Commercialization of clean energy technologies will take collaboration, creativity

Electric industry leaders are optimistic that the deployment of promising clean energy technologies will scale up and help support the transition to sustainable energy, but it will take lots of public and private capital as well as innovation and collaboration.

As part of the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas this week, EEI’s president and CEO Dan Brouillette and EEI Chair Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International, joined Hans Kobler, Energy Impact Partners founder and managing partner, and Maria Robinson, director of the U.S. Department of Energy Grid Deployment Office, to discuss industry and government partnerships as clean energy technology commercialization moves forward.

“What we’re talking about today is how some of these new economies, how these emerging technologies are really reshaping our economy and driving increased demand for electricity,” Brouillette said.

The panel members said government and industry must work together to create policies that will drive the shift to clean energy. Issues like siting and permitting reform, as well as government investments in infrastructure, will be key to ensuring the industry can meet the decarbonization goals and increased energy demands in the future.

“Solving the siting and permitting issue is massive,” Pizarro said. “We could have all of the money in the world, but if we can’t get infrastructure in the ground, we cannot make progress.”

Pizarro said aggressive new zero-carbon goals set by states like California were achievable but were going to require a number of new technologies. Pizarro said achieving that goal would require $250 billion in investments statewide for volt power, renewables and storage, as well as another $125 billion in investments for the grid.

“We’ll need clean hydrogen for things that are hard to electrify, and we’ll need carbon capture… and we’re still seeing natural gas playing a role. It’s still feasible looking here from 2024 out to 2045. But it’s getting tougher.”

Achieving net-zero also will require collaboration between utilities and local, state and federal governments, as well as private entities.

“A lot of things that are going to be required across the economy, government partners at the federal level, state level, local level to get there, and it requires capital formation to make all of these investments,” Pizarro said.

At the federal level, Robinson said, work was moving forward to help implement new technologies that have shown promise.

“I think that what’s great about the discussion we’re having here is the commercialization of some of these technologies is not about whether the technology works or not,” Robinson said. “It’s figuring out how to make them work in the right base. I think that that’s part of our responsibility with some of this funding that’s coming out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is how can we help with those marginal costs? We know that there are utilities out there who really want to adopt some of these technologies… be it dynamic line ratings or others, but they haven’t quite gotten the business models in place.”

Robinson said her office was working to develop new tools to help the industry build out infrastructure to address growing demand.

Pizarro said government can help by not only providing funding solutions for growth, but also getting that funding out quicker.

“You get to a point, particularly in our sector, where you have this really capital intensity of large projects, and that first of all has all kinds of risks… for the private sector to bear,” he said. “That’s where we need help, whether it’s outright funding…  or whether it’s low-cost financing, those are important ways in which the government can help bring down the cost… When you think about the scale that’s coming… our analysis for California, which I think similar results are heard from other states, we see the insight with which we need to add transmission in the next two decades, that annual rate is going to be four times where it’s been historically, distribution 10 times. So you’ve got to solve not just the money part, but the actual product part.”

Robinson said her agency was working to find solutions to not only siting and permitting issues, but to transmission issues.

“I think we’re acutely aware of the siting and permitting piece as well. One of the lesser known parts of what we’re doing right now is trying to figure out how the federal government can get our own house in order, particularly around transmission,” she said. “If you’ve actually worked on any sort of development of transmission, you understand that you end up talking to 17 different agencies, so that then becomes our problem to help manage that for you.”

Robinson said the DOE was making investments directly in the grid, but also doing what it could to support the industry, whether that be through onshoring some parts of the manufacturing and energy supply chain or addressing other supply chain issues. Making sure the industry is able to meet demands and expectations is about more than powering homes, she said, it’s a national security issue.

“We’re trying to fix (the issues), and put all those pieces of the puzzle together to make sure that we have that longevity and competitiveness for national security reasons,” she said.

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