TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Roger Duncan (RD)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: November 16, 2018
LOCATION: Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson
SOURCE MEDIA: HD video
REEL: 3476

[Numbers mark the time codes for the interview.]

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It’s November 16, 2018. And we are in Austin, Texas. And we have the good fortune to be visiting with Roger Duncan, who has served Austin in many ways. Has been a councilperson for the Austin City Council and he’s been a director for Austin Planning Environment and Conservation Services and—and has been a General Manager at Austin Energy, and, in more recent years, has taught at the University of Texas. And with that very brief and sketchy introduction, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us.

00:00:57
RD: Thank you for coming. Appreciate it.

DT: Yeah. Well, we usually start these interviews by asking if there was a—a starting point for your interest in environmental protection or the natural world. And I—I was wondering if you could put the finger on—on any early experience that might have gotten you off and running.

00:01:16
RD: Well I—I re—decided I wanted to be an environmentalist at the first Earth Day in 1970. I was a student at the University of Texas, philosophy major, did not really know what I wanted to do with my life at that point. But I remember at that first Earth Day that I—I felt that this was an important thing to do with my life, that I couldn’t think of a more important endeavor to help other people and to be—make a meaningful impact in life than environmental work. And, at that time, I didn’t know what aspect of environmentalism I would get into.
00:02:00
I really didn’t know anything about clean energy or efficiency or renewables, which I later focused on. But that’s—that’s where it started.

DT: And was—maybe you could describe what Earth Day was like. Was—were there teach-ins or were there demonstrations, or there were workshops? What—what was going on?

00:02:21
RD: Well I—that first Earth Day, there was just a lot of crowds of students like myself and—and there was a little teach-ins and classes on the meaning of environmentalism. And—and, of course, Senator Gaylord Nelson started it. And it was just an awakening at that time that the environment was an issue that we hadn’t really thought about before. Later on, I—I ran into that and—when I started running for City Council later because I became involved in environmentalism and I became involved in politics at the University of Texas.
00:03:09
Of course, that was the anti-war years in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. And I became an anti-nuclear activist at—at that time. And we were—in Austin, we were making the decision to get involved in the South Texas Nuclear Project. There had been a big energy crisis here in Austin back then. And the city had just decided to get involved with the South Texas Nuclear Project as well as other power plants. And I had joined other people and protesting against that on—on the grounds of nuclear waste and safety and so forth at that time and the environmental issues.
00:03:56
And one thing led to another and pretty soon I became very involved in politics and decided to run for City Council in Austin. Th—it was interesting because, as an anti-nuclear activist, the question that everyone was asking me was well if we don’t have a nuclear power plant, how are we going to keep the lights on? What’s your alternative to nuclear power? And that’s when we really learned about energy efficiency. Energy efficiency, at that time, was a radical idea.
00:04:36
Right before my campaign started around that time, the Environmental Defense Fund had—had formed and they had filed a lawsuit in California against Pacific Gas and Electric Utility [00:04:49 inaudible] a new power plant that PG&E wanted to build. And they had the position that if you did energy efficiency through light—more efficient lightbulbs and so forth, that you could avoid building a new power plant. And, at that time, that was a radical ideal. No one really thought that was possible or had thought about it.
00:05:13
And so we adopted that as a po—campaign platform for my campaign that if I got elected, we would try to get out of the nuclear project and we would establish energy conservation programs and solar and—and get into renewable energy and energy efficiency. And that was my main campaign platform at that time.

DT: And is—you—you felt like there was enough support and interest in environmental issues that that could be a main plank in your platform?

00:05:44
RD: Yes, and—and I—and—and it was. It wasn’t the only plank. I was a neighborhood conservation person at the same time and—and some other issues. But that was—that was my main platform and there was plenty of support for that. As I say, Austin, at that time, had just gone through an energy crisis. We had almost run out of electricity in a cold winter. Holly Power Plant, at that time, was running on fuel oil and we had an ice storm and the fuel trucks couldn’t get into Austin from the ice storm.
00:06:22
And I remember watching on TV, we came within 24 hours of the lights going out in the city. And so the power plant future of the city was a big issue at that point.

DT: And I guess this is in the era of the Middle Eastern blockade, boycott. And—and so not only was maybe supply questionable but the price is going up a lot for traditional fossil fuels.

00:06:50
RD: That’s right. And, of course, the Arab Oil Embargo was a big turning point for energy conservation and efficiency in the United States, not only for the automobile, but people like Amory Lovins and Art Rosenfeld in California and Socolow in Princeton and others—these physicists, for the first time, were putting for the bold ideal that we could do the same thing we’re doing now but use less energy. And so I took that platform and ran with it.

DT: And—and you were successful and you got on Council?

00:07:27
RD: Successful. We got on Council. We established a new city department called the Resource Management Department. And the first thing we did—I—I brought in Amory Lovins at that time. Amory—this was before the Rocky Mountain Institute and such. Amory was going around helping people and we brought him in to write the first energy conservation plan for the City of Austin. And, based on that plan, the first thing we did was issue rebates for air conditioners—to go to higher efficiency air conditioners.
00:08:04
And then we built upon that and—and started developing other incentives for going to other energy efficiency technology. And we had to deal with all the issues that—the skepticism from the utility and others that this would actually work. So it was interesting time.

DT: Okay. It’s—it’s interesting to me that—that—that the—the utility, which is municipally owned here, right?

00:08:33
RD: That’s correct.

DT: Went—went with incentives rather than requirements, that y’all were using some market tools. Is that—is that correct?

00:08:40
RD: That’s correct. And, you know, at first—the utility was not supportive of this at first. And so that’s why we established a separate city department called the Resource Management Department that ran all the conservation programs and not the electric utility. Now we were taking money from the electric utility but because it’s a municipal utility and there’s a transfer from the utility to the city government. Instead of paying shareholders dividends, the city gets a transfer from the utility.
00:09:14
And so we were taking that money and using it for the rebates and incentives and the energy conservation programs as a separate department from the utility. They certainly were not happy with that at the beginning. They thought it was a waste of money and, at first, they just—they do—it wo—wouldn’t work, that you actually wouldn’t be saving enough electricity to offset future growth and so forth. It was—it was interesting to watch the evolution over time because, at first, the utility was saying, “Oh this won’t work. It’s a waste of money.”
00:09:49
And then as it started working, it went, “Oh heck, this is dropping our revenues. This is really hurting us.” And so we had to deal with the revenue aspect of the utility over time. And eventually in 19—this was in 1981 when we established the Resource Management Department—in 1998, we merged that with the electric utility and made it part of the utility. But, by that time, we were greening the entire utility, moving more aggressively into renewable energy and—and—and plans. But the city was very supportive in doing that.

DT: So just a moment ago, you said that—that the—the city was offering these rebates to encourage people to buy more efficient appliances including, for example, a HighSEER air conditioning. And—and I—if I understood you right, this kind of tool is so effective that soon people were not interested in buying less efficient appliances. And—and you were able to maybe change some of the code to—to make that a more superior [overlapping conversation].

00:10:59
RD: Yes, when w—when we started out, we gave a rebate to go above code. The code, at that time, was for a 10SEER air conditioner. And the higher SEER, the more efficient they are. So we gave a rebate for 12SEER car—air conditioners if you bought it. It turned out to be extremely successful program. It turned out to be so successful that we found out later there was a study done by LCRA comparing Austin to San Antonio. And when they looked in all the appliance stores here versus San Antonio, th—the stores in Austin weren’t even stocking 10SEER air conditioners anymore because 85 percent of all the air conditioners being bought in Austin were going through our program.
00:11:49
And so they just stopped stocking it—10SEER. So, at that point even if you didn’t go through our program, if you bought an air conditioner in Austin, you got a ho—higher efficiency air conditioner. And then later we were able to move the code up to 12 so it was the requirement and then move our rebates up to 14SEER. And, by controlling both the city side of the regulation on code and the rebates and incentives side from the utility, we were able to stair-step and increase over time the efficiency of the air conditioners.
00:12:28
And it was a case of truly moving the marketplace in Austin. There was just a different market in Austin than in other places.

DT: Well so it sounds like you had more tools than many City Council people have and that—that the City of Austin owns its own utility. Is that—is that true?

00:12:48
RD: Oh it—it—yes, it turns out that’s an extremely important dynamic because I—I’ve gone to other parts of the country at their request to talk about how they could institute certain energy efficiency programs is a tremendous advantage to—for a municipality to own its own utility because you can do certain things with regulations like building codes and ordinances on the city side, and then complement them with rebates and incentives and money from the utility side.
00:13:20
And working together, you have so many more advantages. I—I would go to cities that didn’t have their own utilities and they were depending on federal grants or state grants to do what I was spending millions of dollars on every year coming from the utility and the City.

DT: I think that—that you were very active with the Municipal Energy Conservation Program from just the very beginning of your term on council. Did you feel like you had any debates about that on the council or was the council all in—all in agreement and consensus to do these things?

00:14:02
RD: The majority of the council always supported it over the years. There were councilmembers from time to time who were against it, who thought it was a waste of money. They made the argument that oh, if this was so good, people would do it anyway. There’s no need to give them incentives for saving money. And it just doesn’t work that way for—for several different reasons. But it was very important that a majority of the City Council, as far as I know since the early eighties, have always supported energy efficiency and renewable energy.
00:14:39
And without that kind of support, we wouldn’t have made this transformation.

DT: Well and—and it—it seems like the council—even, you know, if this is over 35 years ago, was pretty conservation minded in other aspects. I think that—that you helped lead a number of green initiatives about water quality and landscape ordinance and…

00:15:02
RD: Yes.

DT: I was hoping that you could talk about some of the other things that you were working on when you were on Council.

00:15:06
RD: Okay. Well, we did the first landscape ordinance in the city and that—that’s been gratifying actually as I drive around because when—Austin is, of course, developing a lot right now—but every time you see a—a—a—a old lot that was a hundred percent parking lot or something, they build something new, they have to put in the hedges and the small bushes and trees and all now. And that’s part of the Landscape Ordinance, and, over time, redevelopment that makes a real difference.
00:15:38
And we started water conservation programs, which became more and more important as time move—moved forward. Again, there was resistance to it. People were saying well we take water out of the river; we put it back in the river, why do you need to conserve it? They weren’t thinking about the treatment cost and the availability of fresh water and so forth. So we did those programs.

DT: Could you give some examples of the water conservation initiatives that you were trying in the eighties?

00:16:12
RD: Well, we were, at that time, and I—and I’m trying to remember at what time different technologies came into effect, but we—there was some low flow toilets that were being experimented at the time that we had. And—and, of course, we were trying—we realized very early that in Austin…

[phone rings]

00:16:37
RD: The water conservation at the time—we really realized very early that summer irrigation was the main problem. So it was mainly just educational programs. We didn’t really have the advanced technology that we have now and drip irrigation and rainwater harvesting, so forth, that came later. And there weren’t much incentives—it was mostly educational programs to begin with with water conservation. There were some other programs that we initially started like the Hazardous Home Collection Program.
00:17:18
We realized that a lot of the stuff going into our landfill was going to be causing a problem in the future. And so I remember we held a home collection day out at Toney Burger Center in the parking lot. And one day where we said if you’ll come out, we will collect your hazardous chemicals and it described the paints and solvents and batteries and other stuff that we didn’t want people putting in the landfill. And we were overwhelmed. I mean, the line was just way out into the highway. We went into the evening trying to collect everything.
00:17:55
It was just a huge response. And so we did it once or twice more each year and then finally just committed to the funds to establish a permanent center that we have now for people to go and drop off their hazardous home chemicals and—and waste. So those were some of the early programs we did with that program.

DT: Oh what you’ve said just makes me think of se—several questions. One is, with the landscape ordinance, that seems like sort of an aesthetic initiative, that you were trying to green the city, make it more beautiful. And—and I—I think it’s interesting because it’s different from some of the energy and water initiatives that were really financial in many ways. And I was curious if there’s di—they’re different constituencies or different rationale for doing these things that are really more about aesthetic?

00:18:52
RD: Well there are. And—and even within the broad environmental movement, there—there are certainly different constituencies that focus on different aspects. I remember Beth Brown, at that time, started the city’s recycling program and was the first person to bring the attention that we—we ought to establish some side of—curbside collection of recyclables. And—and, at that point, again, that was sort of a radical ideal. We had architects that actually came in to us with the landscape ordinance and it was more an aesthetic thing at first but the environmentalists supported it because of its environmental impact and—and such.
00:19:39
And—and a—I’ve seen that over my entire career, that you will find certain programs that will put together different constituencies. Later on, we’re probably talk about electric vehicles and all. And, on a national level, we put together a coalition that wasn’t just environmentalists but had to be auto makers and national security people and electric utilities for revenue and all. There’s various constituency come in with their special interests and can join together to accomplish something that isn’t purely the environmental goal that are motive that you first started out with.

DT: I—I’m also sort of hearing an echo between the energy efficiency incentives y’all offered but it sounds like you’re also trying to get some water conservation movement by, I gather, helping incentivize people to buy low flow toilets, low flow showerheads. Is that correct?

00:20:47
RD: Yes. That—that came a little later, but certainly we had incentives and rebates for low flow toilets and showerheads. And then, after that, we started rebating for rainwater harvesting collection, the rain barrels that people could buy very simply. And then we had some incentive programs for xeriscaping. Xeriscaping was a major effort because it went right at that heart of the peak of the water use in the summer for irrigation.
00:21:26
And we had to do a—a big education program with all the landscapers in the cities and the developers as to what were native plants and—and what used mo—more water or less water and so forth.

DT: Something else I understood you—you were involved in is—is trying to get some, I guess, sort of intellectual capital and staffing within the city departments. I mean, didn’t you start—help start the Environmental Department and Natural Resources Department to try to have some internal resources y’all could tap to—to develop these programs?

00:22:03
RD: Yes. That was—that was very important. We—we pulled together—actually Camille Barnett, City Manager at that time—I had left the City Council. I decided not to run for a third term. And Camille Barnett, the City Manager, came to me and said that she wanted to combine the environmental aspects of some other departments—there was the Resource Management Department that I had established, but there was also the Solid Waste Collection Service within the Public Works Department.
00:22:39
And then there was Water Quality efforts being talked about in another department and—and water and wastewater utility and the Water Conservation within the Water and Wastewater. And so we combined those into the Environment and Conservation Services Department, put them under one umbrella. And—and, of course, that’s very valuable because then you can play off some synergies with each other of water and energy conservation. And when we did that, it really land—led to the first green building program in—in North America actually, which was a major—major step for us.
00:23:19
I remember Mike Myers was a—a person that I had hired earlier over energy conservation and Doug Seiter was with him, and they came to me one day and said that there was this guy named Pliny Fisk. And he had established something called the Center for Maximum Building Potential. And it was a concept that instead of looking at just energy conservation or water conservation or landscape or whatever that you had to look at the whole building and the synergies involved with them and combine it into one effort and he called it “Green Building”.
00:24:05
And so I said that was great. Let’s see if we can do something with that. And, at the time, I was on a national committee called The Urban Consortium Energy Task Force. And it was a group of—of—of cities and they had—they had formed a group to work on energy matters. And we got money from the Department of Energy to give out as grants. And so I got a little $75,000 grant through the Urban Consortium Energy Task Force from the Department of Energy to establish a green building rating system.
00:24:44
And so the first time we worked with Pliny and—and our group to set up how you would rate a building. And it had energy conservation and water conservation and air quality and building materials in it looking up the embedded energy and the building materials—all that in one rating system. And that was the first program of its sort. We won the award in Rio de Janeiro in—in that year, 1990 I think it was. That’s the first green building program in North America. And that was the—that was one of the starting points for the green building movement in the country.
00:25:27
Doug Seiter from my staff joined with other people and established the U. S. Green Building Council and worked on the first LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] Certification Program. It was an extension of work that we and other cities had started to do for our ratings—our ratings system for buildings. And so having all of those sections in one department—water conservation, energy and so forth—led us to start looking at buildings as a whole instead of piecemeal efforts for conserving this or preserving that.

DT: I—I think I understand that—that yo—you were not only pushing these policies at the city level and—and working with your, you know, partners across the country, but you were also trying out some of these ideas in your own home. And I was wondering if you could offer a few examples of—of ideas that you were experimenting with at your residence?

00:26:24
RD: Well, yes. After I had been doing this for, I don’t know, ten or twenty years or so, we bought this house. This house was not built as a green building house. And so we were faced with renovation. And it—it’s much more difficult to green a house that’s already built, that wasn’t designed that way to begin with. But we did some traditional things. We went with high efficiency air conditioning. We sealed the ducts. That’s an interesting story behind that because the program I had for the air conditioning efficiencies and, as you mentioned earlier, we brought in engineers to do real engineering studies on all this.
00:27:14
And one of the things we found out early on is we weren’t getting the energy savings that we were supposed to be getting from these high energy air conditioners. And, of course, you know, yo—you’ve got to prove that this actually works. And we were showing that there was a problem here. And we were one of the first to figure out that the duct system—the air conditioning ducts that run through buildings—were leaking and leaking badly. We were losing 30-40 percent of the cold air going from this high efficiency in—into the outside and all from these ducts.
00:27:50
And so we were one of the first to point out to Department of Energy and the rest of the nation that you had to seal these air conditioning ducts before you offered rebates and incentives for a high efficiency air conditioning. And so we did that in this house afterwards and we did the rebates. And—and there’s other things. The carpet here is made out of recycled soda bottles—plastic—and—and looks and—and wears very well. And it’s got the traditional low flow toilets and such and the xeriscape landscaping out front and in the back.
00:28:30
And one of the biggest things that we did with this house was take the swimming pool that we have in back and convert it to a koi pond with rainwater. And I have a—I have a—close to 4,000 gallons of rainwater harvesting systems set up and it’s a hundred percent rainwater system. And it provides a wildlife refuge. We have not only koi, but we have a lot of frogs, which we love and dragonflies, and—and other wildlife for a little sanctuary here in the neighborhood.

DT: And was there also some non-toxic things that you tried in the house?

00:29:10
RD: Yes, like low VOC paints, for instance. We—we looked at getting paints that would not give off the fumes that you normally get from paint structures. And then we looked at other materials that we could that were sustainable, you know, from sustainable wood materials and such. But a lot of the stuff, by the time we did the house, were pretty well established in the sustainable community at that time.

DT: Maybe we can talk about no just what you’re doing on a building by building level but also I think that while you were with the Planning Environmental and Conservation Services Department you were involved in the redevelopment of a whole neighborhood, of Mueller Airport.

00:30:05
RD: Mueller Airport Redevelopment was a great project. I was really only involved at the very beginning, in getting it started. I—I moved over to the utility not long after that and we brought in some great consultants from San Francisco that did the planning. But it was a tremendous opportunity there because it’s a huge track of land in the center of the city and that the city owned, and whereas, with our other programs, we were trying to cajole or require or incentivize developers to build green building and do transit oriented development and so xeriscaping, all that.
00:30:44
On Mueller, we could just say we’re going to do it. All the buildings are going to be green building and whatever water conservation measures we wanted to put in place were built in from the very beginning and designed. We looked at whe—grey water reused from the water utility coming in. Now, for instance, the Mueller development has the highest concentration of electric vehicles and rooftop solar of any neighborhood in the United States, more electric vehicles per block and more solar on the roof than anywhere else.
00:31:23
And you can do that because we designed the electric grid in that area to handle it. Most neighborhoods couldn’t handle that kind of electric loads that—of old neighborhoods, but we were able to design a—an electric grid and then got incentives from both the city and the federal for electric vehicles and solar rooftops and—and established the Pecan Street Project out there to look at the data collection from all this.
00:31:57
And—and it’s been a tremendous help, not only for Austin, but for communities all around the world on the data that we’re getting from all the conservation and renewables measures that we concentrated on this one electrical circuit and the impact that it has.

DT: Well and I guess if you concentrate all these good features in a neighborhood, you get a lot of synergies that feed back on one another. Is that…?

00:32:24
RD: That—that—that’s correct. And—and the people out there love it. It’s a very—it’s a very people oriented space with walking areas and—and green space and such. And it’s been a very successful project.

DT: Did—did you take some lessons from Mueller to this—I think it’s called Sustainable Communities Initiative—were you active in that as well?

00:32:52
RD: I was active in that. We started the Sustainable Communities Initiative—actually I was named a Sustainability Officer for the city for a while, which was—which was neat because no other city in the country had a sustainability officer. Now several do. But, again, we were able to take, just like with green building, and say for new development instead of just doing piecemeal requirements that you do, you ought to do green building or you ought to do water conservation or this or that, that we made a whole checklist and said things like transit oriented development.
00:33:34
You know, how far are you from bus stops and walking spaces from the nearest grocery store and so forth? How does, you know, how does your—are you building a home so that they are prepared for such things as electric vehicles in the future and so forth? And so we were able to take a more of a checklist approach and then incentivize the developer to—by expediting the development process for them if they in—went to—by the Sustainable Communities Initiative. And so that was—that was very helpful.

DT: So it sounds like there—there’s this whole ‘nother tool that you could use to encourage sort of conscientious development is—is to streamline the permitting process?

00:34:22
RD: Yes. You know, we found that, particularly in a place like Austin, that is a lot of development going on, the permitting development process is very difficult to get through. Some of it is environmental regulations and such. We found that expediting the permit process was much more valuable to the developers than lowering the cost of the permits or other incentives. You know, if you will go with this green building, we’ll move you up to the front of the line in getting your permits and processing it through.
00:34:59
And, of course, that’s a lot of money to them in terms of their bank loans and so forth in getting the construction financing and such.

DT: I—I—I think I understand that—that—see from 1998 to 2004, you were vice president of Austin Energy and you were overseeing conservation renewables and environmental policy. And—and I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that and work that you were doing and some of the tradeoffs you had between different kinds of incentives and—and maybe more fr—free programs, you know, trying to encourage people to have renewables or efficient appliances and then, on the other hand, weather stripping and insulation. Seems like you had lots of prongs in your program.

00:35:46
RD: There—there—there was and—and it was a—it was a very good experience to move the conservations programs, frankly, into the electric utility because whereas there was conflict before, you had to resolve that. And—and there were real issues on the electric utility side with the—the—the—the conservation and efficiency and renewables programs. And one of the things we ran into very early on actually, is that in efficiency programs, you want to incentivize things that get the biggest bang for the buck, that reduce energy demand the most.
00:36:28
Well most of the energy that is being used and wasted are in the more affluent part of towns. They have the bigger homes that use more energy. They have the bigger devices and the—lots of air conditioning and such. And, frankly in the lower income sections of the town, there wasn’t that much energy being used. So if you get a map of where our rebates and incentives were going, it was going to the wealthier parts of the city. And that’s a big concern. You know, the City Council says well we’re not benefitting really on low income community and the answer is well no you’re not; they can’t afford to buy new high efficiency air conditionings and such.
00:37:14
But we had the advantage of not only the utility being owned by the city, but the city itself, and so we could transfer funds from the utility to the city and we established things like weatherization programs. We would choose 750 homes a year based on low income criteria and then weatherize them for free. Many of the homes actually were in such poor condition that we had to get Travis County to join us and put up money to bring in—repair the homes to get them up to the code where when you insulated them and made them more energy efficient, you could actually put in high efficiency air conditioning and systems and so forth.
00:38:05
And so we were able, again, just like with the—the rebates earlier, to balance the city side of—of regulations and social programs from the city with programs from the utility that really were targeted more at saving energy from where the energy was being mostly used in waste which—which was the higher income parts of the city.

DT: So there was sort of a—a tradeoff between the—trying to provide some equity and benefits on the east side, the poor side of town, and—and maybe the cost effectiveness and—and the energy effect that you were getting on the west side of town with these bigger units and appliances and devices.

00:38:51
RD: Yes. And—and that’s very important because, as a utility, you really under—under the law and with the bondholders and all, you ha—you need to show that the money that you’re spending is benefitting the rate payers for the utility. And so we could show that energy efficiency was preventing future power plants and transmission lines and saving money, but that was hard to show in low income areas of the city where, you know, frankly, you weatherize some of these homes, they may use more energy than when you weatherized than—than before you weatherized them.
00:39:35
And the reason was people with very low income and very—houses that needed repair and all, they couldn’t afford to turn on their air conditioners on hundred degree days. And when we repaired the homes and—and sealed the holes in the roof and so forth, put in higher insulation, they could turn on air conditioners when they really needed to and they may actually be using more energy than before they were weatherized. And—but that wasn’t a problem because it was a social program from the city, as opposed to a rebate from the utility that we had to justify, in terms of efficiency savings on the utility side.

DT: That helps. From—see if I’ve got the calendar right here. From 2004 through 2008, you’re Deputy General Manager at Austin Energy for Distributed Energy Services, green building, energy conservation, air quality, government relations—it sounds like a big portfolio. But I had some particular questions because it—it—up to now, you’ve been talking about I guess sort of megawatts. You know, how can you make the—the homes and offices and industries here use less energy, but—but you were also simultaneously, through Austin Energy, investing in a lot of renewables, and—and then also trying to figure out what to do with legacy investments in—in nuclear and coal. And I was hoping you could talk about—about those experiences.

00:41:25
RD: Yes. And, again, it—it—it—it—it was very good to be working from the utility side in this because the reality is that you had to keep the lights on. And Austin was growing very fast, has been for decades. And so you had to figure out how you were going to meet that new energy need. And the conflict was you always want to go with the cheapest source of new electricity for the rate payers and that may not be the cleanest source. And if you’ve got an environmental city—oriented City Council, as we did, how do you balance the extra cost of going with renewables and such?
00:42:13
We were and it—we’re in a very fortunate position in Austin in the sense that we have access to West Texas wind. And in early 2000 or so, Austin joined with LCRA and did the—bought power from the first wind turbines in West Texas. And there was a federal program at the time that gave production tax credits. And so the cost of that electricity was not that expensive. And as the technology developed more, wind power became relatively cheap. So we couldn’t really do solar at that time, which was very expensive still, but the relatively in—inexpensive wind was something that we could start feathering into our system as the load growth occurred in—in the city, while we still maintained our nuclear plants and our coal plants and so forth to beat the baseload.
00:43:17
And we were fortunate in that the wind power technology really took off. And we were—we were riding that—that wave and we established—we established something called the Green Choice Program. And the Green Choice Program was a way to give our customers the opportunity to buy environmental energy. If a customer was environmentally oriented and they wanted to power their home with wind power instead of with coal or nuclear, we devised a method for them, theoretically, to do that.
00:44:02
And I say “theoretically” because the electric grid doesn’t work so that if you buy wind power from West Texas, that there are—there’s not green electrons that flow from West Texas to your house here in Austin. It—it’s sort of like a water system. You put in power at one place and you take out water or power at another place and it—it, you know, the water or electrons don’t flow from one into another like that. But it was an accounting system. And we said that we would buy—make up a number—we’ll buy a hundred megawatts of wind and then we will sell a hundred megawatts of Green Choice power.
00:44:45
And people who wanted to buy that could—could pay a certain amount. Well when we were trying to figure this out, as to how to do it, we hit upon a—a mechanism that turned out to be brilliant in hindsight. We were looking at buying—purchasing contracts for wind power from West Texas and they were ten-year fixed contracts at a certain price. And it was about 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. Now on your electric bill in Austin, you have a base rate and you have what’s called a fuel charge. And a fuels charge is the pass-through.
00:45:28
In other words, if—it—it fluctuates from year to year based on whether you’re using natural gas or coal or nuclear or whatever, and wind. And we said okay, if you buy Green Choice, we’ll take that fuel charge on your bill and we will charge you a pass-through—2.8 cents—the exact same thing that we’re paying for the, you know, we won’t take a profit off of it and—but we will—you will pay the exact amount we’re paying for the contract for the wind and furthermore, we will lock in your fuel charge for ten years because that’s our contract for wind.
00:46:08
We’re not making any money off of it but it’s—you can say that you’re being powered by wind for that ten years. Well the environmentalists in the community loved it, of course, but pretty quickly after that, the big businesses in Austin, the big semiconductor manufacturers, in particular, have huge energy bills and they’re always looking at this. And they realized that it was a fuel hedge, that gas was going up in their mind and it fluctuated and if they could lock in their fuel charge for ten years for planning purposes, they wanted it.
00:46:48
And so I ran into a problem because they suddenly bought up all the Green Choice that we had. I couldn’t get enough contracts from wind to satisfy everything. One year we actually had to hold a lottery for Green Choice and—and pull balls out of a basket to see who got to—to buy the Green Choice because—so we could reserve some for our environmental customers and residential customers, as well as the big industry. And, for that reason, you know, we were—we were buying all the wind as fast as they could build it.
00:47:28
And that’s why we led all utilities in the nation for nine years in renewable energy sales. And it was based on that Green Choice mechanism.

DT: Well and—and did that—that sort of experience of being able to—to lock in a pass-through fee, a, you know, the fuel charge win over any converts to the merits of—of green energy, renewable energy, because I guess a lot of your fossil fuels are—are real volatile and…?

00:47:59
RD: Well it certainly locked in our big industry here in Austin. They loved it. And—and then, even later, the—we got more converts because the—the bigger businesses started to see that wind, in particular, wasn’t more expensive. I mean, there was this concept that oh, renewable energy’s just more expensive than fossil fuels and coals and so forth and that used to be true, but it wasn’t the case with wind. Now even solar is cheaper.
00:48:34
And, in fact, if you look at all the new power plants being built in this country for the last, you know, the—probably five to eight years or so, it’s all either natural gas, wind, or solar because they’re just—they are literally cheaper than building coal and nuclear and—and some of the other fossil fuel alternatives.

DT: Well you mentioned solar power. Can you talk about how you got solar power into the—the energy mix for—for Austin?

00:49:04
RD: Well, we did buy two different mechanisms. We first started offering rebates for rooftop solar on people’s homes. And I set up a mechanism again where we would pay a portion of the cost so that with all the rebates, it—it’s sort of an—an art thing. You’re trying to figure out here’s the base cost. Here’s what it’ll cost you to go to something more efficient or renewable, let’s set a rebate somewhere in between so the customer still pays more, but they get it back over a few years—a quick payback.
00:49:43
So we set up incentives for solar and said if solar dropped in price, we’ll drop the incentives with it over time. And we looked at utility scale solar and we built—at the time, the thirty megawatt plant that we built out at Webberville was the largest solar plant in the world for a brief period of time, I think it was a month or two or something, before somebody was building something bigger. But we looked at land we already owned, which was so sweet in some respects. The Webberville site was where the coal plant was going to be built from many years ago that we avoided building with energy efficiency, but we had the land.
00:50:35
And so we used that land to put solar panels on it, not all of it but a big portion of it, and built a solar plant there at the Webberville site. And now solar has come down even much more in price and we—later on, we bought some land out in—further in West Texas and we’re buying purchase power agreements for new solar farms out in West Texas that are some of the cheapest energy we’re getting. It is—it is cheaper than any other alternatives that we’re finding out there on the marketplace.

DT: Can you—can you tell me how the Austin Energy balanced having centralized large scale solar installations versus distributed, small rooftop solar incentives?

00:51:28
RD: It’s—the magnitude of the decentralized is not great enough yet that it’s a major technical problem. The—some places around the country—in Hawaii, for instance, they’ve run into significant problems. Some of their circuits are overloaded with solar and you can’t put anymore solar there. We have not had that problem in Austin both because the system is somewhat newer here and we haven’t had that kind of concentrations on a—on a circuit. But you’ve got to work with the planning for that.
00:52:13
Like I say—said earlier, you’ve got a concentration of electric vehicles and solar in Mueller, but that’s a brand new electric grid out there. Other parts of the city you couldn’t do that in without major upgrades to the electric grid. And so it’s a—it’s a big planning issue. You have to figure out how your distribution system is—is—is going to handle it and—and there’s business model problems in that how do you—if you have to upgrade a system in a particular neighborhood because of the solar or electric vehicles coming in, the cost for that is spread among everybody in the system and in that neighborhood that pays for the upgrades.
00:53:04
It’s the whole city—all the rate payers do. And so you run into issues that we ran into with our solar rebates and people saying “Hey, I don’t have solar on my roof, I can’t have solar on my roof.” Actually I don’t have solar on this house because I have these wonderful live oak trees that shade the roof and I can’t put solar on it yet, I’m paying through my electric bill for rebates for people who are putting solar on their home and their bills are going down. So where’s the equity of that? And—and those kind of business model problems you run into and—and they’re not easy to solve.

DT: Well we’ve been talking about solar and wind and—and—and the renewable portion of the portfolio. And my understanding is that a lot of these new, large-scale installations, the wind farms and the—the solar arrays are out in—they’re—they’re remote and that you—you’ve had to build transmission lines to get that power to Austin’s other eastern Texas cities. And—and I was curious if you could talk about the CREZ line controversy and the effort to get these—these lines built?

00:54:21
RD: Yes, it—it—it’s a fundamental problem worldwide usually because usually your major wind resources or solar resources are not where the population centers are. And so transmitting that energy fro—to the cities is—is a major problem. And Texas is one of the only places that’s really solved it well. And politicians here don’t like to put it this way but we socialized the problem.
00:54:53
We used the state ERCOT system, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, built the transmission lines and—and created what they called the CREZ program, which is the renewable energy zone—Competitive Renewable Energy Zones—and—and then paid for it by assigning cost to every utility in—in the state based on how much they use the grid And Austin uses about four percent of the grid so we were assigned four percent of the cost and I think it was what—seven billion—seven or eight billion dollar project for the CREZ lines.
00:55:39
But, you know, we went through phases because when we started out, like I say, I—I was buying everything that I could possibly get out of West Texas and others started to as well, and so the transmission clogged up right away. And then we—wind stalled in Texas till they could build those lines. Everybody shipped it to the south along the coast because you’ve got coastal winds but, more importantly, you still had transmission capacity on the coast up to the center part of the state and up to East Texas.
00:56:18
So now the action moved in wind forms to the coastal areas on land, not offshore while the CREZ lines freed up capacity to build more out there. And it was a good solution to do it that way. It’s turned out to be even better because now that solar’s being built, we did the studies along with others, and your solar and wind take up capacity in the transmission lines at different times of day. The wind’s blowing mostly at night and flowing over those lines and it dies down during a hot day.
00:56:57
And, of course, during a hot day is when the solar ramps up and uses the transmission lines. And so putting solar and wind both out in West Texas uses—makes much more use of the transmission capacity than—than you would have thought earlier.

DT: Well a couple questions come to mind that maybe you could help us with. One is that it—it—it seems like the portion of Austin’s share was based on their use—our use—of—of the grid, in general, not of renewable power, in particular. Is that right?

00:57:35
RD: That’s right. A portion of the paying for the transmission line is on the grid in general. It’s not for exactly what we’re getting from West Texas. Now there’s a very complicated system on pricing that’s called nodal pricing and it does take into account the price that we pay for—the CREZ that I was talking about was just paying for the construction of the lines. The price you pay for the energy coming from any part of the city takes into account where it’s generating and where it’s going to, and that fluctuates based on the congestion of the line.
00:58:18
And so that does take into account whether you’re buying renewables from a wind farm or from a coal plant in East Texas or whatever.

DT: Okay. Is it—I guess we’re—what I was trying to make sure I understood is that this sort of issue of—of socializing the cost of the CREZ lines was—was borne evenly according to whether people used X number of megawatts of power, but not Y number of renewable solar or wind so—so you could, for example, be a—a town in East Texas that—that really was entirely coal dependent say, but they were still paying the same pro rata share of the cost based on the number of megawatts they’re using as Austin was, which was using—buying as much renewable power as possible.

00:59:13
RD: That’s right. And that—that’s why it’s a—it’s really a—a social system.

DT: That’s extraordinary. Something else that I thought would be interesting to talk about. You—you mentioned how the CREZ system allowed solar and—and wind power to sort of support one another because they’re—they’re both intermittent sources but they’re—they’re—they kind of offset one another.

00:59:39
RD: They’re at different times of day.

DT: How—how is the—has Austin Energy and other utilities dealt with this problem of fluctuating…?

00:59:48
RD: Intermittency.

DT: Yeah.

00:59:49
RD: Yeah, intermittency is a major issue with renewable—with wind and solar. And you have to have what we call firming power or balancing power to offset that. And when the wind power dies down, you have to have—in Texas we use—it’s mostly a natural gas plants that can ramp up at the same time the wind is dying down. And you have to have the capacity there to—to balance that because the grid has to be balanced at all times. And that’s a—that’s a major issue.
01:00:28
You know, I—a few years ago, the State Department sent me to some countries in Central and South America to talk to them about their renewables and efficiency programs and all. And it was interesting to—to st—to—to deal with them because I would go into a country like Honduras or so and—and there were all these renewables—people selling them wind farms and solar and hydrogen fuel cells and all this exotic stuff and they had all these grand plans about how they’re going to build wind farms here and solar farms there.
01:01:02
And I’d look at their electric grid and I’d say, “Well, actually you’re not. You’re—you can’t handle it. You—you got to have firming power to do this and you—you’ve got to have transmission upgrades to do this and it—it’s complicated.” And—and people—people do not realize the—the complications sometimes of integrating renewable energy into the current electric grid. It is a major issue. It’s not simple. And it not only causes technical problems but it causes business model problems as we—we’ve talked about earlier.
01:01:48
And as we—we’ve got to make the transition. We’ve got to get off fossil fuels, but that is not going to be easy to solve, both technically and financially to make that transition when we really start to really become successful. It’s not a big problem if there’s just a little bit. You know, you can put some solar on panels or spread them around and it isn’t going to affect the grid or you can plug in electric car here or there, but when you start concentrating it, it causes the electric utility real problems dealing with both the distribution grid and the intermittency of the flow of power from these renewable sources.

DT: Is—is Austin Energy exploring any sort of battery storage solution?

01:02:40
RD: Austin Energy is exploring battery storage solutions. We’re looking at the community solar projects that have battery storage with the—the community solar projects. We’ve also looked at battery storage as individual homes and businesses. And that is an area that’s going to develop nationwide and globally fairly quickly. The—the batteries are improving incrementally at a—at a good pace. And—and you’re going to see in our future grid buildings and battery storage at all different kinds of levels.
01:03:26
In fact, we’ve even dealt with the idea of using automobile batteries in electric vehicles as capacitors for the electric grid. It’s called vehicle to grid where you can tap in and you plug in your electric vehicle and you can charge it but in times where the electric utility needs more energy, you can draw down a little bit on all these batteries and then get it and then load the—charge the batteries back up again off-peak at night and such. So batteries located in buildings and transportation sector and in the utility grid at substations and all are going to be a big part of our future electric grid.

DT: We—we’ve talked a fair amount about renewables and—and I—I guess another part of the—the pie for—for Austin Energy and other utilities is what to do with the—these legacy sources of—of energy, whether it’s coal or nuclear. And I—I believe that, you know, Austin’s already taken Holly [Street Power Plant] offline and I think Decker’s [Creek Power Station] coming offline soon and I think there are plans to take Fayette offline and—and there’s been muttering about South Texas Nuclear Project. Can you talk about some of the discussion that—that you’ve been privy to and, you know, what the challenges are to that?

01:04:54
RD: Well the—you’ve got two different basic kinds of challenges. One is just meeting the total load. In other words, you got to have enough power to—at—at the time that you need it to do this. As an example, our—our big environmental issue in our system is the Fayette Coal Plant. That’s our biggest polluter. I mean, ideally the environmentalists would say well let’s just close down the coal plant. It’s 1,000 megawatts. We’ll just build 1,000 megawatts of wind or solar and take that offline. It doesn’t work that way.
01:05:36
We mentioned the intermittency problem a moment ago. And the Fayette Coal Plant’s a perfect example. On a hot summer night in July, we’re getting a lot of our electricity for the lights and the homes and the freezers and the commercial load, a lot of energy, baseload energy, occurring at night on a hot summer night from that coal plant. Well the wind is not blowing much on a hot summer night in West Texas or it’s blowing more on the coast, but still you’re getting a small amount compared to what you’re getting out of that coal plant.
01:06:17
Solar is not—we’re not getting any energy from it on that hot summer night. You could store it in batteries and other assets and draw on it at that time, but that’s a huge amount of storage. And so it’s not just oh I’ve got 1,000 megawatts of fossil fuel, I’ll replace it with 1,000 miles of—megawatts of renewables. It’s fitting your load profiles within the utility so it works and the grid stays stable and such. And then you start throwing in the prices differences and the rate impacts and—and so forth. So it—it gets complicated.

And the transition to decarbonize our electric grid is just going to take longer and probably be more expensive than we want.

DT: And I guess there will need to be a different business model for utilities. Is that…?

01:07:14
RD: There—there dill—will need to be a different business model for utilities. And—and a lot of places—New York and California, Chicago, Britain, and several places have, for the past few years, been looking at what that new business model will be. Basically there’s—there’s two different approaches people are talking about. One is for the utility to become a service provider instead of a commodity seller so that instead of selling elec—seeing your business as just selling kilowatts of electricity, we’ll provide the services of keeping the lights on and so forth.
01:07:53
And then the other business model is that there will be an integrator. The idea is everybody will put solar on their roof and the utility would just integrate all that solar that’s distributed around and keep the grid stable and buy and sell and transfer it among all the distributed. We looked at that actually at the LBJ School at one of our classes that I—I taught a few years ago, at these different business models. And what we found is that the—they worked fine at low levels of penetration.

DT: Penetration by renewables?

01:08:35
RD: By renewables. And if you’re, again, if you’re having a ro—relatively modest amount of solar going up on rooftops and—and electric vehicles and so forth, it doesn’t crash the utility’s business model. The problem is when you’re successful. When you get a lot of solar deployed and a lot of energy efficiency, it doesn’t work for the utility. There’s not enough revenue there to maintain the distribution system, the poles and wires because contrary to some popular beliefs, when you put solar on the roof and such, you don’t disconnect from the grid.
01:09:16
You still need the poles and wires. You bring in electricity at night when the solar’s not working. You push electricity out during a hot summer afternoon when you got more than you need and you still have to have a revenue source and business model that supports the maintenance and operations and construction of that distribution grid. It turns out it’s very difficult to find a business model that does that when everybody is privately owning the—the sources of generation. See the utilities always own the power plants, whether it was a big solar form or a coal plant or a nuclear plant, they own the generation so they could sell you the electricity at a certain price.
01:10:02
The problem with distributed generation is not that it’s solar. It’s not that it’s wind. It’s that the utility doesn’t own it anymore. I mean it could be diesel generators that everybody owned. It would be the same problem. There’s no revenue source there from selling the electricity anymore to pay for the grid infrastructure that you’ve got to have if you’re going to move all this electricity around from building to building and place to place.

DT: Well do you think that—that the—the business model will shift from selling electricity that’s produced and—and—and then consumed to more based on ama—electricity that’s transferred over the grid?

01:10:48
RD: I think that—I’m not sure what the solution is frankly. You know, we—we’ve been talking about this problem for ten, fifteen years now. And I haven’t seen the solution that works in the long term in my mind. I think that you will end up having businesses that own the operation of the grid but they’re going to be much smaller businesses than the big electric utility revenues and—and companies that we see now. I don’t think that the electric utility industry is—is going to be the industry that it is today in a massive deployment of distributed energy resources.
01:11:37
I think a lot of utilities are going to go bankrupt frankly.

DT: We—we’ve talked about energy, whether it’s produced at a plant or a solar array or wind turbine and—and then used in a house or office or a industrial building, but it sounds like you’ve also been interested in—in electricity as it’s used in vehicles. And I was hoping you could talk about the plug-in hybrid initiatives that you’ve been involved in.

01:12:06
RD: Yes. That was a lot of fun. And it started with the intermittency problem because back in 2005, by that time, we were starting to get a lot of wind power from West Texas into the utility. And it’s the same issue. You know, it was coming in on—on at night and I was—I was getting grumbling from our engineers who were having to ramp down power plants to take the wind in, you know. And I was thinking well how could you store this energy to—to use it when—when it’s coming in?
01:12:44
And I was thinking, you know, if you could charge car batteries with this wind power and then use it the next day to run vehicles, then you could—you could take all the wind power and put it in car batteries and not ramp down your power plants to—to take it in and such. And that’s when I—I looked around, I learned what Andy Frank was doing in California at the University of California at Davis. He invented the plug-in hybrid and it was a car that ran on an electric motor for about thirty, forty miles. And when the battery ran down, it switched over to gasoline automatically.
01:13:25
And I thought this is perfect. If everybody had these type vehicles or more electric vehicles, I could use my renewable resources when they weren’t needed in—for the power grid and store that energy in car batteries and then later use the car batteries, if we needed to, and discharge them into the grid. So I joined up with people in California at Southern California Edison and EPRI, Electric Power Research Institute, some others who were looking at this and I hooked up with Jim Woolsey in—in Washington, which was interesting.
01:14:05
Woolsey was the former Director of the CIA for Clinton. And I heard him give a speech one time in which he was talking about plug-in hybrids because he wanted to get off Middle East oil and he saw this as a way to—to—to do that. And so I went to the City Council and I said I want to take a—a million bucks and it ended up being two million bucks—from the electric utility and create a program to convince the auto makers that there’s a market for these electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, in particular, and all electric vehicles.
01:14:46
And so we did and we formed a coalition and this was one of the cases that I mentioned earlier where you had different interest groups that had their own needs being met. Woolsey and the National Security people were interested in promoting this to get off Middle East oil. The environmental organizations were interested in promoting electric vehicles to stop air pollution and such. The electric utilities—you—took them a while but they realized suddenly this is a source of new revenue for us.
01:15:20
And then we had access to the big cities because we—we were parts of coalitions and—and I said we’ll target the fifty largest cities in the country and we’ll put together this whole coalition and what we’ll do is go to the fleet managers of the cities and the states and environmental groups and all and have them sign pledges that they would seriously consider buying a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle if the auto makers would make it. And so we started getting thousands of these pledges for—to purchase plug-in hybrid vehicles.
01:16:01
And I went up to Detroit with Daryl Slusher, who was working for me at the time and—and we talked to the auto makers and—and suddenly it just took off. We had a press conference in Washington and—and we had mayors of cities from Boston to California to—all around the country jumping in wanting to join this coalition. And environmental groups and state or—agencies and so forth in Minnesota—it just took off faster than we ever imagined. And then I joined with my old friend Lloyd Doggett, a congressman.
01:16:41
At that time, he was on the House Ways and Means Committee, in charge of taxes. And his office put together the 7,500 dollar tax credit for buying a—an electric vehicle that—that a customer could get 7,500 dollars off their taxes for buying an electric vehicle. And that lowered the cost because these vehicles cost more than a normal vehicles because of the battery cost. And that put it down to a range that made it pretty acceptable. And next thing we know, General Motors announced they were going to build the Chevrolet Volt, first plug-in hybrid, and Nissan announced they were going to build their vehicle—all-electric vehicle called the Nissan Leaf.
01:17:28
And—and now, of course, we got every major auto maker has recognized that they’ve got to transition and are moving toward electric. So it was extremely successful. And I have one of the first actually Chevrolet Volt’s that was built—number 59—the—I’ve got in my driveway.

DT: So you can testify to—they—does it work well for you?

01:17:55
RD: Oh it works well. I—I joke with people that it’s about the only thing I’ve done that works just like the PowerPoint said it would because, you know, what we—what we sold this on was the average driving range for most people in the city’s around forty miles. You usually don’t drive more than forty miles during the day. And if you’ve got a vehicle that would charge on—run on battery forty miles but then flip over to gasoline if you have to go further without a problem, then it’ll solve the problem. And it—it does it. I—my driving range is within that.
01:18:30
And I go to a gas station once a year and put new gas in it and—and it’s been a great vehicle. And—and we sold it also on the ideal that the electric grid has extra capacity. You know, you build electric grids to your peak capacity which are on hot afternoons or—or—or winter times and—and such in some parts of the country. But there is a lot of extra capacity where those power plants are sitting idle most of the time.
01:19:07
And we showed that you could have millions of electric vehicles plugged in without having to build any new power plants, you know, because they would be charging at night most of the time and you had that capacity there. So it wasn’t a problem.

DT: And I guess the—the beauty of charging at night is—is that that’s when the winds were blowing most strongly and you had a lot of renewable surge coming in. So I think you mentioned in passing that—that many of your partners were cities. And I’m curious was it that they were in non-attainment and they were trying to figure out ways to get their air conditions down? What was that…?

01:19:50
RD: Air—air quality was a big…

[misc.]

01:19:56
RD: Air quality was a major issue because with an electric vehicle, you’re not getting the ozone precursors in the city during the day that you’re getting from a gasoline vehicle. Now you’re shifting the problem because if you’re burning a coal plant or a natural gas plant, you’re shifting the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant. But it is much easier to control the hundreds of power plants than millions of tailpipes for emissions. And so the cities were interested for the air quality reasons, for the noise reasons, because the electric vehicle is very, very quiet and efficient.
01:20:46
And—and there were just several reasons that the cities were excited about the idea of promoting electric transportation for both private and public—electric buses and electric rail and so forth.

DT: So was—was part of it also because they had fleets for—for those agencies?

01:21:06
RD: Yes, and—and this is where we were going with the plug-in partners. I was going to the—the fleet managers of these cities and states and saying, you know, you got—you got a thousand vehicles here, write me a pledge that if you—that if the auto makers will make these, you’ll seriously come buy so many sedans and vans and so forth that are electric. And that helped convince the auto makers that there was a market there.

DT: So what wa—what were the auto makers’ initial reaction when you came up there with these pledges? What—were—did they buy it? Did they [overlapping conversation]?

01:21:42
RD: No, no. They—they—we went to Detroit and they shook their finger at me and told me I was a troublemaker and—and that they were never going to build electric vehicles because the batteries weren’t ready and the batteries were never going to be ready and it would cost too much and no one would buy them. And—and they—they just said no and go away. And—but we didn’t. And we kept it up and we—and—but fairly soon, they switched and saw there was a market and there wasn’t just a market, there were other pressures.
01:22:16
There was environmental pressures to do something to the—the pollution and there was social pressures on, you know, Middle East oil and national security. Like I say, the coalition that we put together was several different sectors that all wanted the same thing. And the auto makers finally realized that this was a major movement, not just a—not just a few people who were environmentalists that wanted this.

DT: You know, it—it—it seems like there’s a—a recurring theme in your life and your involvement with—with sustainable energy, you know, from when you were first trying to encourage people to buy high SEER air conditioners to trying to encourage folks to buy wind energy to this most recent episode with—with plug-in hybrids, that—that the—the demand was—was underestimated. Is th—is that true? Did—just wasn’t recognized as a—at—that there was that kind of support out among the public?

01:23:23
RD: I think there—yes. I think there, in most cases, there was a case that the demand was underestimated. There was also a case of—and I think I’ve been in the right place several times when the technology changes. One of the little sources of pride that I have I guess is that I have several books that are on the early stages of such things as nanotechnology, plug-in hybrids that we’ve mentioned, clean—the smart grid in electric clean technology and renewables that we’ve talked about.
01:24:09
My name is common in all of those books of the early history and it’s be—not because I was an inventor or—or such, but I—I had the ability to recognize there’s a technology shift taking place here. And—and if this technology is available and becomes available, the demand would be enormous for it. And so I—I think you have a combin—it’s got to be a combination of under—of—of estimating the demand and the technology being ready to meet that kind of demand.

DT: We—we—what—what do you credit that to or blame that on when it seems analogous to looking out your window and seeing in 1900 the streets are full of—of horse drawn carriages and you come back in 1920 and it’s all internal combustion driven cars. You know, and—and the folks in—in 1900 might not have seen 1920.

01:25:10
RD: Yes, it’s—and I don’t know. I—I—I’ve always had an inter—like I say, my—my degree’s in philosophy and particularly philosophy of technology was my interest. And I’ve always had an interest in looking at the big changes in society and—and big technological trends and just a fascination with following the news on what the new inventions and so forth are. And—and I’ve been able to see here are major shifts that are taking place.
01:25:49
And, you know, we usually—we usually underestimate how long it’s going to take for a new technology to take place, but radically underestimate the impact that it’s going to have. And then part of that too is the problems. You know, I like to—when I’m teaching a class sometime and talking about environmental issues, we got to realize that there’s no perfect solutions and that the solutions we have today are creating the problems of tomorrow. Example I like to give is the big environmental problems at the turn of the century in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, there were three major environmental problems.
01:26:41
One was we were decimating our forests. All the New England forests were being completely cut down. We were cutting all the forests going west because our economy was run off the steam engine and we were burning wood for the industrial revolution. We were burning wood to heat our homes. We were burning and we were cutting down all the forests. And the second problem—environmental problem they were facing was same one we face today—the whales were being eliminated very fast back then because whale oil was the source of lighting in our cities and lamps and in lubricants and such and we were very quickly killing all the whales.
01:27:27
And the biggest environmental problem was horse manure. In our huge cities, I mean, there were hundreds and thousands and millions of horses spread out in our big cities and it was a major environmental problem with disease and the smell and the horses dying on the streets would take days to remove. And our economy was based on the horse. There was a major horse flu in the late 1870s or ‘80s, I don’t remember the date, and it almost shut down the entire East Coast economy.
01:28:02
And these were major—these were the environmental problems of that day and there were three new fuels that solved those environmental problems—oil, gas, and coal. Coal stopped the destruction and cutting down of the forest because suddenly we were burning coal in all our steam engines and—and—and processes in the economy. And electricity from that coal—the—solves some of the problems but natural gas was the first thing to replace the whale oil that was being burned for all the lighting.
01:28:41
And suddenly all the street lighting and homes and everything were burning natural gas. And then, of course, the big solution to the horse problem and you had planners at that time that said cities like New York and Boston and all had reached their maximum population. They could not grow any bigger because they could not handle the horse problem. And they had resigned themselves to that fact till the internal combustion engine came along and removed the horses. And now we’re trying to shut down all the coal plants and the gas plants and such and oil because of the air pollution problems and greenhouse gases and such.
01:29:20
We need to recognize that when we convert to a new solution, that is seems to be the clean solution, it’s not going to be a hundred percent solution. There will be problems created from that as well that we’re just not dealing with yet because we hadn’t reached the magnitude of the deployment of that.

DT: Well maybe you can do some—some philosophizing or—or future seeing to talk a little bit about I guess the—the—the role of—of the energy industry and—and con—in the context of—of climate change. I mean, I think that you gave me a—a really fascinating example earlier that because of the retirement of nuclear power, we’re really no farther along in non-fossil fuel sector supply for—for energy and—and that that’s a real challenge as far as climate change is—is concerned.

01:30:30
RD: Well, you know, I th—I have come to believe that climate change is the number one big problem that we’ve got to solve environmentally and trump’s all the other environmental problems in my mind. And I’ve changed my opinion along the way. I started out, as I said earlier, as an anti-nuclear activist. But what I’ve come to realize is that climate change is such an urgent problem and so massive that we have to use every tool at our disposal as soon as possible, as quickly as possible, to decarbonize the economy.
01:31:15
Shutting down fossil fuel generation of electricity, fossil fuel use for our transportation system, has to be done as—as quickly as possible. Nuclear, it turns out, is a very good way to deal with that, both in electrifying the transportation system through electricity and generating electricity in a non-fossil manner. The statistic that I mentioned earlier to you is that was deb—dismaying to me when I first saw it is that 25 years ago, 14 percent of our global energy was non-fossil fuel, 86 percent was coal and gas and oil.
01:31:59
Today, 25 years later, after all of the wind farms we built around the world and all the solar and hydro power and everything we’ve put in place, that number hadn’t moved. It’s still 14 percent non-fossil fuels and 86 percent fossil fuels. And so the question is well how could that be? How could that be? How could that be with everything’s that been deployed? And there’s two answers. First is that our energy load has expanded so 14 percent’s a bigger number than 14 percent 25 years ago so we’ve met a lot of our new energy growth with renewables.
01:32:39
And secondly, we’ve shut a lot of our nuclear power down in sp—particularly in Europe, Japan, some other parts of the world. And that has been taken place by the renewables, if you will. You still have—so all the renewables we’ve been putting in place has been meeting new load or meeting the load from retiring nuclear plants. We still haven’t made that much progress in the total amount of energy that we’re displacing with fossil fuels. And so I’ve shifted my opinion some. I think that nuclear has a place. I think that we need to prioritize.
01:33:24
We need to shut down the coal and gas and fossil fuels first. If, at that time, the world wants to close all the nuclear plants and replace that with renewables plus storage, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t be shutting down nuclear plants while we’re still putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from fossil fuels.

DT: And—and why is that you feel that climate change is—is such an urgent challenge?

01:33:54
RD: Well, it is—it is so massive. It affects everything. You know, I can’t start to give the order of magnitude. It literally affects everything from the economy—people talk about it—the economy can’t afford it. Well, at some point, the whole economy, it collapses if we do not solve the climate change problem. And it’s a difficult problem to solve socially because you’re talking ab out solving a problem really that is most impacted future generations in future places. It’s not affecting my next week or next year economy and—and family here at home so much.
01:34:48
So it’s a difficult problem to solve. But I think people kn—do not understand the magnitude of what it’s going to take to solve the problem. Our focus has been on shifting—on decarbonizing our economy. Let’s shift our—our generation of electricity and our vehicle transportations and all away from carbon. And if we close down all the coal plants and gas plants and stop burning oil in our vehicles, that will solve the problem. Unfortunately, I’m convinced that will not solve the problem. In fact, I think that if you magically stop burning fossil fuels for our economy next Tuesday, we would still have pretty catastrophic climate change.
01:35:42
The reasons are that there’s so much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already that will continue to warm the atmosphere. The second is the major land use issues of deforestation and—and agricultural use that has to be solved that we’ve had—we’ve had the luxury of the oceans and the forests being major sinks to this point of the carbon. I think they’re reaching a point where there are no longer sinks and will start emitting, I mean, we’re having the arboreal forests now in the northern region starting to burn and die and release that carbon.
01:36:22
And we have the methane problem, the so-called methane bomb of the tremendous amount of methane that is locked up in the permafrost in the Arctic regions that is starting to release due to the temperatures rising. There’s as much greenhouse gas potential in the permafrost methane as there is in all the coal in the world. So if you stop burning anymore coal but don’t stop the methane from releasing, you got the same problem. So, you know, it is—it is such a huge problem that we have to do everything we can as fast as we can and realize that it’s still not going to be sufficient.
01:37:08
We’re going to have to find ways to start mining the carbon out of the atmosphere. And I look at technologies that can take atmospheric carbon and put it to other uses or sequester it or—or so forth. We’ve got to do that in addition to decarbonizing our economy and—and reforestation and so forth.

DT: Well, th—the—I think this gives a good example of some challenges going forward. Can you maybe give us maybe a little message about why this has been important to you for so many years and—and why it should matter and—and be of a concern to future generations who might be considering working on conservation issues?

01:38:03
RD: Well, you know, it—it’s something I haven’t thought about in a long time. It just seems natural I guess. I think that it—it’s one thing to enjoy the outdoors like I do and most people enjoy that. But I think it’s even more important to realize the interconnectedness of everything, that if outdoors and nature is not your thing but you’re interested in social justice or you’re interested in so many other economic and issues that it really is all dependent on the environment, that people do not realize that our economic future is dependent on our environment.
01:39:00
It’s not just having parks to go to or a green space to—to look at or—or such. If you—we’re going to start running into fundamental problems of clean—access to clean water and availability of water to drink. We’re going to start running into fundamental problems of heat waves and droughts and—and floods and so forth that are going to completely destroy st—economies and certain areas of the planet are just not going to be able to live in anymore out—outdoors. That—that disrupts anything that you’re planning to do that you’re not relating to the environment at this point.
01:39:47
The environment is fundamental to the other functions of our society. And we’ve had the luxury of not really dealing with that because we’ve had such an abundance of air and water and such that we hadn’t had to deal with it.

DT: Well I have one more question and—and I—I hope you might answer that, but also if you have anything to add, of course, we would love to hear. And that is just is there a—a favorite spot that gives you feelings of—of serenity or—or composure or peace, whatever it is that, you know, is meaningful to you?

01:40:39
RD: Well, I enjoy being in the outdoors and I’ve been backpacking for years and—and love that. And I go on retreats out in the-the countryside and so forth. I can’t say there’s a favorite spot physically, I have to say that I—I’ve been meditating for many years and I enjoyed the retreats that I went to out on the—the mountainsides and being in solitude nature. But I also find that just meditation in any environment gives me the peace of mind to center myself and—and go forward and—and that one of the things I’ve had to learn is there’s a need to center myself and reach a peace of mind, even if the environment around you is not conducive to that.

DT: I hear ya. Well, that’s all I’ve got but I was curious if there’s anything you’d like to add at the close of the interview?

01:41:51
RD: I think the only thing I’d add if people are looking at this and—and want to, you know, enter the environmental field and fight the battle and—which more and more people are deciding that’s the thing to do every day—the lessons I’ve learned from dealing with this over the past forty years are patience and perseverance that the world doesn’t end or, you know, with one battle.
01:42:21
You don’t—everything isn’t won or lost with a particular fight. Patience and perseverance, refresh yourself whether it’s going out in the woods and being alone or—or selling or whatever refreshes you, you need to remind yourself why you’re doing this. It’s also important to—to work with your opposition. Don’t demonize your opposition. Don’t—there aren’t evil enemies out there. There are other people who literally see the world differently than you do that you’ve got to work with to change their understanding. So add patience and perseverance to that and do the good work.

DT: Okay. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

[End of Interview with Roger Duncan – November 16, 2018]