coe183_dustin.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We're here with a newsflash, Simone, how has just broken the news that she feels like she couldn't hack it as somebody assembling sandwiches at Subway? She couldn't deal with the stress so many. Would you like to fill us in on some of the reasons why you think it'd be hard to be a sandwich jockey?

Speaker2: [00:00:43] I mean, actually, I have been a sandwich jockey before. You didn't know that I didn't work at subways. I worked at a place called Togo's, also known as Togo's T, which

Speaker1: [00:00:53] I thought was to go

Speaker2: [00:00:55] Well in Santa Cruz. We called it Togo's. So yeah, so I've done that before, but I just, I don't know. I don't know if I could handle, you know, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. It'd be hard because people are so finicky about their orders and so indecisive. And when I'm listening to people in line at Subway, sometimes it makes me a little crazy how they're kind of like, maybe, oh, how about that? And they kind of pause. I have to think about it.

Speaker1: [00:01:19] And Oh, wait, wait, no, no. I take those black olives off

Speaker2: [00:01:22] That happens that sometimes I'll be like, No, no, no, no, you know, no, whatever.

Speaker1: [00:01:26] You know, we we're here in Chicago where we're doing summer teaching gig. And this is not a paid advertisement for Subway. Subway is not sponsoring the Cultures of Energy podcast. There is one Subway franchise that's right here on 57th Street on the south side of Chicago that I say is hands down the best subway franchise in the world run by some.

Speaker2: [00:01:46] It's the best, and I tell the woman every time I go in Assam, I tell them, I don't know. I think she's the manager. Do you think she's the owner? I think she should tell her. I try and tell her every time we go. Or at least, you know, once a season that it's our favorite subway. And it's I think it's the best subway. It's why. Yeah, mostly because of that hot pepper mix. That's such a good that what do you call that? It's like an Italian pepper mix with different spicy. It's got like kind of cured bell peppers and other little hot peppers, and it's got some vinegar in it. It's an Italian mix.

Speaker1: [00:02:18] Yes, and that and the fact that the people that are just like, super friendly, super competent, super skilled and they just make it like and they remember you, if you haven't been there for five years, they'll remember you and your order, which is I don't even know how that's possible, but anyway, great, great place. That's where we were. That's why this moment of reflection and reckoning and sim, I mean, frankly, I hope that you do get the chance to be a sandwich jockey again if you want to be. But I don't think you should feel like it's a failure that you're you're not able to hack it anymore.

Speaker2: [00:02:48] I don't even know if it's called standard Shawki. I thought about the technical term for the sandwiches

Speaker1: [00:02:54] Now, OK?

Speaker2: [00:02:56] I'm not sure. Yeah, sandy pasta

Speaker1: [00:02:57] About east of sandwiches.

Speaker2: [00:02:59] Yeah, yeah. But mainly the thing we were reflecting on and had our time during our time at Subway. Was this the swan song of your directorship?

Speaker1: [00:03:10] I know.

Speaker2: [00:03:11] Don't cry,

Speaker1: [00:03:13] Cry, cry. I'm a little emotional. I know. So for people who don't know, and we were talking about the way the podcast has become divorced, a little bit from the center that founded it. I'm not divorced, but I mean, I think that people think of the podcast is its own thing and it is its own thing. But it came out of a project called the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences,

Speaker2: [00:03:31] Which still exists so

Speaker1: [00:03:33] Robust exists going going strong sense, as we call it. And it just so happens that after a marvelous six year term, which I'm thinking of as eight because it took two years of administrative wrangling to get the center set up in the first place. So I'd say it's more like an eight year commitment to directing the center that I've had. I am stepping down, going on sabbatical next year, as you may know. Do we mention it already? We go on sabbatical. Anyway, we're going on sabbatical, which is a great privilege. But also, I think in our case earned because we've worked pretty hard for this institution and our dear friend and colleague Joseph Campana from our English department. We'll be taking over as the next director. And I think it's a good thing because, you know, if there's not leadership change, there will be certification. And I feel personally as though I've given about all I can give to this project right now anyway. And I'm just happy to be a kind of rank and file member of the group rather than the person, as they say on 30 Rock Heavy is the head that eats the crayons, right? That's right. That's one of my favorite lines from 30 Rock. And so, yeah, surprisingly because there were some financial ups and downs in those years. Surprisingly, I did lose sleep over this center in its future at various points, which I will now not have to do. Yeah, so that sounds really good to me. And meanwhile, we have more time for other cool stuff.

Speaker2: [00:04:53] So what were what were some of the highlights of your time as director? Is there kind of a hit list or some faves that you want to share?

Speaker1: [00:05:03] I would say shouting out our good friends and yoga Gardner, I think having them as our first artist in residence was super fun. That was great. Everything that went along with their presence here and just the fact that they became connected to Houston, you know, and there was this weird kind of Icelandic Houston connection was set up. Now has created other kinds of true connections and cool people moving back and forth, I think that's been amazing. That's right. I love this symposium. The annual symposium we've done every year has been just a way to meet some marvelous people and build communities and networks. And I see most recently, finally, after after Hurricane Harvey, as the city and the county began to really turn their attention towards climate action, the fact that we were already there with some capacity and expertise and able to sort of get involved with both the climate vulnerability analysis for Harris County Precinct one, as well as get involved in the city of Houston's first ever Climate Action Plan. I think that's pretty amazing. And that's stuff that I hope we will all stay involved in because my goodness, there's a lot to be done in Houston to make it a city that will survive into the, I guess, twenty second century.

Speaker2: [00:06:12] But I think I also would do those are all very good points. I think we'd also do an important shout out to the postdoctoral fellows. Oh yeah. So Matthew Schneider, Mayor

Speaker1: [00:06:22] Sun, go to Grinnell now our colleague

Speaker2: [00:06:25] At Rice, Roy Scranton,

Speaker1: [00:06:27] The amazing Roy Scranton, Abby Espenak, Mark Vardi.

Speaker2: [00:06:31] So these have been amazing folks to have around and wonderful intellectual interlocutors have also gone on, all of them gone on to do cool things and good positions and doing more work and bearing the the rice monogram somewhere Typekit or logo, right? Probably a little owl, an unconventional owl probably tattooed on their body somewhere.

Speaker1: [00:06:58] So as you're thinking about and again, not just my directorship of the first six years of the center, that first chapter, let's say, are there things that you remember so many how that you particularly enjoyed or found to be valuable?

Speaker2: [00:07:09] Well, I mean, it's kind of this connects back to the symposium every spring, but going on the toxic tour, I think, was a really remarkable experience for everyone involved because I know that it took me a while to actually make it onto one of the toxic tours because I seem to always be busy doing a million other things while that was happening. But I know that all the participants were really, really moved by that experience. So I think that getting that organized and having that happen was really important.

Speaker1: [00:07:37] Yeah, but credit to Tejas, who are the people really organized it and we just were

Speaker2: [00:07:42] Along for

Speaker1: [00:07:42] The ride. We were just able to, like, help finance the bus and get people on it. And yeah, no, that was really a really amazing experience. Working with Tejas a few different times in different advocacy projects, including Standing Rock, including the Deer Park Fire. That's been great stuff. I really think that what we were doing the first couple of years in the center was really trying to create this beacon for energy, humanities and this idea that like maybe every school, there might be like one person who worked on energy and one department, or a few different people working in energy scattered across the university and not necessarily with the critical mass to kind of make anything happen locally, but still the sense that and again, not just us, but also let's say the amazing petro cultures network up at the University of Alberta, our fellow travelers and our fictive kin up there. You know what they were able to do to just create this international network where people didn't have to feel isolated in their interest and energy? And that was kind of important eight years ago. Now I think there's so many people working on the energy we have, you know, a legion of scholars and people are actually like advertising professorships and fellowships and energy humanities. And that's just all, like, pretty incredible. Yeah. What do you think about where we started? So, yeah, so only good memories and and a kind of a happy transition, which is nice. I think you want to leave. I guess this is a note of advice to all future center directors and so forth out there. I think it's a good time to leave a position as before you feel as though like you're repeating yourself right, not to leave like two years too late when you feel exhausted and kind of burdened by things. But while you still actually really like the project and would just like to see what somebody else can do with it,

Speaker2: [00:09:21] That's excellent advice to the rarefied segment of the population that will ever direct

Speaker1: [00:09:25] A center. I think I think of our audience probably a good 50 percent of them will be center directors. Well, that could happen. Or aspirants, directors, right? One way or another. I think it'll be great. So, yeah, so what else do we have going on that we want to touch on before we transition to our wonderful guest and really interesting conversation? Anything else you want to throw out there?

Speaker2: [00:09:43] Well, I'm not sure except that, except that the the weather in Chicago this summer, folks, is extraordinary.

Speaker1: [00:09:53] It is.

Speaker2: [00:09:53] It's so pleasant out there. I just I don't feel like I've been in weather this good in years. It's it's it's it's like a little warm with the Sun, but there's a little breeze and it's so fragrant and green. It's been raining a little bit. And like just even the streets, the streets smell like flowers. It's astounding. Yeah, so I'm enjoying it.

Speaker1: [00:10:14] Yeah, Chicago is a nice place. It's a good spot. So today on the podcast, we had the great. Joy of speaking with Dustin Mulvany, who teaches at San Jose State and is like a really like legit expert in solar power, as well as an environmental scholar and scientist. And he does many. He wears many hats. I get the feeling, and Dustin has been working both as a scholar and as an activist analyst consultant on the solar ization of the American Southwest. All of these new solar projects that are appearing in California and Arizona, Nevada, I suppose. And he has published a new Nevada, Nevada. It's a good thing I'm not running for office because I cannot remember either Oregon and Nevada.

Speaker2: [00:11:03] It's Oregon, not Oregon.

Speaker1: [00:11:05] Stop it. Stop it, woman. So, so Dustin has published a book called Solar Power that I think really anyone who's interested in what's happening with solar energy today should read, because it's a really careful, clear analysis of what solar power is, what's happening. And the great thing about the book is he's really concerned with the environmental justice aspect of it. So how do we make a solar revolution that does not repeat the mistakes of the past? And that is a critical problem because we know of this enormous urgency and pressure surrounding solar conversions and new solar developments. And there's a pathway where that becomes just a repeat of all of the dispositions of petro culture. And what he is tuning us to is that's not necessarily the case. And here's something interesting that came across social media today. Simone, how do you remember that refinery explosion in Philadelphia a few days ago? Yeah. The company that owns that refinery has decided they will not rebuild the refinery. So now I saw on my Facebook courtesy of Bethany Wiggin, friend of the Pod, that there are a group of people getting together who want to turn that facility into a massive renewables installation, which is a great idea. And this is precisely what Dustin and his colleagues are advocating, which is not to turn like pristine desert into solar farms, but to take the land we've already fucked up in the name of popular culture and to use that instead.

Speaker2: [00:12:29] Right? Some brownfields, yeah. And then, you know, the installation Where are we install is very important in terms of energy, justice or environmental justice in terms of transitioning to solar or other renewable forms. But the other piece that he's interested in that's really important also is the manufacturer and labor rights, and that workers who are assembling and disassembling and working with these metals that are that can be dangerous and chemicals that can be dangerous are not put in in harm's way by this, either. So there are a lot of different dimensions to the energy justice angle that we might think through in terms of renewable energy. And as we talked about on the pod, there's some cognates, of course, with wind power as well, and I can imagine with other renewable forms. So these are questions for solar, but not, but not only.

Speaker1: [00:13:20] So anyway, you should read Dustin's book, but before you do that, listen to this podcast, which is a terrifically informative and interesting conversation. And with that, I'll just say Simone is somebody who is not giving up her duties, and one of her duties is to say, Go Dustin. Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, we couldn't be more thrilled than that we have on the line from Santa Cruz, California, epicenter of the solar revolution. Not necessarily Santa Cruz, but California. Dustin mulvany, author of a brilliant new book called Solar Power, Innovation, Sustainability and Environmental Justice and We Were Just Chatting Beforehand. This is going to be the chance for us to ask all the many questions we have about solar power to a true expert in the field, Dustin. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker3: [00:14:24] You're very welcome. It's great to be on, and I'm a big fan of the show. I've heard so many smart people say smart things and you guys ask very good questions. So I'm going to be on my toes trying to reply to these questions as well as I can. You set a

Speaker1: [00:14:39] High bar for both of us. We're going to have to ask the good questions and

Speaker2: [00:14:41] You have to give the good. Well, yeah, yeah. Next in the lineup of smart responses, Dustin. So, yeah, so as Dominic said, you've got this new book out, which is excellent, a really cool book about solar power out with California just this year in Twenty Nineteen. And I kind of want it to begin with a really big question, and that is the premise and argument of the book. And that is how can this solar revolution, how can it be scaled rapidly important and at the same time, be kept sustainable and just as injustice, fairness and equality? So I wonder, Dustin, if you can tell us some of the ways in which you can see that happening. Both do this scaling up scaling of solar quickly, efficiently and yet at the same time, not have it be a forum for screwing over certain populations and peoples and non-human others around the

Speaker1: [00:15:33] World that have often been screwed over,

Speaker2: [00:15:35] But that have often screwed over in the past. Yes.

Speaker3: [00:15:37] Yes, yeah. I think there's a few things going on that have been really interesting to see about how the solar industry has rolled out. I mean, to start with the solar industry is really a conglomeration of a couple of different industries. Some of these are chemical industries. Some of these are like semiconductor industries, so they're borrowing from a bunch of technologies and processes and experiences from other industries. Yet we talk about them as something that's, you know, as if they grow in trees and they're we just deploy them out and they're going to salvage us from our, you know, our climate crises. And I think we need to reflect on that a little bit because think first of all, the environmental movement starts off really challenging the chemical industries right back to Silent Spring and all these things, you know, Bhopal. So there's all these kind of historical tensions with the environmental movement in the chemical industries. Yeah. Now we're at this point where the climate crisis seems so urgent. We don't really critically think about these industries as such. So, you know, look at how I got interested in this. Maybe that's a better way to kind of get to your question, which is I was interested in environmental justice my whole time. I come from a chemical engineering background. I worked in the chemical industry for a little while. So when I was thinking of a new project to start, I was seeing all this talk about thin film manufacturing coming to Silicon Valley, and that was going to be the new PV technology of the future. And to juxtapose that with the history of semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley.

Speaker3: [00:17:15] I'm thinking here, OK, here's the, you know, climate justice being served by deploying solar power, which will displace some of the fossil fuel industries, impacts and such. Yet you have this this history with semiconductor industries in Silicon Valley that left behind the largest concentration of Superfund sites in the world. You know, people, workers, communities potentially poisoned from the interacting with these chemical industries, you know, that were interestingly called clean tech right in the 60s and 70s, just because the bunny suits and the clean rooms, they called it clean technology. Not not low carbon, clean, but like clean rooms. And to see that this was a whole, this whole thing was coming around again. So I think first and foremost, we need to understand that solar manufacturing is making a product and you know that tendencies of capitalism are to make products as cheaply as possible. And when we do that and go with that mindset, we end up marginalizing workers or having out of sight out of mind environmental impacts down the commodity chain. So I think to avoid or to to lessen, I'm not sure that we can completely avoid it, but at least to lessen the impacts on workers and communities from manufacturing products. We need to bring critical attention to them. And I think first and foremost, that's seems to be absent from our conversations, even the ones about a Green New Deal. Right. It's still about making more solar panels, not necessarily embedding principles of justice into the manufacturing floor or to where products are being sited. Did I answer the question, yeah,

Speaker2: [00:18:54] I think you did, but I'm going to even, yeah, you totally did, and I'm going to take it a little bit further. I think one of the things you advocate throughout the book is that we need to open the black box of solar power. So can you give us a sense of what's inside that box because you've opened it and you've rifled through it right and you've sorted things into categories? So what is it that what's the underbelly of solar that we should be attuned to?

Speaker3: [00:19:18] Yeah, this is interesting because it has evolved a little bit since I've been studying it. When I was seeing these new manufacturers coming to Silicon Valley, what interested me most was they were these thin film technologies, and most of the thin film technologies were using some cadmium based semiconductor cadmium, as we know, is a heavy metal that is mutagen. It's a carcinogen. It's something you definitely want to minimize exposures to. So for me, the labeling of this next iteration of clean tech low carbon technologies was masking some of these heavy metals that are actually present in the PV modules. Now the reason I say it's shifted is because after all, these thin film manufacturers started popping up with their pilot manufacturing processes, and a couple of these were able to get a little bit bigger and bigger manufacturing facilities and were commercial operating commercially, operating for a little while. We saw the major shift, which was the rise of China making crystalline silicon modules, and they don't have the cadmium in them. They have lead in them, however, and there's heavy metals in that as well. So to kind of start with, you know, in the materiality of the panel itself, you do have heavy metals, you have plastics, give modules are mostly glass, which is interesting for thinking about how to recycle them. And are they electronic waste or are they like a mix of electronic waste and glass that requires a slightly different kind of processing? So that's one thing. The other way to think about it is the question of what's in the black box is what are the processes that are associated with making the panel? So for example, one of the materials that's in a PV module is something called TED layer, where there's, you know, different polymers that are similar. So Ted Lars, this kind of plastic material that protects the PV module from moisture and things like that and a byproduct of making this TED layer material is something called hexavalent chromium, which is another metal we don't like. We definitely don't want to be exposed to. And we see with

Speaker2: [00:21:29] This, it sounds mean

Speaker3: [00:21:32] It's it's

Speaker1: [00:21:33] I think our transformers made of.

Speaker3: [00:21:36] Well, it's I mean, that's the chemical of concern. And Erin Brockovich is Damien. Ok, so there's that. That's the connection, but that's not in the panel. That's just in the supply chain. And that's kind of the way that I would also answer your first question, which is how do we think about these things in terms of a manufactured product and how do we make sure that they're justly made? It's to shine light, not just on the box itself, the square box that sits on your roof, but the supply chains, right? And where do the actual materials that actually constitute the product come from? And what are the waste products associated with that? And what does it leave behind in certain areas? So that's kind of the the crux of the black box argument is to say that we need to understand that we're one putting what in the book. I also call a green halo on these solar panels that they're, you know, they're manufactured product that we really like them. So we want more of them. So we maybe give them a pass a little bit. And I think that that's that's a troubling thought, right? We don't want to do that. We don't want to give anybody a pass for what they make because we want to. I don't know. We want to just world that, you know, raises all boats. We don't want to be reproducing the same inequality that we've seen in the current economy in our future economy. And I think that, you know, juxtaposing the, you know, clean tech green job here in Silicon Valley, where they're installing the solar panel to far up the supply chain, where they're taking. In the case of crystalline silicon, they actually use metallurgical coal to coke the silicon. So there's coal even required in the supply chain of photovoltaics, and people don't even think about that. So how is that for how do we keep that in the ground? Exactly.

Speaker2: [00:23:18] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker1: [00:23:19] Very good point. This might be a good place. Just to that question to shout out the work that you've been doing together with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, CTC and Justin, you've been. In addition to doing plenty of work as a professor and a researcher and a writer, you've also been giving a lot of testimony to a lot of commissions and you've also been acting as a scientific advisor. And here I think that's what you've been doing with CTC. And one of the things that group has put together is a report card on, you know, as I understand it, the toxicity of the various production. Processes that different manufacturers are using so that you can kind of encourage people to clean up their act, so to speak, so do you want to talk a little bit about that? And have you found that the work of that coalition has been impactful in terms of changing, you know, and improving things?

Speaker3: [00:24:07] Yeah. So the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has been really critical actually to where my position is today in many ways because as I was finishing my PhD and thinking about new projects I was teaching in college at UC Santa Cruz, I just newly minted PhD in the job market that didn't exist in 2007 2008 because of the financial crisis and looking at opportunities. I happened upon the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, thinking about the same exact questions about semiconductor industry coming back and what are the impacts on workers. So we started with a white paper in 2009 that documented some of these potential impacts and environmental justice concerns with different manufacturing processes, and then rolled that into the solar scorecard, which we are, I think, in our 10th year of doing, and I think that the card has actually impacted manufacturers. One is that we we see manufacturers suddenly having sustainability programs, and you could argue whether these are greenwashing to some extent, but a little bit of transparency is better than none. And that's what we started with in that industry. We do have a part of the scorecard that does note whether there are heavy metals in them or not, and we've seen some manufacturers of the crystalline silicon modules move away from lead based solders and metals based where you would find the lead.

Speaker3: [00:25:35] So you have some benefits there. So I think it has shifted the conversation a little bit. We did roll that into actually a sustainability standard through NSF International, which is one of these organizations that does examine electronic products and such. They run the EPA registry, which I don't remember the acronym stands for exactly, but it's basically a white list of manufactured products like computers and things like that that if you are required as a state entity or something to purchase, you look up computers on this list. So we create a standard out of the scorecard that was stakeholder led. We had industry there, we had recyclers, we had chemical industries in the supply chain. So that was a pretty interesting process. So I would say that it has it started a dialogue in a space that no one else would touch. I mean, no other environmental organization was actually looking at this at all, even though they had, you know, long histories working on electronics industries and semiconductor industry, chemical pollution and such. So I think they importantly fill the niche that a lot of the rest of the environmental community just wouldn't take up.

Speaker1: [00:26:40] You know, there's always trade offs. We know this with every energy form. There's no perfect energy form and we keep fantasizing. There is one. But even even the ones that seem like the most optimal to a sustainable future and adjust future always have these externalities associated with them. And I wanted to ask, you know, we've been talking a lot about photovoltaics, and obviously photovoltaics seem to be leading the charge in terms of solar development. But of course, there is also concentrated solar, or CSP is out there, too. And it is part of, you know, the growth plan for solar energy in some parts of the world. If you could talk a little bit about comparing the the advantages and disadvantages of those two types of energy, again, for the benefit of folks who may not be totally familiar with what's going on there.

Speaker3: [00:27:22] Right. So from the top, photovoltaics are taking photons from the sun and turning that into electric current. And that's the typical PV modules what you'll see on a rooftop or in a big solar field. The other kind of project you'll see in a solar field is called Concentrated Solar Power, or CSP, as you referred to, and there are a couple of different designs. There's one where you basically have a trough of kind of a half circle with a pipe running down the center in the center of that circle, and it's reflecting heat from the sun onto that pipe and that creates steam. And then the rest of it, just like a regular old power plant where you're turning that steam into motion that spins a generator and makes electric current. The other type of CSP that's been sited around California, for example, is called a power tower. And these power towers have a big field of Helios stats, and they focus energy from those Helios stats or mirrors onto a tank at the top of a tower. And then that creates the steam that turns the turbine eventually. So that's how those two technologies basically work. The PV industry, as I have described, is much more like chemical manufacturing. It's got manufacturing plants and you produce these manufactured products. And if you're building a big field of them, you just tie them all together into little subunits in the.

Speaker3: [00:28:52] Subunits get tied into bigger units and then they get tied into the grid, and some of these can be really big. So in California, we have two projects, I think that have over eight million solar panels each in them. So yeah, that's a lot of solar panels. Imagine that. So they're again, they're very it's very modular. That technology, you just kind of build it as big as you want it. In that case, that's a 550 megawatt power plant. Pretty big. The CSP has a couple of different issues with it that make it very different. You know, it's a lot of steel and a lot of reflective surfaces. So aluminum, things like that, it's got your basic things that you would buy for natural gas power plant, like the turbines and such like that generate the electricity. The one environmental trade off between the two? Well, with both technologies, we have something going on in California where there are very high levels of birds crashing into certain solar farms in California, and that includes photovoltaics. There's something that is being hypothesized called the lake effect, where birds and these are largely aquatic birds, which is amazing. The birds are being attracted to solar farms, and we're not sure because we don't have camera traps or anything like that and free bird falls from the sky.

Speaker3: [00:30:06] Coyote runs away with it, and you never see it, actually. So there's issues with scavenging that don't really know what's going on. So that's going on with the photovoltaics and the CSP. So a lot of collisions are happening with mirrors and stuff like that. Csp the power towers that I described were the the mirrors focus the heat at the top of a tower. They have an issue that Fish and wildlife has described a new term. It's called a streamer and a streamer is a bird. So when they take this power tower and they want to back off the energy production, they raise the halo from the boiler where all that light is being concentrated. They call it the solar flux. They raise that up into the sky a little bit higher to kind of lessen the heat that hits the boiler to make the steam and what that creates. Well, and we don't know the mechanisms here. Fish and Wildlife has described this as a possible ecological trap where you have insects attracted to this glowing light and the birds are chasing the insects, and then the bird enters the heat halo and becomes a streamer when it literally disintegrates or in some cases, explodes going through the heat halo. Wow. So I'm not sure we'll ever see in California, another solar power tower ever excited based on public comments I read by fish and wildlife and such.

Speaker3: [00:31:24] They certainly won't get a very positive biological opinion in the environmental impact statement process. So. So those are the the landscape level. That's the kind of major difference is you have this heat halo that could be causing additional avian mortality in the KSP projects, but both of them are actually causing avian mortality, which is interesting and something I've been speaking with a professor at Purdue University and we've submitted a couple of concept papers to try to explore this question a little bit better. Apparently, we don't know how bird see very well avian vision. We put our that lake effect hypothesis is our interpretation of what we see out there. Oh, it looks like a lake out on the horizon, but reality is birds. Some of these birds are seeing in the ultraviolet, some see into the infrared right, and they process images differently and faster and things like that. So that's a place where hopefully we'll learn some, some cool science trying to solve this problem because I think we're we're going to see this problem elsewhere where birds are attracted to these things or if they're being attracted, but we'll have to figure out ways to mitigate that.

Speaker2: [00:32:32] I mean, this is a really important point, Dustin, because it's true that there are certain forms of science and, you know, advancing human understanding and knowledge at the nexus of, you know, what we can gloss as environment or natural systems, animals, creatures, plant life and how they intersect with these energy systems that we're trying to innovate and expand. And just, you know, listening to the story of the birds kind of being drawn into the heat halo because they may be pursuing insects. It's very it's very much cognate with something that we saw in our research in Mexico on wind turbines, where there is a phenomenon of bats being attracted to wind turbines and scientists actually aren't quite sure why. Very similarly. But they do think that it might be because of insects that are around there or they get killed by the blades or on the towers themselves. And so the bats come to try and feed on those. And then as they get in front of the rotor, it creates a vacuum effect that essentially implodes their lungs. It's called Barot Trauma, and basically it sucks all of the air out of their lungs and their lungs collapse, and they just fall dead from the sky. So you can find these dead bats at the base of these turbines, but it's not clear exactly how to deter them from coming around or how to prevent. So I bring that up because I think it's it's just interesting to see these parallels between these different forms of renewable energy. But what we also wanted to think through with you is a really interesting concept that you share in the book called The Green Civil War. And I think that this is really apropos of the kind of the balance or the paradoxes that come to play between renewable energy forms and their implementation and the desires of animal rights activists and people interested in protecting wildlife and other environmental actors. So can you tell us a bit about what we might think of as the Green Civil War?

Speaker3: [00:34:28] Yeah, absolutely. And just to add one last point to the kind of the ecologies that are suddenly enrolled into our renewable energy systems as we roll them out. Dr. Rebecca Hernandez at University of California, Davis, has a lab, and they're studying all these different interactions between insects and plants and things like that in and around renewable facilities. So. So I think there is a whole new interest in looking at that because, you know, it's interesting because there's so much research on climate change and how climate change impacts the ecology. And here you have our responses to climate change and trying to understand their interactive effects is a whole 'nother suite of things. I think that's actually not supported very well right now, at least not from the granting agencies and such. All right. We often hear ecologists say I need to put climate change into my research study. Otherwise I can't apply for grants because that's what's really available up there at the funding level. So. And I think this does Segway right into that green civil war a little bit because you have now pitted climate change. Our climate action advocates against people who want to have a more responsible way of using land and interesting land as part of the climate conundrum, right? Land use change is part of what of our challenges we face with adding too much carbon into the atmosphere. Yet we have this kind of narrowing or winnowing of environmental problems to just carbon emissions, and I think that leaves so much of our, you know, the richness of the world that we live in, you know, stripped away from, you know, thinking about how to responsibly put solar on the ground.

Speaker3: [00:36:09] So so with this idea of a green civil war is really me documenting in fights between environmental organizations about responsible solar deployment versus in some ways, it's a false dichotomy. Responsible solar deployment is really what we want. On one side, you have people who are advocating solar at all costs everywhere, anytime. Don't fight anything to people who say, you know, we need to more carefully think about what the land use decisions here, because one thing that's neat about solar is it's one thing you could live under it. What other? What other energy technology can you put over your roof, right? And like and like, have cohabit space so well know? Wind farms, I think, are one case, but I think as you just pointed out, there are some intractable challenges with wind turbines that impact technologies that will need to understand how to to minimize or avoid however we can with rooftop solar. I mean, we've already built flat surfaces all over the planet, right? I mean, you just coat them with solar panels there you have minimize the serious land use conflict. And that's really what the Green Civil War idea is trying to point out is that in some ways, the Green Civil War has set up a false choice between climate protection and biodiversity protection, and we have crises in both.

Speaker3: [00:37:30] So so how about we work together to try to find synergies where we could actually save water by putting solar panels on a reservoir? You know, assuming that the birds aren't going to crash into them, it's a whole another level. But you know that we're looking for those kind of win win situations. I mean, I drive around California more than I'd like to admit, and you drive around and you see these aqueducts that are full of water evaporate evaporation dishes basically, right? You cover every year. My students that we talk about this and I get a group that wants to see what the solar potential is. If we covered all the California aqueducts with solar panels instead of just letting all that water evaporate. As we try to pour all this energy and moving it around, you know, there's a lot of Win-Win scenarios there and there's plenty of space for it. We've been following with the EPA. The U.S. EPA has a program called Repowering America's Lands and R e stands for renewable energy, and they've screened lands for the screen lands that are degraded. In some way, they're either brownfields or they might be Superfund sites or abandoned mines, REC rest sites, Resource Conservation Recovery Act sites.

Speaker3: [00:38:40] They total more than 10 times what California needs for its solar potential just in California. So that's why this green civil war I tried to unpack because they did the. Position themselves, you had the National Sierra Club and wanting to do everything about deploying as much solar as possible to fight climate change, and you had the local Sierra Club in the desert saying, What are you guys doing to us out here? You're like, Have you guys looked at what you're how you're transforming this landscape or why aren't we? And you fly into places like Los Angeles or Phoenix or Las Vegas, and you see all the empty rooftops on storage buildings and logistics buildings where they're sorting all of that junk we get from China and putting it on trucks to all over the world. These are all opportunities that we're we're missing. So this whole idea of Green Civil War, it's really to get people to think about how to, you know, first of all, avoid this pitting of one against the other. Because I think that that's unproductive, like with the the thing that drives me crazy is about the wind is when I see that that graph that talks about how many cats deadly cats are for wind farms and how many birds, because it's like, that's cumulative. That's additional. We're not trading them out. Like by saying no to the wind farms, we're not going to suddenly get, you know, fewer deaths or fewer road collisions with birds and things like that.

Speaker3: [00:40:04] And by the way, have you ever seen a golden eagle take down a cat? No, because not working the other way around. Yeah, that is not taking down the Raptor, that's for sure. So it's kind of like, what ecology are you looking at when you lump everything into birds? Right, right? That's not even a sensible way to approach it. So I think that's really what I'm trying to do is point out that there is this division because everybody gets called a NIMBY in this space. And the social science says, no, it's actually not really a. In some cases. Sure. Right. People don't want things, you know, in their in their neighborhood and such in this case. And it definitely applies in the housing situation. So that's a whole different game. But we're talking about rural areas or sensitive ecosystems or, you know, some of the case studies I look at in my in my book, it was actually land that was bought by an environmental organization donated to the BLM. And then the BLM leased it out to the solar industry to bulldoze it and put solar farms. So that's how you, you know, you stoke a civil war. What I'm looking for is like a solution. How do we actually put this stuff out there? It doesn't provoke this because people like the look of solar in certain places, they're really that concerned about it.

Speaker3: [00:41:12] It's just it's the transformation of rural and ecosystems, rural areas and ecosystems into industrial landscapes that people are opposed to, especially when they don't see the core issue being addressed. I had over and over described to me more or less paraphrasing I'm going to do, which is why should I turn this whole valley into a solar farm when it's just powering the air conditioning that's in homes that are unoccupied in Los Angeles right now? Like we're not treating the symptom of our climate crisis, which is that we waste a lot of energy and here we are in their view, like sacrificing land in the California desert. They're like, Oh, and you already have our landfills are out here. You know, your your oil and gas comes from here already. You're polluting our water from all your food. And here now you just want to turn it into giant solar farms to power your excesses. And that's, you know, I don't think that's necessarily NIMBY. I think that that's that's contextualization that people are reading into the situation. Again, there are there are NIMBYs, but there people are questioning the wisdom of the strategy. Yeah, more than saying we don't want solar because, you know, I've seen plenty of solar projects appear in industrial ag lands, and I never even heard a peep from anybody about them.

Speaker3: [00:42:28] And that's that's where the challenge comes from. And it's probably something that's really confined to the western United States, maybe or other areas where you have big open spaces and it's relatively rural still, and you have lots of ecosystems out there because I maybe it's different and that's what some people would push back a little and say, Oh, it's different here in the Northeast or it's different here in the Midwest than what you're seeing out there, where there's a lot of public lands. And that's another element is the privatization or virtual privatization of public lands. In these cases, by leasing more to industry, which, you know, the BLM basically has been giving land out to oil and gas for one hundred and forty years. So why not give them more to solar and wind? And it's like, well, those are different landscapes and different parts of the world, and I'm not sure that that's the right response to giving all this land the public land to oil and gas companies. And the right response is to take the public lands away from oil and gas industries. And maybe, you know, use arid, dry lands as a defense against climate change, which is, you know, they absorb carbon from the atmosphere, arid areas. There's a lot of carbon plants. So we've got to tackle the land use change problem at the same time as we deal with our carbon problem.

Speaker1: [00:43:40] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it's uncanny how many of the same this whole quote unquote nimbyism that's that's going on regarding solar, how much it maps across. You know, what we saw regarding wind power in southern Mexico were. People are not challenging renewable energy, per say, but raising exactly these questions about the the wisdom and the and the equity of of taking agricultural lands and turning them into energy landscapes. You know how

Speaker2: [00:44:03] Specifically a to an industrialization, exactly something that people said explicitly like this is now an industrial

Speaker1: [00:44:08] Zone privatizing land, restricting access, increasing local food costs because there's not as much food grown in these areas. So a lot of things are playing into that. And I wanted to to touch on one thing that I think this really raises and it really is central, I think, to not just solar or solar energy, but I feel like renewable energy more broadly, which is, you know, how we think about whether it should be like a radically decentralized resource or whether it's something where we should try to accommodate the logic and the infrastructure of of grid and grid was, of course, built behind fossil thermoelectric and nuclear energy, going to optimize to those energy forms in a way that I think renewables don't necessarily have to. At least the argument has been that renewables can maybe work even better as a radically decentralized, and this gets you back to the photovoltaics on your roof. And you know, it seemed to me a lot of the issues that have come up around the environmental externalities of solar development are around these huge, you know, 500 megawatt fields, et cetera, et cetera. One hears a lot fewer complaints, although maybe there are some about what happens when a whole town puts, you know, limited kilowatt systems on their roofs. So I just wanted to get your thoughts about this. I mean, do you see the scale issue as being an important one? And do you think that, you know, a more decentralised emphasis or a greater emphasis on decentralization within solar energy development would be something that would help to address these justice issues?

Speaker3: [00:45:35] Yes, I do think that decentralized systems have some advantages inherently that will help us see the justice question through a little better. First of all, homes use basically the same power density as the Sun can provide. You know, I'm talking about not apartment buildings, but like most of the United States is, which is single family houses. Actually, I'm not sure that's even true. Maybe more people live in cities, but a lot of our landscape is dedicated to single family houses in terms of housing stock. And much of that matches so well with solar make sense to have that distributed. You know, there are debates happening amongst economic modelers that say, Oh, if you put too much solar out there, then you have challenges getting all the way to 100 percent because you have to have storage and storage is expensive, and that's something that will have to think about a little bit more. These are people who build these models that are called least cost models, and they try to simulate what the grid will look like and have have power plants dispatch into an economic grid and see what that composition looks like based on the different costs, the different energy technologies. And again, the solar plus storage tends to be an expensive option in their view. And partly it's because they have these big grids and the grids are expensive. And having big grids means you don't need to have big batteries in places and thinking more about a distributed strategy. People spend a lot of money on their homes in this country.

Speaker3: [00:47:06] Those who are homeowners, you know, in California, especially here I am, you know, in a very, very expensive place to live. And I look at that battery and I say your battery is nothing compared to the cost of this house, right? So I mean, it's not nothing. It's something. But in the context of real estate, batteries seem to be very reasonable and people spend a lot of money on pools. People spend a lot of money on granite countertops and high end cabinets. People spend a lot of money on stuff, and I don't see why they wouldn't spend money on an electricity system that is all self enclosed and they know how to deal with a wire. I mean, I look around our neighborhood and I look around every neighborhood, you know? You know, I spent a lot of time living in Jersey City, New Jersey, where the wires were just like all over going in all these different directions. And I think we're going to look at pictures of what our society looks like 100 years from now. We're not going to see wires anywhere wires that are buried, but particularly in these less energy dense places where you're going to need to start spending power around to different regions with the big cities. Because there you have a mismatch between how much energy the city uses and how much it could self generate. And some cities could could generate quite a bit of their power potential, particularly as they start shifting to buildings that are autonomous from the grid in terms of their power generation.

Speaker3: [00:48:28] So the answer is a mix, and I think again, pretty context dependent on what is the actual power need for the area that you're describing. But I think people who are overly concerned about the cost of solar plus storage aren't thinking about it in the right context. They're thinking about it, like in how to make a solar power plant functional. In a market of a big grid and really what we need to be thinking about is the power plant gets wrapped into the cost of the house or it becomes part of the development of even an apartment building could offset a decent amount of its energy by having some power on top. So I don't know if that answers if I punted too much on that question, but that's how I've thought about how this question of decentralised versus centralized will play out. The other just last thing on this is with fires, and we've seen so many horrific fires in California over the past few years. I just don't see throwing and people say for California to get more renewable energy, particularly into Northern California, you're going to have to tie into Wyoming to get wind or do some swapping with northwest for some of their hydro. That just means more power lines. And I just don't see adding more power lines in California, particularly with the risks that these power lines pose to vulnerable landscapes that could easily catch fire during a wind event or something like that.

Speaker2: [00:49:52] Yeah, that's a really excellent point. Wires are not just unsightly or awkward to encounter, but they've actually become dangerous in places like California and elsewhere. So it's it's not nothing to think about D wiring our systems more explicitly.

Speaker3: [00:50:10] It seems like a treadmill, right? It's the here you are responding to climate change by trying to get more wind power out of the out of Wyoming, and you're making new power lines and creating new risks across different landscapes. So which are are made vulnerable to climate change by hotter, drier weather, windier weather, right? So so it's like we're trying to respond to climate change and the landscape is going to respond right back to us if we if we make some bad decisions.

Speaker2: [00:50:36] Yeah, yeah, that's really well put. So we've been talking, we brought up a couple of topics. I wanted to return to some other recommendations that you have towards the end of the book for policymakers and for others too, and you walk through a couple of different, several different elements of what we need to consider and kind of social systems and political orientations that we need to shift and perhaps rethink in order to create a just transition with solar power. So we talked a bit about the land use issues and questions of wildlife. We talked a bit about to the heavy metals and the use of cadmium and lead in the manufacture of solar panels. And you note that there is innovation going on around that where they're trying to replace the cadmium, I guess replace it with magnesium based salts and to try and get the chlorine based chemicals out of the the photovoltaic production altogether. But I wanted to bring up this question of long term of the disposability and resource availability questions that are tied into recycling, reuse or disposal of the solar apparatuses after they've been produced. Can you tell us a bit about what that does look like or what it might look like in an ideal state, if we were to to think through the longer term picture of when these photovoltaic panels are no longer operable and they need to go onto their great reward, what is the best way that we can imagine enacting that?

Speaker3: [00:52:05] A few things that are really important for recycling solar panels or thinking about the resource limitations of photovoltaics include a couple of different metals that are precious or rare. So crystalline silicon, which is the dominant technology today, uses silver. In fact, somewhere on the order of 15 percent of the global silver supply currently is used in the solar industry. It's pretty incredible to think about. There's one little industry that makes one product using such a large swath of precious metal that sent conquistadors exploring continents for so, so long ago. And that's really important because the Silver is a really good conductor. That's one of the reasons they use it. Eventually, they could move on to a different metal, but the the availability of silver limits how much solar you could actually put out there, right? You can't just if you want ten times more solar going out next year than you had this year. What does that mean for silver supply? Like, where do you get that if you've already, if you're using 15 percent of it already? So that means possibly more mining activities. And we know mining is very, very energy intensive process and we are in an era of declining orders. The ores that we find today are not what the conquistadors were seeking or found in some cases, but they're actually declining it. We're finding less and less silver and everything that we mined as we look and maybe will find more on meteorites and in the deep sea. And those are two areas that frighten me.

Speaker3: [00:53:35] Think to think about a little bit when you start thinking about where those pressures will look like in the future. So what that means about deployment, though, is that unless you start closing the loop toward this circular economy idea where you think about industries as ecologies, their output. Become inputs and you don't have any waste. You're you're going to be limited on how much solar you could put out there. You could probably put, you know, some some say we need to get maybe 10 terawatts of solar out there altogether to start to make significant inroads and replacing our current energy systems. Some studies show one to two terawatts of crystalline silicon photovoltaics based on the availability of silver. So we don't start closing those loops now. We're going to be looking for where we where are we put the solar panels when we were landfilling them and we'll be sifting through our landfills looking for the silver unless we come up with some other material. Now that's a conductor, that silver. So that's possibly something you can you can replace what you can't replace or what becomes more difficult to replace is the semiconductor that you could put in the sun that generates electrons because there's just not that many of them. So you can have different combinations of metals that exhibit the photoelectric effect, which is when you put the piece of metal in the sun, it makes the electron move into circuit and you know, you only have limited amounts of these.

Speaker3: [00:54:54] So one thin film manufacturer that I talk about a bit in the book called First Solar. They make a cadmium telluride thin film, and they use a material called tellurium and tellurium is about a thousand times more rare than rare earths. So they're very, very rare in the Earth's crust. And this one company is this 40 percent of the global tellurium supply. So here you have 40 percent of the global supply of an element on the periodic table being used by one manufacturer. How much space does then that create for cadmium telluride manufacturers to compete? Right, that's the challenge right there. So that company actually does recycle their tellurium and then they send it to their supplier who remakes the semiconductor material that they sell back to them. So there you have an example of some closing of the loop, and I'm sure that part of the reason for them doing that is because they're using 40 percent of the supply of a material. In fact, that's something they had to report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is when you have a company and your company makes something, you have to be candid with your investors about how limited your market cap is. And they had to say, you know, we use a very large portion of one material, and that means price volatility in some cases, but also real scarcity. In other cases, and that's why they and then they write off of it, they say, we have our own recycling facilities where we recover some of this, so they are there.

Speaker3: [00:56:25] The laws of capital are somewhat dictating the recycling in Europe. They've been recycling solar panels for about 10 years, and I've gotten to know this gentleman named Young Klink. He works for PV cycle and PV cycle has been one of the take back and collection parties in Europe. So they've had a system in Europe where waste electronics have to be centralized and sorted and properly disposed of or recycled. And once they set that system up in Europe, they started finding that the panels, some of them when they started piling together, they still worked. So they had developed a new secondary market for reusable panels. Now you don't put these necessarily in a string and a brand new power plant, of course, because you get different voltages as they degrade over time, they start to mismatch. But powering pumps or powering an isolated electronic demand somewhere is what some of these PV modules where some of these PV modules have found a new home. So that was a consequence of actually regulating an industry and saying you have to take back and collect your product, and you ended up with a situation that you had even a better use than you intended. The idea was to set it up so you could recycle and get the metals back. What if you start putting things in re-use that's higher up on the waste hierarchy? That's what we want to reuse things before we have to recycle them.

Speaker1: [00:57:49] The recycling part of it is going to be so important. As you know, we move out of the gigawatts into the terawatt hours of solar energy in the future. And I think that's something that is it's really terrific you're paying such close attention to and that obviously the industry is beginning to pay more attention to as well. It's getting towards the hour, Dustin. You've been awfully patient with our questions. I had one more for you, though, if you're willing to take it and that is to returning to the Green New Deal, which is something you talk about in the book as well. And it's something that's obviously becoming a large touchstone topic of political conversation in this country, although I think, generally speaking, these principles are being discussed in a lot of parts of the world now. In other words, how do we manage a renewable energy transition that also creates economic opportunities that that allows people to transition out of, say, jobs and coal or oil and gas into jobs and in renewable energy? The idea that there might be this terrific growth potential there, but also we know that the whole growth model itself is problematic and is linked to fossil fuels and innumerable. Way so. So as you're looking at this Green New Deal conversation, I'm calling out a conversation because I think the proposal that's out there is obviously just one of many, and it's going to be something that's debated for many years as it becomes policy, hopefully. What are some of the issues that you think are most important that people concentrate on from the perspective of making sure that this solar revolution is not one that repeats the inequities of the past?

Speaker3: [00:59:18] In the book, I have a chapter called Green New Deal. In the context for that was actually the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and Tom Friedman's Op-Ed on Green New Deal, and it was used in a couple other publications at the time. So it's been really fun to see it suddenly resurfaced as my book was in production, and I'm like, Wow, there's actually a chapter. And in some ways, it's obviously my chapter is not about what is going on today in the contemporary discourse around Green New Deal. But I do think there are a lot of lessons in there, one of which is that there are a bunch of policy proposals that came out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that we might see come back again. And I think if there were some lessons to be learned with money spent through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on clean technology, you know, there were a couple of major challenges. I think that were part of that. One was a lot of that money was spent on utility scale solar projects on public lands. So I would be cautious to see public lands wrapped up into an effort to deploy more solar energy in the next round. And I think that we might start to see that we've seen a little more activity on people applying for right of way permits, which is how the Bureau of Land Management permits solar projects on public lands. So that might be something to be cautious of, because I think that speaks against what we want to see as responsible. Solar development and public lands are something that we're a legacy of.

Speaker3: [01:00:52] The Homestead Act that was land that was not it was not able to be given away to anybody because it was dry and not able to be worked. And as a result, it has by default become very conservation heavy, meaning it's really got a lot of species on that landscape. So by making public lands available for solar development, you're kind of pitting that green civil war flare up again against each other. Secondly, there was something called the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and that's something else that we might see come up again. And the tendency here. This was basically the Department of Energy cosigning loans with project developers to build, in many cases, very, very big projects. One project, I think the largest project was a $2.1 billion concentrated solar farm. In fact, there have been nuclear power plants that have gotten many billions of dollars on this loan guarantee program. And it seems that that program had a tendency to invest in very large projects as opposed to smaller distributed projects. And I'm sure that has something to do with how well the financing arrangements can be made to be to a lot of people versus just having a bunch of big companies apply and you have fewer actors there. But so those are there was a tendency to emphasize public lands and kind of build big, big projects and in some cases too big to fail actually did enter into conversations again. And I think that that went against many of the ideas that we want to think about. If we want to have a just future which is having more voices, having more stakeholders at the table weigh in on what the proposals are.

Speaker3: [01:02:29] And a lot of decisions were made behind closed doors. No one really has shine the light on how decisions were made or why this company was chosen to build a solar project that will be built by Bechtel. Why this project was awarded to a company owned by Citibank. Why this company was awarded even though they're owned by Morgan Stanley and Co. to finance themselves. So there are political economies that these financing arrangements get inserted into, and I think we have to be very cautious about who those actors actually are, whether they are taking advantage of just money that's being made available or whether they actually are or have the transformative potential that we want to see where things are using new technology, using multiple voices to decide who gets to site where and who. What kinds of technologies are deployed and who benefits from these things. These are things that were never asked. No one ever asked. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. No one ever asked, Who benefits from this? They just wanted to see it get built. And if you actually look at who benefited these all Google, you saw Morgan Stanley, you saw Chevron, you saw BP does the same kind of big, big energy companies that were managing the status quo got all the benefit, not the companies that maybe could have been more transformative or more and more in line with the principles. You describe you would see described in Green New Deal thinking today.

Speaker2: [01:03:54] That's a really good point.

Speaker1: [01:03:56] It does remind me very much of Kyle Power's White's work and you know, we met each other in person at a conference. He was keynoting and his his warning to all, you know, to beware, you know, settler apocalyptic discourse that then allows for people to fast track new development, you know, without asking those questions about who benefits and who doesn't and and where things are sited and what communities might face, what kinds of fence line issues and so forth. So point very well taken. Dustin, this has been great. I've learned a lot, actually. You know, I was going

Speaker2: [01:04:26] To say, did I was going to say I learned a lot?

Speaker1: [01:04:28] We both do a lot. So, you know, the book is called Solar Power, which makes it sound like it is the definitive work on this topic. And pretty much it is. I hope everyone is listening. We'll we'll find a chance to go by it. It's with the University of California press just out. Any final words, Dustin? Anything you want to shout out, any projects you're working on right now that you want people to know about before we sign off?

Speaker3: [01:04:51] Yeah, actually, there's this cool project that we started about a year ago. It's called Capitalizing on the Sun, and in many ways, my book is trying to be a blueprint for asking the questions. It doesn't have all the answers in it. It's like, here's here's the things that have been kind of glossed over, and we should do a little more digging into. And I hope that it comes across that way that I see a lot of optimism and opportunity here. But this project capitalizing on the Sun, it's with Jamie Cross. We started about a year ago, the

Speaker2: [01:05:24] Buddy Jamie Cross.

Speaker1: [01:05:25] Yeah, you guys, right?

Speaker2: [01:05:27] Yeah. So Jamie Cross,

Speaker3: [01:05:30] Well, he last year we launched this thing called the Better Solar Network, and the idea was to get people together occasionally to talk about what's going on in batteries and solar panels. And at this capitalizing on the Sun conference last spring, it was amazing to sit at this table and had, you know, 30 other scholars who are now engaging in these supply chain questions and land use to questions on the solar industry. Whereas 10 years ago, there's nothing and it was just all life cycle assessments and those aren't really telling a story, right? There are no lives and life cycle assessment. So in this, we're really trying to bring together a bunch of scholars who are thinking about questions about photovoltaic supply chains, waste land, solar futures and an edited volume. And we hope to be presenting that to some potential publishers this summer and getting essays in. We've gotten about 25 people submitting abstracts for this thing, so I'm pretty excited to see the same framing that's in my book in some ways about the different aspects of the solar life cycle, but with different scholars thinking different ways, different in different ways and exciting ways. And some are presenting kind of more artistic and thought provoking articles where some are telling stories that are more ethnographic type contexts. So so that's something that we're excited to start sharing with people as we make a little more progress on it. But that's if you're interested. Still send me an abstract, we might be able to get it in.

Speaker1: [01:07:07] Oh, that's great.

Speaker2: [01:07:08] That sounds. There you go, project and something to look forward to and a nice little connection that we didn't even know existed.

Speaker1: [01:07:14] Yeah, awesome. Look at that. Yeah, it's just it's a small world.

Speaker3: [01:07:17] And I should also mention Benjamin Brown, who works with Jamie. He's also part of that.

Speaker1: [01:07:23] Well, Dustin, thank you so much. A terrific conversation. Thanks for participating in our greater education and all matters solar today, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon, hopefully at some new revolutionary solar event.

Speaker3: [01:07:37] That sounds fabulous. Well, thank you so much for having me. And again, I learned so much from your podcast. So, so thank you to.