3 Takeaways - Former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz: Tackling Global Warming and Energy Solutions (#234)

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Energy is complicated. As global demand continues to grow, so does the need for realistic, climate-friendly solutions. Are renewables the answer? How about nuclear power? What is China’s role? Listen, as former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz provides smart answers to daunting questions about energy, and examines the threat of nuclear war.

Global warming. Such a hot topic. Many believe that global greenhouse gas emissions are being driven by the developed countries, especially the US and Europe. But that's not actually the case. China accounts for nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the next largest emitters are the US at about 11%, then India at 7%, and Russia at 6%. The emissions of all other countries are each below 3%. The US and the four largest European countries, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy, account for less than 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. So even if the US and Europe achieve net zero,

which is to say no net greenhouse gas emissions, global greenhouse gas emissions will still increase if emissions are increasing in the rest of the world. Energy is complicated. The issues include environmental impact, cost, scale, and energy security. What should the US and other countries do? Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers,

politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz. Secretary Moniz is by background a scientist. He earned his doctorate in physics from Stanford and served as head of MIT's Department of Physics and as director of the Bates Linear Accelerator Center. Then he joined government serving as undersecretary of energy and then associate director for science in the Accelerator Center. Then he joined government serving as Under Secretary of

Energy and then Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the office of the President. He was appointed Secretary of Energy by President Obama and served as Secretary of Energy for four years. Secretary Moniz is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which works to mitigate nuclear, biological, cyber, and other threats. As a scientist, former Secretary of Energy, and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, he has a unique perspective on global warming, energy, and nuclear and other threats. Welcome, Secretary Moniz, and thank you so much for joining Three Takeaways

today. Thank you, Lyn. It is my pleasure. Let's start by talking about energy. Demand for energy is increasing in the US as well as worldwide. The US accounts for about 11% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the increasing demand for energy, the US is consuming both more fossil fuels and more renewables. How do you see the energy situation in the US? Energy production in the United States in multiple technology areas has gone up dramatically. As we all know, renewables have been built very, very aggressively, especially over the last 10 years, and we'll see much more of that.

We are now having a bit of a nuclear renaissance, although we've heard that many times before, and we'll see if nuclear energy does in fact grow. A major interest in nuclear energy, of course, is the absence of greenhouse gas emissions, which then, of course, brings us back to fossil fuels as the source of those emissions. And in the United States, through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, we have seen an enormous increase in the amount of natural gas and of oil produced over the last 15 years especially. But I want to also point out that the greatest single reduction in the United States greenhouse gas emissions,

and we have reduced emissions, has come from the substitution of coal by natural gas, which is much less carbon intensive. And secondly, on the oil front, frankly, global demand has kept increasing, putting aside COVID interruptions, but fundamentally demand has kept increasing. However, the increased US production does not seem to have accounted for that greater demand. What has happened is there's been a shift of market share towards the United States away from the OPEC countries. So we have not really, I think in our production, increased overall oil use globally. However, it does point out, I think, a very important thing,

in my view. A lot of the arguments that one hears around addressing climate change tend to focus on the fuel side. I believe it's the demand side that we have to be working on. We have to create the demand for low emission technologies, and that will come by innovation and cost reduction. Speaking of demand, there have been articles saying that artificial intelligence is an energy hog using as much electricity as small countries. How much impact will artificial intelligence have on energy demand? It's very considerable. We should say specifically for electricity. Right now the growth in demand for various utilities is 80 to 90 percent dominated

by data centers. Data centers not only for AI, but that's part of it, but data centers also for running essentially all of our commerce, all of our financial activities and the like. So until recently, electricity demand in the United States was virtually flat for the better part of 20 years. Now the Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy has just announced they are expecting suddenly demand to be increasing year on year by about 3% nationally. That's a lot. By 2030, data centers will probably account for about 9% of all the electricity supplied in the

United States. So this is a very, very big deal. And I would also add, this load growth is not going to be restricted to data centers. They dominate right now and they are sprouting up everywhere, but we're only at the early stages of further electrifying the economy. What does electrify the economy mean to you? It means shifting, for example, in vehicles from gasoline powered vehicles to electric battery driven vehicles or plug-in batteries. But basically, it's electricity replacing certain fuels.

However, if decarbonization is the objective, then of course, how you make that electricity is critical. And that's where things like nuclear power, where renewables, perhaps the modern geothermal energy, hydropower, all come in as a whole variety of low carbon intensity electricity generation. So again, if we enhance those elements of the power sector and electrify the economy, then we are in fact eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Wind energy in Texas is very inexpensive and Texas has been called the king of wind.

But there's more to the story. What are people missing? Well, what people are missing in Texas, and we have this bad habit of actually looking at data, and some would rather not look at data because it can be inconvenient. So, for example, we looked at a full year, hour by hour, how the wind resource in Texas specifically was so-called dispatched to consumers. And what we found was in that year, there were 90 days, nine zero days, a quarter of the year where there was essentially no wind in Texas. And

that included a period of nine days in a row with no wind. Well, when that occurred, we looked at 2019, the dominant source of electricity in Texas remained natural gas. So when the wind wasn't blowing, you simply dialed up the natural gas. But of course, that produced greenhouse gases. So that's what I mean, that we have to learn how to manage these variable resources. We can't always tell what the resource will be like. And we have to worry about, again, reliability of the grid. You can't tell Texans or anybody

else, oh why don't you just take nine days off from having electricity supply. That would not provide very good job tenure for the utility heads in Texas. It's the whole system we need to design and we have to replace it with alternatives that are low carbon and are comparable in cost. How does the price of energy from different sources in the United States compare? How competitive are renewable prices? That's a difficult question. It may sound like a simple question. It's not so easy.

And the reason is solar energy and wind energy, of course, are the dominant new renewables entering the economy. If one looks at the marginal cost of producing a solar electron or a wind electron, that can be very, very low. However, there are hidden costs in a certain sense because those sources are inherently variable. They are weather dependent. And so they do, as they become very large parts of the economy, they can challenge reliability. We will need backup power. Somebody has to pay for all of that. We can store electricity like with batteries, but only for a couple

of hours really. So what happens when the wind doesn't blow for a week? Well, we need backup and we're going to have to figure out how to pay the full price, how to manage the grid when you have these sources that are not on all the time, that you just can't call on when you want them. The obvious case is solar energy at night, obviously, is not a viable resource, but wind is up and down. I might add, Lynn, there is one other variable here, and that is that if we could connect different regions of the country through high-voltage transmission lines,

well, you know, when the wind isn't blowing in Texas, maybe it is blowing in Oklahoma or Nebraska, and we could, you know, distribute it around to alleviate the problem. But another problem we have in the United States is it's extremely difficult to build infrastructure. So building high voltage transmission, for example, across state lines, I have scars

to show from my tenure as energy secretary from trying to accomplish that. It's very, very difficult. So somehow, again, we need to optimize the entire system to have clean electricity all the time, when we want it, where we want it. And I'll just end this comment by saying we've focused a lot on clean electricity and that is very important. As I've said, it is the lead in decarbonizing the energy economy. However, I think it's now widely, if not universally accepted that clean electricity is absolutely necessary, but it's not going to be enough. We're also going to need very low carbon liquid fuels

for our economy. That's another big technical challenge, how to replace things like gasoline as a fuel when it is, to be honest, very inexpensive. When you think about the amount of energy you get out of a gallon of gasoline, and we have to replace it with alternatives that are low carbon and are comparable in cost.

What would a clean modern electricity system take? In the United States to decarbonize the entire energy economy, so not just electricity but the entire energy economy, So not just electricity, but the entire energy economy. The estimate is that we would need an additional $200 to $300 billion per year of investment all the way out to say mid-century. It's a lot of money, but we think the capital is actually there. It's really making the policy environment, the investment environment, the infrastructure environment such that the financial institutions will say yes when they are presented with a project. And right now, a lot of the projects are not viewed as having a

sufficient risk-reward equation to satisfy the investors. But that's what we need. We need to have a big jump in the amount of investment in clean energy. And that will come when we make those financial investments look stable and profitable. Are there any new technologies that you're excited about that you think will come online in the next few years that are about that you think will come online in the next few years that are affordable, scalable, safe and sustainable? Well, I'd like to expand that to say a decade or so. I'll give you one that sounds far out but is looking very exciting and that is going back to the electricity sector, nuclear fusion.

Now, there's the old joke, you know, that fusion is always 40 years away and always will be. I think the joke has been overtaken by events. I'm not promising, but there are a number of innovative approaches that have attracted, by the way, $7 billion of private capital. So somebody is willing to put their money on the table for this. I think we will know in this decade whether the technology will work to produce commercial electricity. I didn't say it was going to scale in that time period, but I think we'll know the answer. That would be an enormous breakthrough, an enormous breakthrough. So that's, I think, something to watch. In

a different arena, a lot of cost reductions still required, but hydrogen is attracting a lot of attention. Free hydrogen does not occur in nature, but there's a lot of hydrogen in water, H2O. There's a lot of hydrogen in natural gas, methane, CH4. And so the question is getting that hydrogen out of the water, out of the methane, not letting the carbon from the methane get into the atmosphere. And if you have hydrogen, then it becomes almost like carbon-free natural gas in the sense that it has many, many end uses. You can use it for power, you can use it for heat, you can use it for industrial processes.

Right now, too expensive. We go back to that cost issue. So we're working on it. We're working on innovation. Those are just two examples of technology we don't see around us today, but can be enormous in supporting a growing growing clean energy economy. We haven't yet talked about China. China, as you know, accounts for about 30% of global greenhouse emissions.

What is China doing with respect to energy, and what do you think they should be doing? China is the leader, frankly, in deploying clean energy, but they are deploying so much that I think they're also the leader, frankly, in deploying clean energy, but they are deploying so much that I think they're also the leader in deploying coal. Because obviously, as you know, it's a huge country with a huge population, an economy that at least until recently has been growing extremely rapidly, and their energy needs have been growing along with that. It wasn't that long ago that the United States was the largest emitter

of greenhouse gases. And now, of course, China is about three times the size of the United States in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. But they are leading by far in deploying solar energy and deploying wind energy. Of course, we all know that they are producing a lot of the world's electric vehicles, much less expensively, frankly, than we are in the United States or in other parts of the industrialized world. And that's creating some issues since the automobile industry has been such an important part of the industrial base in the United States, in Europe, in Japan, and Korea, et

cetera. So we should recognize that China is producing quality products, advanced technology, producing them less expensively than we are in many cases. We need to compete. There have been several nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants, including Three Mile Island in the US, Chernobyl in Russia, and Fukushima in Japan. How do you see the risks from nuclear energy?

Well, first of all, Chernobyl was using a very outdated technology that would never have been licensed in the West. And the operators were doing some unfortunate experiments, shall we say. In Fukushima, there was a regulatory breakdown. The size of the tsunami which caused that accident, historically it happened at the same size in the same place,

and it was not prepared for. Doesn't change the fact that those accidents caused a lot of damage. Three Mile Island, on the other hand, it was more of a human problem and very importantly, while the reactor was lost, there was essentially no public health impact. So we need to distinguish among these. Now, where are we today? Today, I would say the modern designs are much more advanced in terms of safety issues. The reality is, let's say in the United States, we have by far the biggest fleet of nuclear power plants, the order of 100 in the world, and we've never had an accident that impacted

public health. So today, you are seeing many new reactor designs as well that have what are called passive safety features. Namely, if the systems that are to keep the plant safe go down, the plant will essentially turn itself off. Lots and lots of interesting directions being pursued. So it's an exciting time. And I think the safety issues have been moved to the forefront and we're in pretty good shape there. The risk of a nuclear catastrophe, whether deliberately by accident or miscalculation, seems to be growing. Today there are nine countries which have close to 20,000 nuclear weapons. In

addition, there's radioactive materials from nuclear power plants and other sources. You are the head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. What threats are you most worried about? In terms of the nuclear weapons risks, I think there is no doubt in my mind that the risks are higher today than they have been certainly since the end of the Cold War, but actually I would say going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And that's for a variety of reasons. One is, of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led Russia to make many pronouncements about using nuclear weapons in that context, the so-called battlefield

nuclear weapons. They have not, but they have, for example, changed their nuclear use doctrine recently, and that's, shall we say, a bit nerve-wracking. Secondly, China is growing its nuclear weapons stockpile very substantially. We believe their aim is to have a nuclear weapons stockpile on the same scale as that of the United States and of Russia. That's an issue. Of course, North Korea is the only country to have tested nuclear weapons in this century and continues to work on producing weapons and producing ballistic missiles. We have the situation in Iran where they have not produced a nuclear weapon, but they are a so-called threshold state. They could get over the threshold pretty quickly if they chose to and are enriching uranium

in a way that suggests they want to get very, again, very, very close to the capability of a nuclear weapon. But there are other issues. It's not only the countries with nuclear weapons. There are allies of ours, like Japan and South Korea, for example, that benefit from the United States' so-called nuclear umbrella. That is, we offer them protection in the absence of nuclear weapons.

However, I think it's fair to say, and I'm not saying anything other than what one can read in the newspapers, that the reliability of the United States to come to their assistance is probably being questioned a bit more today than it was in the past for a variety of reasons. Another feature is that the same missiles that can carry nuclear weapons also carry very potent conventional weapons. Well, until it lands, you don't know what it's carrying. So there are all kinds of risks here. And we're very concerned about decision times. You know, it takes about 30 minutes for a ballistic missile to fly from Russia to the

United States. But once you go through identification and all of this, the president probably has about 10 minutes to make a decision, a very, very obviously fateful decision as to whether the data are correct or not. Oh, of course I should add cyber issues, for example, 3D printing, drones, robotics, et cetera. These also offer new challenges to the command and control of our nuclear systems. So we're working hard on those, others are working hard on those, because we should note that those technologies can pose risks, but they also pose opportunities.

What are some specific opportunities that you see? Well, for example, artificial intelligence and its simpler cousin, machine learning are very, very powerful ways using modern computation, of course, to analyze enormous amounts of data and look for very, very small signals. Well, those very small signals could be to try to find entities in various countries that might be involved in nuclear weapons proliferation. We at NTI carried out such an exercise several years ago, and I won't get into the specifics, but let's just say that we did find in one country five or six entities that had not previously been identified and then through machine learning identified very suspicious patterns of trade.

So that's an example where you can use modern technology also in a risk reduction mode. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? One takeaway in the climate space and clean energy space is that we must be able to recognize that forming alliances and forming coalitions across sectors, across boundaries is the only way to make real progress. Stick to our objectives, stick to our goals, stick to our values, but then have the flexibility to make coalitions to actually move in the right direction.

The second takeaway is that in nuclear risk reduction, there are many opportunities to lower risk. For example, there is a risk in every country with nuclear weapons that there could be an accidental use. There could be an accidental use, there could be an unanticipated use. It could come from incorrect data about threats. It could come from cyber intrusions, which could be national or subnational characters. So there's an example where every country with nuclear weapons, as the United States has just done, should do their own review of how they command and control their nuclear weapons to minimize, eliminate ideally,

the risk of accidental use. Third area is China is obviously a huge growing country with great technological capabilities, which it is focusing on. I think we still in the United States have the edge in many areas of innovation, but I believe we should be working with China to economically develop clean energy, develop national security norms that will make everybody safer, everybody more prosperous, everybody living in a cleaner world. Thank you. Thank you for your service and government and thank you for your leadership of NTI to reduce nuclear and other threats. Thank you, Lynn.

Thanks for the conversation. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at 3takeaways.com,

where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynne Toman, and this is 3 Takeaways. Thanks for listening.