to be in the basement to be stable and avoid vibrations.

And I sort of felt like I wanted to get outside of the basement for like the third or fourth summer in a row. And so I decided I was generally interested in architecture, but I'd done a lot of science. And so I spent about ten years working outside of academia. I worked as a engineer for three years, and I worked in real estate finance for three years, and then I worked in government for three years. And I would say to students, now, when I have urban planning students here at MIT, I say, you know, we didn't have an urban planning major where I went to school. But if you put engineering and finance and, government together, it's basically urban planning.

So I say, you know, the kind of advantage of having an urban planning major is you get to see how these things work together in the beginning, whereas it took me like ten years of my career to figure that out. And so after ten years of doing, engineering and real estate, real estate, finance and government after college, I went back and got my PhD relatively late, did my PhD and was a professor at, another university for five years and came here at MIT 11 years ago. But what I also say to my doctoral students is that a lot of the time in my research, I'm trying to write about things for audiences that I encountered in my career before academia.

Or I'm also trying to figure out problems or things that came up in my career before academia. So sometimes it's like when I'm reading this policy making literature, I'll read a paper and say, oh, that happened to me when I was working in New York City government, or I'll read a paper and say, you know, I'm not sure if I think, somebody in my old finance firm would agree with this, or sometimes I'll be really excited, you know, I'll get a call or an email from a small town or city or a, you know, career civil servant, and they'll say, oh, reading your paper because I want to implement this policy that you wrote about.

And I get really excited when those nonacademic audiences, are interested in our research. And I think that's why I'm excited to be here, too. Yeah. Thanks again, by the way. Thank you for having me. The New York sounds interesting. Where were you working with energy grid system policy, then? Two or is was that a little different? I was not working. That was after I'd worked in real estate finance and building engineering. So I was actually working on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan after September 11th, September, 2001. So I guess I'm dating myself a little bit, but, you know, I was a fairly junior urban planner at the time, working on this big project, probably the biggest urban planning project in the US, maybe world at that time.

And I kind of realized that we were making these what seemed like big, multibillion dollar decisions at the time. I didn't feel like we had enough research, and that was the last thing I did before academia. I decided I'd go back to academia, get a PhD, learn more about, how policies are made or how policy should be made. And now I found myself in academia writing about how policies should be made or I think, you know, arguing why some policies are more effective than others. But I'm actually kind of reaching back to my former self and wanting my audience to be the people who are actually implementing policy.

Mike's going back to the grid. So the grid is just electrical energy. Well, there's different ways people, some people refer to the, gas network as the gas grid. Some people refer to, you know, the internet. We don't think of it as a physical grid because we tend to think of it as, you know, information and bits and, you know, light. But at the same time, it does have a physical nature and a physical geography. And I think it matters because as we're seeing with, you know, internet cables and data centers, that physical topography or arrangement of these physical pieces matters and how information flows, for the gas grid, it matters because a lot of our energy comes into our houses, not in the form of electricity, but the reason why I think it's important to have electricity is that, for our decarbonized future, notwithstanding, you know, the idea of clean energy fuels, most of the power pathways to a decarbonized, minimal climate damage future are going to involve a lot of electricity.

So that's why the electric grid is important. It's also a lot of concern. An electric grid is being driven by the cost of electricity, which is rising very quickly. So, that's just to say that, you know, there's different kinds of grids. I have to say, I always study electricity and gas grids. The two complement each other because a lot of electricity comes from natural gas. But at the same time, when people talk with the grid, they're generally talking electricity. So you brought up, decarbonization and at that scale, in the grid, at least in the US, seems to be primarily coal or natural gas oriented. Right? Yeah.

That's actually I have to remember the exact percentages. You know, the grid is getting cleaner, has been getting cleaner for a while as we have more and more renewables penetrate, the grid. So I think in Massachusetts, you know, we have a renewable portfolio standard, which is a legislative mandate to the utilities to buy clean power. And I think we're around 20, 25% renewable power in states like Massachusetts. I think maybe about half the states having these renewable portfolio standards that mandate how much clean energy we're going to buy. But that's to say that, you know, if it's 25%, you know, other 75% is probably a relatively small fraction of nuclear and hydropower, and the rest is probably coal.

But increasingly it's natural gas, and natural gas is, cheaper and cleaner than coal. So it's displacing coal in a lot of states. Nuclear hasn't nuclear, hydropower haven't grown. And there's not as much room to grow for hydropower. There's a lot of interest in nuclear now, among environmental so used to oppose nuclear because nuclear is a clean, carbon free emitting sort, energy resource, even if it's not renewable, it's clean. Yeah. You mentioned these, suppliers being mandated to buy, cleaner energy and I imagine not all grids around the world run in that format is. So what is for the wider audience? What is this energy supplier?

Yeah, that's a good question. So, you know, the grid is, fascinating technology because it's literally mixing those thousands of power plants. You know, I kind of said before, yeah, let's say one power plant serves 50,000 people. There's thousands of those power plants. They have a very, you know, various kinds of technology. They can be, solar farms, wind farms, that can be a nuclear power plant. They can be a coal fired power plant or natural gas, two kinds of natural gas turbines or hydropower plants. Right. The great thing about the grid is you take these thousands of power plants, and you serve millions of people through basically millions of miles of wire.

You know, the way we do it is that the legislature in various states, because energy policy is made, almost all the state level, not at the federal level. The states dictate through the legislature or their public utility commissions, mostly legislatures, how much energy a utility has to buy. The utility that you pay a bill to has is kind of your local, public utilities. So it's a regulated monopoly. So they tell them how much power they have, they have to buy. And that comes to you through the wire in your house. Yeah. The interesting thing about it is that when you buy electricity, you're buying a physical electron, but you're also buying a certificate of how clean that electron is if it's clean or not clean.

And so what happens sometimes is the utility will end up buying power at a certain time of year. But we'll buy this certificate called renewable energy Certificate at a different time of year. But the legislature says, well, as long as it all balances out and it's clean electricity. So, you know, we get a lot of our electricity in Massachusetts from the Midwest. A lot of that is, from wind turbines for part of the year. But other parts of the year we're buying, you know, let's say power from the Midwest or buying clean hydropower from Quebec. And we get the certificates from a different part of the system.

So that's interesting. Bring up the different location of these, these main sources of energy for the, our our country here. And I know in the news a couple times Texas has been coming up for their separate grid and so is Puerto Rico. How does why do you think it ended up that way? So this is a long story. Yeah, I'll make it short. There was about 100 years ago, I want to say 1920s and 1930s, the Federal Power Act, the Federal Power Act. You know, the electricity grid only started around 1880. And we talked electricity grid in 1880. It's like literally limited to a small section of lower Manhattan, like the first electricity grid.

You know, people say Thomas Edison built the first one in lower Manhattan. You can actually go see a plaque on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, but it really serves like 100 stores and restaurants. And, you know, we, I always tell the story, one of the one of the, the few residents is served by the first electric grid was JP morgan's house. Because JP Morgan was a major investor in General Electric and apparently JP Morgan was like a big techno enthusiast. So even though this nascent grid had like a coal fired power plant next to his house, and apparently the fluctuations the grid would, like burn up his curtains or sofas or cause fires in his house.

Apparently J.P. Morgan was really enthusiastic about it. He he's like, oh, this is you know, why I'm investing in. And this is like the price of progress. So he was really into this early electric grid, but one of Thomas Edison's, basically lieutenants, this guy named Samuel Insull goes off to Chicago, figures out how to make this grid bigger than just a small section Manhattan and starts to build these, you know, the the public utility model we have today, or at least the business side of the public utility model. And so these grids are basically all limited to cities and towns, and they're kind of competing like there's multiple utilities competing in the same city.

So sometimes they'll cut each other's poles down like anytime. And you'll see these pictures of all these overlapping such of wires like this, a picture of lower Manhattan with, you know, we're used to seeing one telephone pole in one set of wires. There's like a telephone pole carrying 20 such wires, and they're all tangled up, and you'll see pictures of these wires falling down in snowstorms. But the grid starts to really become what we think of us today, when cities start to link up with each other because they can share power between each other, that makes both of their grids more efficient. And then in the postwar period, like the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, we start to build these big transmission lines that allow us to move power across regions.

And so the grid is, you know, I always say this kind of thing we've been building for 150 years. If we I actually say to students, nobody in their right mind would build a grid we have today. But if you had a clean slate, you build a different grid and so what we're trying to do is build a new, cleaner, more efficient grid to meet really different needs in the 21st century. But on top of a 20th and even 19th century technology, sometimes technology based. Yeah. Well, I want to know what are the differences between this, this new cleaner grid and this old grid, but also with this connecting of the different cities.

Was that did that need to be primarily like state and policy driven, or was were there choices made between these companies? Yeah, that's a great question to and I feel like I need to get back, Charlie. Question. You know, the federal power acts like a hundred years ago. 1920s and 1930s. And then there's a whole series of, legal precedents where I go to the Supreme Court multiple times, you know, lower courts decide this, and they kind of decide a series of responsibilities for who's going to decide what. So, there's some famous legal cases about, how the cost should be allocated to both the users and the utilities themselves.

Like I said, utilities are regulated monopolies. So, you know, as monopolies, they could charge us anything they want. But then some of these court cases say, oh, no, actually, the Public Utility Commission is going to decide what a fair, just and reasonable rate is. And so the Public Utility Commission is state based. That's why I say we have state energy policies, and we don't have that much of a coordinated national energy policy. So, you know, public utility commissions are, you know, kind of, a new thing around after 1907. But it even starts in Massachusetts in the 1880s. There's like railroad commissioners and his gas commissioners, and they are basically a quasi judicial, quasi administrative, quasi legal body that gets created the Progressive ERA.

Yeah, they're not really like they're almost like a new branch of government. Yeah. It's like, you know, 3 to 7 commissioners. They get appointed by the governor, legislature. Sometimes they're elected, but they can do lots of things that the other branches of government can do. They can set, rates and they can control which companies can enter or exit. They can tell companies whether or not they have to merge. And they do all these things because the nature of the technology is that we think it's more efficient to have these monopolies, to have one set of pipes or wires instead of multiple sets of pipes or wires, like the crazy situation I was describing before.

But we need to regulate that monopoly. Or also monopolies would just charges whatever they want. So that's why we have these, you know, public utility commissions. There's a bunch of legal precedents that say, what's the public utilities commissions can decide how much, a fair and reasonable return is for private shareholders that own these utilities. Like two thirds of our electric utilities are owned by private shareholders. So they're really called investor owned utilities. And even though the public utility model is that the public can govern this, but the utility is actually mostly investor owned, we have other cases where municipal utilities, like they're owned by the city.

And it's actually a really interesting political power struggle, like 100 years ago. The mayor of Cleveland says, if you don't own the utility, the utility owns you. That's Tom Johnson from Cleveland. I think. And so Cleveland really, interestingly, builds its own public utility next to the private utility. And there's this kind of battle between the two, which customers will have, there's a few weird cities that have two sets of utilities, one that's publicly owned, one's privately owned, or two competing private utilities. But generally most people in the US get their power from a investor owned company that's regulated by these commissioners.

And so that's kind of one way that energy policy gets set. Sometimes legislatures do it. Sometimes in some aspects like, gas pipelines, are not regulated by the states or regulated by the federal government, by Ferc, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. So there's there's really. Complicated, heterogeneous landscape, kind of like the federal system in the US. One thing I always think about as urban planner is that these energy systems are governed at the state level and not at the city level, but many cities are interested in climate action. Yeah. So for them to pursue goals of decarbonization or climate action, they have to think about dealing with utilities that really are trying to answer to a commission at the state level.

So that's why you have really divergent goals between like a city like New York or Boston that has aggressive climate goals and has to deal with their utility in the utility, really carries more with the public utility commissioners think. Yeah. Do other countries that are maybe starting a grid later? Do they follow a similar pattern, or is there better choices that have been made as of late? Great question. A lot of, some countries, you know, the the federal system of government is limited to mostly. Oh, that's not entirely true. There's a lot of, like Germany is the federal system of government in Australia.

Canada have, you know, provinces, they've moved those three countries, Australia and Germany definitely have moved to different models of governing the system where they're actually created a market or created, like England, Australia have created markets in which, the utility company is not necessarily responsible for generate ING and delivering all the power parts of the US actually have markets where the utility is required to buy electricity on a competitive market, and the competition is meant to keep the prices lower. And some parts of the US have this, you know, utility model that's 100 years old, where the same utility generates electricity, transmits electricity, sends it to your home and sends you the bill.

And, you know, I've heard arguments in favor of both, but, this is to say that, you know, countries that don't use as much electricity or as much energy as the rich or developed countries do, and some of those countries, you don't even have grids, right. And so if you're in parts of I've done work in India, in parts of Africa, you know, some communities don't have regular access to electricity in the same way. And so they're if you're a customer, you might have a different choice. You know, you might actually be considering you'd like to connect to the grid, but maybe the grid has to connect connected to you.

Or maybe the government is not providing very reliable electricity. And so then you might start thinking about buying your own solar panels or batteries to try to basically create electricity for yourself in those cases. Is that what a would you call that a microgrid? Is that. Yeah, I think, you know, microgrid is basically the same things I said. You have a grid before, right? You you have to have a way to generate electricity. You need to have a user electricity. And if you're not using electricity, exactly when you make it, you need a way to store it. But batteries are, getting cheaper all the time. Cheaper?

They're getting cheaper faster than solar panels did. And you can also think of even microgrids that are based off of fossil fuels have existed for a long time. You know, the energy is stored in diesel fuel, and people only run their diesel generators when they need to. Electricity for some use. So a microgrid, you know, you can even think of your house at some point as a microgrid if you have solar panels, a battery or electric vehicle to store the electricity, and you have lots of uses in your home, you can start to think of homes as microgrids too. So as that, you know, distributed capacity builds up, especially say, in like India, where they're trying to expand their grid for this town that might not have reached been reached by the grid yet.

Is it? Should they still be just getting a bunch of solar panels for themselves, or is there a better way to make both of those kind of meet together? That's a great question. You know, I think that is actually a fairly active choice that people are making. You know, if you and I there's actually interesting some people have ideological fixations on like, oh, we definitely should have a centralized grid, or we definitely should have solar panels. Like, I think there are activists who will say, like, oh, we should have definitely one answer or the other. You know, some people say, biggest beautiful and some people care.

That small is beautiful. I actually think it's kind of interesting to put yourself in the shoes of a user, a customer in a different situation, and a different country, and ask yourself, like, what would you do? And people, I think, make fairly rational choices if they have good information, but also that like there's different customs that people follow, right. So I've studied, small villages in India where people didn't necessarily have access to reliable electricity like the government promised them electricity, and they hadn't brought it there. Like we are driving along some road once and I saw a bunch of concrete utility poles and I said, ask the people, you know, we're traveling with.

I said, oh, you know, what are those poles? Jain? And they said, oh, they're going to build the grid. They're going to build a connection to our village. And I said, well, how long those poles been there? And they're like, they said, oh, those polls have been there, lying there for ten years. Wow. So, you know, if you had to wait ten years, maybe a solar panels more expensive, but it starting to look pretty good. And so you're seeing in Pakistan right now, solar is really taking off because the central government doesn't provide very reliable electricity. So even if the grid came and connected to your house, people don't trust the government to provide electricity reliably enough.

They're willing to invest in a solar panel. Having said that, you know, places like Puerto Rico, I did, some work after Hurricane Maria. Maria. There was basically a old, fairly vulnerable electricity grid, you know, got knocked down by the hurricane. And, people didn't necessarily trust, the utility to build the grid again and run it better. Yeah. And they pay actually amazingly high prices for electricity based on burning diesel fuel, which has to be shipped into Puerto Rico. Oh, wow. And one of the sunniest parts of the United States. And so there was a lot of interest from community groups and cities and towns from building their own solar systems.

I did work with students there for a couple of years, but I'm just trying to describe the range of things, you know, the US, right? Used to this 150 year old system, but, you know, other places in the world, the situation varies quite a bit. Are these types of, say, outcrops of different energy sources. Part of when you were mentioning a newer, better grid is this is this part of that equation. Yeah. I think, the really exciting thing is that, you know, solar has gotten so much cheaper, so much more quickly, and there's plenty of sunny places in the world that lack access to any kind of energy. And lots of those places.

Solar is making a really big difference in people's lives. But even the United States, like, you know, places like the United States or Germany, or I'm just naming two countries that, have been very interested in, in Balcony Solar. You know, somebody said that solar cells are so much cheaper, they're cheaper than the wood required to build a balcony. So people just literally build or hang a solar panel off the side of their balcony. Oh, wow. Okay. And so there's all this interest in the US about how to, enable building codes to allow people to plug solar panels into their socket. Yeah. So I just mention that because, you know, solar has gotten remarkably cheaper.

But solar also poses a lot of challenges for how we manage the system that was built around big power plants. So how do you bill people? How do you charge them? Who gets to invest in these things are all questions that we're still trying to figure out. So if I get a solar panel and I plug it into my house right now in mass, and am I okay to do that or do I need to ask someone first? That's a great question. My dad actually lives in western Massachusetts still, and he wanted to install solar panels on his roof. Yeah, and the utility said, no, you can't style solar panels. We have to buy a new transformer. And so if you want to install solar panels, you have to buy a new transformer for the whole neighborhood.

So and became this kind of funny, story where my, like, personal life coincided with my academic life because my dad was complaining. He's like, I don't want to buy a transformer for the whole neighborhood, but my neighbors want me to buy the transformer. And I said, well, first, why don't your neighbors kick in to buy this transformer? And then he said, you know, being my dad, he actually went and researched how much the same transformer would cost from the same company in Connecticut versus Massachusetts. And he found that the utility Massachusetts said, you know, quoted them like 5 or $10,000 and a quarter.

Somebody in Connecticut, $2,000. And I said to him, I said, you know, you're tired. You should go complain to the attorney general, and they should bring a lawsuit on your behalf as a consumer advocate. And, you know, he decided not to do that. I was really hoping my personal and professional lives to converge and get my dad to bring this lawsuit. But at the same time, that just illustrates some of these challenges, right? Like he has access to this new technology, it would benefit him. It could theoretically benefit the grid. But then the entity, the utility that controls the system, said, now you have to invest.

We're not going to invest. And that regulated monopoly could charge whatever they wanted to, even though they're charging like five times what they're charging Connecticut. And then all of his neighbors, you know, wanted him to do this so they could get solar panels. But those kind of pathways or those mechanisms for those things to happen don't exist. So we're still figuring this stuff out. But to answer your question, solar could help the grid. In some places like California, we have so much solar adoption that actually more solar adoption doesn't help because it only generates electricity during the daytime.

Yeah. And so at 3:00 in most of California, solar is not adding a whole lot of marginal value. But, you know, other places like Florida, Arizona that have remarkably sunny electricity or remarkably sunny climates, they actually are natural gas dominated. And you ask yourself, like, why do places like Arizona, Florida not have solar, whereas Hawaii has a remarkably high penetration of solar? And then that leads to challenges on how you finance the rest of the grid, too. I think getting back to your question, like if I have solar panels, I do have solar panels. Massachusetts it generates electricity and generates about 90, 95% of my electricity for the whole year.

But it's generate electricity mostly in the summer, so it's not really helping in the winter. So I have to figure out societally, how do we pay for this backup capacity from the grid in the winter, and how do we store the electricity in the summer to use it in the winter? Some people say we should build batteries. There's these long duration batteries from MIT, spin off building batteries that could literally store energy from the solar and discharge it as from the summer and discharge in the winter. There's also, some proposals. We should just build twice as much solar as needed and just thereby have enough in the winter.

Okay. Yeah. You know, I think we're still figured out isn't in a way that's kind of an argument for for the grid, because, say, if you had at a big scale. Yeah, it's, you know, it's sunny over, over and in Massachusetts where we are. And then, it's still nighttime somewhere else. And in the United States or somewhere else in the world, if they were connected, so to speak, and the capacity was there. Yeah, that's a good argument for long distance transmission lines. You know, some of these systems are literally big enough. Now you see China doing this. China is building, high voltage transmission lines and China's roughly, you know, the same 3 or 4 time zones big as the US is, they can move are very will soon have the capacity to move solar from one end of China to the other.

And we have that in a limited way in the US. But all the modeling, all the estimates say that if we built more transmission lines, we could have much more clean energy across the US. And, you could move wind or solar energy across the three time zones. So those those times of day when I told you about people use electricity, yeah, you could literally move sun from, the west coast to back to the East coast during the night time. Yeah. Or you can move wind power from the upper Midwest to other parts of the US. Because the wind tends to blow at night in parts of the US. So what are some of the the blockers to that?

I mean, China's been overcoming some of them in some ways. So that's a great question. You know, the, if you are building a transmission line and this is not my area of expertise, but I've learned a lot about it, with from colleagues both at MIT and the federal government. There's a lot of permitting that has to happen, both, at the federal level, at the state level, the utilities themselves want to own parts of the system. There's a lot of fragmentation among different responsibilities, interests. You know, if you're a clean energy developer, if you're a solar farm developer, or if you're building the transmission line itself, if you're a utility that serves customers or has to buy this power, you all have different economic interests, and then you need permits at almost every level.

So there's been a lot of work, I'd say, over the last 4 or 5 years. People trying to figure out how to expedite building transmission lines. There's a great book about this, if you're interested. Tell us, the book is called Super Power by, Russell Gold. Okay. He used to be a Wall Street Journal reporter. Yeah, my students and I just read it last fall, and we still refer to, Michael Skelly as the entrepreneur who's trying to build transmission lines. He ultimately fails in the book. He got a transmission line, I think, approved by the Biden administration. And the Trump administration canceled it. So, that's the story of, you know, him trying to build transmission lines as a microcosm of what a lot of people are trying to do.

So, so with, I guess, in the sense of the department you're in. So urban and environmental planning, with these transmission lines, there must be in other parts of the grid, there's a lot of land use associated with that. Yeah. And besides the policy around that, how does if, if I add had some property, is there is there a benefit for me given that there's an argument there. Right. Yeah. That's that's a good question. You know, one of my colleagues, says that, pipelines and transmission lines and highways are uniquely difficult to build. Yeah, because they cross lots of different properties and people don't always benefit in between.

And so, you know, one real question of equity is, you know, if you're building a transmission line so New York City can get power from Texas, what's the benefit for all the people in between? We had this problem in Boston where we were trying to build one clean energy line to get clean energy from Quebec, which has hydropower. And I think which states in between either New Hampshire, Vermont didn't want to build it and local communities didn't want to build it. I think eventually one did get built, but there's been, a series of sagas in New England for, you know, we live in Boston or most of the population.

A lot of economic activity is in Boston. Yeah, but you have to cross a lot of other communities to build these long, skinny transmission lines. You know, I think it's interesting to think about, you know, some people don't like transmission lines because they say they ruin their views or they don't like solar panels. They ruin their views. But with climate change happening, you know, forest fire is going to ruin your view. Two or, you know, a smoky day from burning Canadian forest is going to ruin your view. So there's some choices we have to make as a society about what we want to build. And so visually speaking, that transmission line that I'm imagining that the big aluminum structure looking thing with the the kind of imposing, top part hold the stick figures. Yeah.

Stick figures. Okay. Got it. Yeah. There is some interest in building, transmission lines under water. Oh, yeah. Some of those, developer, I can't remember who is proposing to build transmission lines in the Hudson River because nobody would see it. Okay. And at some point, Google had proposed building a transmission line off the Atlantic Ocean underwater because of connect offshore wind farms and I say, okay. But even then, you know, some communities were objecting to, the the electric lines coming ashore at certain places on the beach. Okay. And so I think, you know, we have to really have a conversation about, you know, making societal choices that benefit everybody.

Yeah. But, you know, our local state systems of property ownership and community consultation block some of the things we also think we generally want. And so I think that's a really difficult conversation for, some people who care both about clean energy and local communities getting what they want. But that's also a problem for affordable housing. So you know, that's the urban planning aspect of this project on it. Yeah. So thank you. I do want to learn more about, what would be the effect of putting these high voltage transmission lines untreated under the ocean. But I think we should we should round this out.

Okay. So for, for the audience, what what are some, common misconceptions you'd like to clear up about? I think we talked about today. That's a good question. You know, I'd say that a common misconception is that the grid is a unitary object. You know, I think, lots of people like to say engineers voted the electric grid as the most important technology of the 20th century. Like, more important than computers, automobiles, you know, certain vaccines. Engineers were like, the electric grid is the most important thing. I always like to emphasize that the electric grid is a continent spanning technology like we talked about.

It can move energy from one end of the continent to another, but that gets filtered through so many different systems, pieces of technology, decision making bodies, institutions, utilities that it's really hard to think about managing the whole grid is one thing. Yeah. And so it is a system. And, you know, we can change systems, but it's remarkably hard to change that system. The other thing I think is a misconception is, that the electric grid is this thing separate from other things. You know, the electric grid increasingly relies on different sources of energy. We're seeing right now with, energy shocks in the world that, you know, energy prices tend to move together.

Yeah. So, natural gas and oil are being affected by, you know, political events in, in the Gulf. At the same time, natural gas is increasingly going to generate electricity. And, you know, renewable energies compete against fossil fuel energies and nuclear. And so the systems work together, like you see, in places like, Texas had a big winter storm a few years back and electricity went out, and then the electricity went out. So it stopped driving compressors and natural gas systems and natural gas plants went out. And in fact, that most of that power outage was caused by natural gas plants going off in the beginning because they weren't weather ized.

Oh, wow. And so there's all these interdependencies between infrastructure that, you know, we talk about these things like electricity versus gas versus nuclear. They all work together. And so understanding how they work together is really a big part of it. The last part is I think we talk about the grid as a technology. Sometimes we don't talk about as a culture. Yeah. Like I said, you know, we kind of expect our electricity around us to be reliable and cheap and to be clean and to be on demand whenever we want it to be. And when you have big outages, because of a hurricane or because of a winter storm, when you have increasing outages, because, let's say wildfire in California, you have to start thinking about how the consequences of using fossil fuels are starting to affect how we use even clean energy in the future.

And so, you know, I always think about climate change, decarbonization as it's going to be a very long conversation to figure that out. But, you know, I also feel hopeful we can figure it out. Yeah. I think you've you've very much already touched this, but, for our segment, we'd like to do a Tldr on, which is a too long didn't listen at the end. Okay. So just a I don't know if it's an actual acronym, but so if you could give our listeners, feel free to look at any of the cameras, why this matters for what we talked about and really ending with, what you're looking forward to. Okay. Why this matters is we started building a grid 150 years ago.

We have a lot of ambitions and hopes and optimism about what the grid electric grid could do in the 21st century, especially to fight climate change. But to understand how to change the grid, we have to understand how is built and how we have to change that building of it to realize our goals for the future. Nice. Thank you. Well, from our listeners and myself. Thank you for being here, David. We have the associate professor from, Urban and Environmental Planning here at MIT. Thank you again. David Hsu. I've been your host, Daniel Braconnier. And thanks for listening to chat with you next time. Thank you very much.