Visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can – and the real heroes and sheroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide.

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): In this episode, visionary clean energy entrepreneur Danny Kennedy explores the promise and challenges of the epic civilizational transition to renewable energy. Without doubt, the shift has hit the fan, but will we make the transition in time to avert complete climate breakdown? Danny Kennedy says we can – and the real heroes and sheroes will be millions of clean energy entrepreneurs and startups, in partnership with the determined leadership of Indigenous Peoples arising worldwide.

I’m Neil Harvey. This is “The Charging Twenties: Now is the Time to Build a Solar-Powered Civilization”. On the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Energy is a nation’s master resource. Each global empire has had an idiosyncratic ability to exploit a particular energy source that propelled its rise to economic power. The Dutch learned how to tap wood, wind and water. The British empire fueled its ascendancy on coal. The American empire has dominated with oil.

The cautionary tale is this: No empire has been able to manage the transition to the next energy source. The joker in the deck this time around is the climate imperative to fast-forward the transition off fossil fuels worldwide. It requires the most complex and fiercely urgent transformation in the history of human civilization. Nothing like it has ever been done before.

A new energy economy is going to require the reinvention of every aspect of our industries and lives. It’s going to take visionary leaders committed to a green and fair future, who also have a deep working knowledge of technology, economy and politics. They’ve got to know how to make change happen on a very large scale – all the while fighting ferocious resistance from the retrograde fossil fuel industry desperate to delay its looming demise.

One of these practical leaders is Danny Kennedy. He’s currently CEO of New Energy Nexus, a cutting-edge global nonprofit platform that provides funds, accelerators and networks to drive clean energy adoption and entrepreneurial innovation worldwide. Danny Kennedy spoke at a Bioneers conference.

Danny Kennedy (DK): And today I’m going to talk to you about the mines we need to build and the stuff we need to do to get through the energy transition that we’ve begun this century, and the hard work and the hard choices that we’ve got to make this decade about some tough things, including maybe some holes in the ground that need to be built, because we have to finish the job we’ve begun to drive the solutions of climate change.

The good news is if we do it with a sort of approach in our hearts and heads, we can create a civilization just a decade or two hence which can actually live sustainably on this wonderful spaceship Earth forever. And that’s the prospect that we have to build this decade. This is the time. We are the generation. We always knew that, and now is the time to build.

Host: Danny Kennedy has long been at the forefront of clean energy adoption. Among many hats, he also serves as Managing Director of the California Clean Energy Fund, which finances early-stage companies driving innovation and building equity in the California economy. He has co-founded several clean energy companies, funds and enterprises around the world.

His earlier work beginning in the 1990’s with Greenpeace and Project Underground put him on the front lines of stopping destructive mining and extractive projects. His activism against a gold mine in Indonesia led to his arrest, interrogation, and deportation from Papua New Guinea.

He says the clock has run out for what he calls “fossil fools.” In fact, in 2023 for the first time ever, global investment in renewable energy surpassed investment in fossil fuels. Predictably, the backlash from this zombie industry is fast and furious.

DK: They did damage for 200 years from extraction through pollution, and it was never going to end. We were locked in, by the turn of the century, with China, in particular, having just begun to get its coal out of the ground, to be the factory for the world, as well as to bring hundreds of millions of humans into electricity services like we take for granted in places like the U.S.– India, China do the same.

But we realized that we had a problem, Houston. We had to decarbonize this system of electricity and mobility services that we’d become dependent on in the 20^th century, and we were wondering, pretty legitimately, to be honest, at the turn of the century which technology set would we depend on for our civilization going forward. Would it be fossil fools with carbon capture and storage? No, that’s bullshit, as it turns out. Would it be a nuclear renaissance? No, it’s not going to be that. Would it be wet renewables, wave power and maybe hydro done better, run a river or something or other?

As it’s emerged, as the market has had its head, it’s become clear we’re going to be a solar-powered civilization, and the big nuclear reactor in the sky does plenty of good work, shining its lights on us every day, and we can capture it through photovoltaics and wind turbines, which the wind is transferring the heat on the Earth around. And the reason it’s won the race, the question of which technology would be the winner, is simply cost. It’s the lowest way to produce electricity ever in the history of the world, and we’re seeing that now.

And in 2014, we hit a point we call grid parity when our electricity was cheaper than anyone else’s electricity. And the thing is, the more we do it, the cheaper it gets. It’s called a technology curve versus a resource curve, where a finite thing gets more expensive because it’s scarce the more you use it. This stuff’s getting cheaper the more we build it.

Host: The takeaway is disarmingly simple: Fast-forward the transition to renewables – and electrify everything everywhere all at once. Of course, it’s easier said than done.

DK: Of course there was the problem of [LAUGHTER] when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine. [LAUGHTER] You know the story. We had to fix for that. And so we lent into the periodic table and we did some green chemistry and we came up with the highest energy atoms that we could in lithium, a technology we’d commercialized in the 1970s for our Walkmans and made better through our personal electronics boom in the nineties, and we started putting them in cars, and then on the grid. And so we solved for the problem of storage of all this abundant sunshine that comes to Earth and we can transition into electricity with these batteries that we’re now making at speed and scale.

And thanks to the Chinese, really, for doing that. In 2017, there was a moment where the startup BYD made the fleet of taxis and buses in the city of Shenzhen of 20 million people go electric in one year, and that kind of proved that batteries on wheels could store all the sunshine that they were producing in the nearby electricity markets and go from dirty to clean.

Host: But just how renewable is renewable energy? Is it possible to have a so-called “green” lithium industry if it still requires endless extraction?

Ironically, after starting his career opposing mining, Danny Kennedy now found himself facing the triage of climate disruption: How do we end fossil fuels and also get off the destructive extractive cycle, while we still need mining for the time being to build the clean energy future?

DK: Here’s this stuff called lithium. We thought it was only for pharmaceutical purposes until three Nobel Prize-winning scientists created some batteries out of it in ’71-ish. We used it for Walkmans in its first commercial application.

Then around the turn of the century, some geeks down in Silicon Valley were actually wiring these little rechargeable batteries together and driving their go-kart roadsters around on them, and that became a company we now know as Tesla. And that has disrupted the automobile sector, the oil and gas industry, the grid storage and so forth, all with the incredible reality of this lithium element, which sits in the periodic table right up there with hydrogen and helium – lithium, beryllium, boron – right at the top; very strong energy density and potential for exchange, which is why it’s going to continue to be used in battery chemistries.

Good news is lithium’s very common in the world. In fact, in seawater it exists at significant parts per million and is probably a future source of—from the desalination of seawater. Right now, most of the lithium in the world comes out of hard rock mining in Australia, about 60% of it. We dig rocks up in Australia, put them on ships, take them to China, burn them in furnaces for a few weeks in a sulfuric acid bath, and extract the lithium out of the rock that way.

Another very big resource of lithium and a significant source of lithium in the economy today is in South America in the so-called lithium triangle of Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, where it is coming out of salt waters underground, but they evaporate it through salt ponds. So quite destructive on Indigenous land in Atacama Desert. That’s the other big source that’s expanding in the world.

The world is going to probably 10x this decade or more the need for lithium to drive all the vehicles and do all the things, and electrify everything, so everyone’s scrambling for new resources, new sources and reserves. Trying to produce better green lithium.

Host: But is “green” lithium a contradiction in terms? Here the story gets gnarly – literally.

DK: Here we produce about 10% of California’s electricity with geothermal power plants. The San Andreas fault is squirting water out of the magma, coming up through the geological structures, dissolving everything in its path. And that all comes to the surface, and who knows what that all is. They call it a gnarly brine. That’s the technical term. It’s got a lot of shit in it, and it’s all dissolved at super high temperatures.

They’ve been studying it for 40 years, they’ve been producing this steam to the surface, it’s not a lot of toxics. There are some things in there that we would be careful of in high concentration.  As they bring this hot water off the San Andreas fault to the surface, to get the steam to generate the turbines, the water cools down and a whole lot of salts precipitate out of it. Lithium is one of the salts there that they can take out commercially. To take the salt out of it obviously has an environmental impact. So I mean I’m not saying it’s without footprint. It has a footprint.

The first bottles of lithium solution, which becomes lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, which the precursor chemicals into the lithium battery supply chain, we have sort of all held in our hands in the last months, which is a very exciting thing, because we’ve been talking about this since 2019, when we wrote a report called Building Lithium Valley.

So we’re on the cusp of green lithium with almost zero additional carbon footprint at the scale of about 300 kilotons a year, which was probably what America consumed in 2020, not what it will consume in 2030, but a good chunk of what we need. This system is such that we can extract a certain amount of this material onto the surface into the economy, and two decades hence, we should just be cycling that. We don’t need to go back to the well. We can just keep a recycling system going and use it in perpetuity, which is this wonderful abundant solar-powered civilization stored in lithium that we’ve already got in the system if we do all this right.

Host: Scale matters. The total amount of lithium that’s necessary to mine by 2050 is a fraction of 1% compared with coal, oil and gas. But even if lithium can be recycled at scale in a closed loop within 20 years, how do we avoid replicating the same broken economic paradigm: the extraction of concentrated wealth by giant corporations? 

Once again, the story gets gnarly.

The California lithium project centers on the Salton Sea, an environmental justice calamity caused in 1904 after a dam broke and the Colorado River flooded the Imperial Valley. Today, the Salton Sea’s primary water source is nearby agribusiness farm runoff, which is riddled with fertilizers, heavy metals and toxics. It’s on Indigenous lands long held sacred by tribes, in a poor, largely Latino county whose average family annual income is $13,500 dollars. And the toxic mess has resulted in a poisonous dust that’s killing community members, including children.

What social and economic impacts will industrial-scale lithium mining have on the 180,000 community members? Who will benefit?

DK: One of the things that happened last year with this lithium conversation, because it’s starting to get interesting from the industrial development point of view, like $4 billion of investment were announced last year. I mean, it’s all paper tiger stuff; they’re not real investments until they’re real investments, but, you know, big battery factories are being talked about in this place. OEM, meaning automobile manufacturers, are talking about building things nearby and facilities and so forth – billions and billions of dollars, which this town hasn’t seen for a while. Right?

And the state legislature did impose a tax, which was hard fought. You probably didn’t even hear about it in the news. But this was a big deal because it says initially $400 or $700 a ton, up to $1,000 a ton will be taxed on every ton of lithium extracted from the ground and sold to be recycled into the community for community benefit. We got a lithium severance tax effectively written in the law. There’s no lithium of note being produced, so it doesn’t mean anything right now, but at least there’s that prospect.

This tribal community has this incredible land right, which is kind of a weird twist of fate, which is they can buy 11,000 acres anywhere in this region because they had their land buried by the Salton Sea. So, you know, oh, you want to build a giga factory, LG Chem, you need some land for that? You want that land? I can buy that land, and I’m a sovereign nation that can do whatever is necessary to do it. But the sovereign nation is smart enough to know we want to do that the best way possible.

Host: The Torres Martinez band of the Cahuilla Indian Tribe owns 11,400 acres below the Salton Sea, with rights to purchase 11,500 adjacent acres. Rather than leasing the valuable development rights that will pipeline the profits to corporate headquarters, the tribe is organizing itself as a sovereign nation to reinvent the tribal business economy through its own ownership, development and entrepreneurship.

While protecting its cultural and natural assets, including its language and history, the tribe is designing sustainable development plans, including youth entrepreneurial accelerators.

Jesus Arguelles, a business consultant to the Torres Martinez band, calls it “servant capitalism” intended to create an eco-industrial zone providing good jobs and an inclusive economy.

Needless to say, there are serious issues and concerns. Many Native people are justifiably skeptical of any kind of commercial mining, whose long history of environmental racism and eco-apartheid is well documented. There are also environmental unknowns. Disturbing the deep briny watershed could provoke earthquakes, although there has been marginal such increase from the existing hydropower plants – at least so far. The historical echoes of false promises by techno-utopians and the imperious greed of corporate interests resound throughout the community. Yet at the same time, climate breakdown necessitates the imperative for large-scale action. Welcome to 21st Century triage.

When we return, how California is setting the pace for the clean energy revolution and a just transition that elevates those who’ve been hurt first and worst by petro-colonial legacies – how China and India are electrifying – and how millions of clean energy entrepreneurs may be the heroes and sheroes of this epic transition…

I’m Neil Harvey. You’re listening to The Bioneers…

Host: How fast the massive clean energy transition remains a wild card, but some things are certain: The fossil fuel industry will use every trick in its playbook to obstruct the decarbonization of the economy – and big business will do anything and everything to prevent the democratization of the economy. Again, Danny Kennedy.

DK: I see two big psy-ops in the sort of media and messaging war that’s out there. One is saying that it’s sort of an apples and apples experience, what-about-ism, you know, this transition to clean energy’s going to do just as much destruction, so don’t worry about it, just hang out with fossil fuels. This sort of false equivalency that the mining required for lithium batteries, for example, is just as bad as fossil fuels.

The other is that the start-ups and the innovators and the disrupters in the community, activists and the organizers that are trying to build community wealth through this transition because of the innate justice built into a distributed energy architecture that could be locally-owned and democratically-controlled, they can’t deliver it on time. You’ve got to depend on the big guys.

It’s almost like this is a trap, a script that’s been put into the executive offices of these oil companies over the last few years. They’re repeating and repeating this message, partly to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, which has been their game for 30, 40 years, but also just in case they want to try to capture the initiative and take the market, and do the next century just as they’ve dominated the last.

Host: As the fifth largest economy in the world, California is on a path to 100% renewable energy and a decarbonized economy by 2045. By 2023, it had already reached 31% renewable energy, up from about 4% just a decade earlier.

Can California’s ambitious trajectory go national and global? Given that we’re already in climate overtime, can we quicken the pace? Danny Kennedy says the kinds of entrepreneurship and startups that New Energy Nexus supports are crucial.

DK: And so here we are in the 2020s. We’ve got to just electrify everything. There are a billion machines here in the States that have to be switched over from thermal system to electric, and 10 billion systems around the world.

We’re obviously going too slow, and we need to speed this up. California 2035, not 2045. Come on, people. We’ve got to build some new muscles. We really have to do things differently, including build stuff. We’ve got to go back to the future, really, and the indigenous wisdom and the leadership of communities of color, [APPLAUSE] the people who have been hurt first and worst, those living with the legacies of fossil fuels that are actually leading the way.

The lift we have to do this decade, we’re less than half of our economy electric right now, and that’s a big lift. We’ve built a lot of renewables that we can’t interconnect to the grid because of transmission delays and pipelines and things.

Where we are seeing leadership for this in the States, I could talk about the amazing people in Standing Rock that are standing up wind farms as well, or the Yurok up in Northern California that have built out the resilience microgrid at Blue Lake Rancheria and are helping the offshore wind industry grow out of Humboldt Bay.

But, I have the privilege of working with 150 amazing folk around the world, supporting start-ups in many countries to get this energy transition done. We support diverse entrepreneurs with justice and equity in, so we get justice and equity out of this transformation. We’ve had 880 companies come up since I joined the outfit in 2016. We’ve supported thousands of entrepreneurs, put $50 million into them, and we’re trying to redress the gender injustice that’s inherent in the energy industry, as well as in start-ups, seeing more generally with some success, although, always more work to do. And we’re seeing this upswelling, this Cambrian explosion of this opportunity that is actually happening in real time in the world.

Host: Addressing climate disruption is intrinsically a global game. No country can do it alone. In particular, China and India are make-it-or-break-it players.

Just on rooftops, China is supplying 50 gigawatts of solar annually, the energy equivalent of what 15 nuclear power plants produce in one year. It’s also still burning gobs of coal and building coal plants.

Meanwhile, India has adopted a potentially game-changing national solar mission. It’s playing out in unexpected places where it really counts.

DK: Just like five years ago, India was being talked about as this ticking time bomb on climate because they’re going to get electricity for all their people, and now they’re doing it with solar and wind at a scale and speed which is almost hard to imagine. And that is spilling over into their mobility markets, where vehicle miles traveled in India are mostly on two and three-wheel vehicles. I think the rickshaws in Delhi or the mopeds in Mumbai, 85% of people get around that way, and that is all electrifying because this low-cost, abundant electricity is spilling out of the system and charging batteries all over the market. And that is actually destroying demand for oil in the world, like millions of barrels a day is actually being reduced from global demand by the electrification of mobility.

And we’re seeing this everywhere. In Indonesia, we’ve got a company in our portfolio that’s doing it for hot swappable batteries for the two wheelers there. We’ve got a company that actually came up in Berkeley, California, called Powerhive, that is taking boda bodas electric in East Africa. Boda bodas are like the taxis in Kenya that they’ve got hot-swappable battery platforms for.

Host: Similar kinds of radical shifts are now disrupting marine transportation. Hundreds of millions of humans move around rivers and coasts in small gas-powered, emissions-belching boats that are now starting to go electric too, and it’s much cheaper.

One challenge to meet the needs of the transition is the lack of a U.S. manufacturing base. Another is the dearth of training for the people and skills needed, as well as practical support for small businesses.

Now, says Danny Kennedy, is the time to unite to build a solar-powered civilization…

DK: We literally need millions of businesses to deliver the electric everything – the appliances, the induction stoves in the houses, the marine transportation, mechanic shops to switch out the motors or whatever. You know? And there’s not enough getting into that game. And then there’s not enough workers to work in those workforces. Just electricians to electrify everything, you need electricians. We’re short at least 100,000 in the United States for what we think we need done. The rest of the world, forget about it.

And this I think is actually the big one: it’s geopolitics. We are talking about “them and us”, and we’re creating a desire to dominate these supply chains and these industries, instead of we are all in this together, we must collaborate, we have one decade to do this, people, and we cannot fall out. You know?

The saber rattling is frightening to me, and I’m not pretending the Chinese are above this at all either, but we need to get together and not let the scarcity mindset of the past and these men and their toys and the military industrial complex and their businesses drag us and our children into a distraction rather than do the work that needs done this decade.

Now is the moment. The 2020s is the decade we knew was going to be the turning point inflection. We are on the path. We must stay the course. Do not get distracted. This is the time to build. These are the charging ‘20s, the time that history will look back upon in which we built the solar-powered civilization we all yearn for. Shine on! [APPLAUSE]

Host: Danny Kennedy, shining on.

“The Charging Twenties: Now is the Time to Build a Solar-Powered Civilization”