(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 311: The Energy Efficiency Megatrend

November 19, 2020

This week we’re joined by Roger Duncan to talk about his new book with Co-Author Michael Webber called The Future of Transportation, Buildings, and Power.  We chat about buildings can get to net zero energy, the changing structure of public utilities, and the energy efficiency megatrend.

Below is a full unedited transcript:

Jeff Wood (0s):
You’re listening to the Talking Headways podcast network. This is Talking Headways a weekly podcast about sustainable transportation and urban design. I’m Jeff Wood this week we’re joined by Roger Duncan to talk about his new book with coauthor Michael Webber called the future of Transportation Buildings and power, which a lot about how Buildings can get to net zero energy to change in the structure of public utilities. And The Energy Efficiency Megatrend Stay with us. Today’s podcast is brought to you by our super generous Patrion supporters. Thank you infinitely for supporting the show. You can support the show by going to patreon.com/theOverheadWire today’s podcast is also brought to you by the numerous projects of The Overhead Wire our 14 year old daily newsletter, where you can sign up for a two week free trial by going to The Overhead wire.com and our audio book production of Raymon Unwin in 1909 classic Town Planning in Practice pick it up and listen to it as a podcast, by going to The Overhead wire.com or Raymond unwin.com.

Jeff Wood (1m 4s):
Before we get to this week’s show, I want to let folks know that they can get this podcast wherever you find your podcasts, including iHeart radio Spotify overcast Stitcher And of course Apple podcasts. Make sure you subscribe. So you don’t miss an episode and subscribing means to get both this show Talking Headways and Mondays at The Overhead Wire where this music I I’m talking about comes from on the same feed to fund Podcast one great channel subscribe today.

Roger Dunkin. Welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast

Roger (1m 33s):
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Jeff Wood
So before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Roger
Yeah, so I, I say that I’m a recovering politician. I was elected in the early 1980s to the Austin city council ran on the platform of energy efficiency and clean energy. And I served a couple of terms left office undefeated, and an unindicted. And we went back to the city as a department head. I had a 20 year career with the city of Austin. And when I left, I was a general manager of all the energy, which is the municipal electric utility for Austin, Texas.

Roger (2m 15s):
So I had a, a career and board with the electric power and Transportation, and Buildings for on-demand this one point of view,

Jeff Wood (2m 25s):
What got you to initially run for office? So it was the impetus.

Roger (2m 29s):
Well, I was in an anti-nuclear activist by the late seventies, and we were protesting Austin’s participation and the South Texas nuclear project. And I got very active in the campaign against it. Then people persuaded me to run for city council. So that was my reward was serving two terms on the council. And it was interesting because bike in those days, the question put to my campaign and the us was, if we’re not going to have nuclear power, then how are we going to keep the lights on? And the very concept of energy efficiency was a radical ideal at the time, the idea that you could actually not be able to a power plant and replace it with energy efficient, light bulbs and air conditioners and so forth, which is really a brand new ideal.

Roger (3m 20s):
And we read on that campaign and the, after all it was elected, we are established first municipal energy conservation program in the country and went on to establish what are the first green building programs and North America.

Jeff Wood (3m 34s):
That’s awesome. Where are you around for the save? Our Springs long meeting.

Roger (3m 40s):
And I was around four that, that was after my time on the council, but I was like a department head over the M energy conservation services department. When we did the SOS ordinance in Allston,

Jeff Wood (3m 55s):
You been working on this book for a lot of years with Michael, I’m curious what the impetus was for writing the book.

Roger (4m 1s):
Well, as I said, I was general manager of all strung energy from 2008, 2010. And Michael, he is a professor of mechanical engineering at the university of Texas. And at that time he was on the electric utility commission for the city of Austin. So I worked with him. So I am as a general manager of the utility. And we recognized early on that we both had similar visions and thoughts for the future of clean energy and renewable energy conservation and so forth. And so when I retired in 2010, Michael asked me to come over to the university of Texas and joined him at the high energy Institute at UT at all, all was there.

Roger (4m 47s):
We got together and tolerate a short course briefly on a, the future of energy, particularly Buildings and Transportation in power. And this book came from that short course and we brainstorm and worked on it for over a decade until we finally finished it earlier this year.

Jeff Wood (5m 8s):
And how much have things changed since you started the book until now?

Roger (5m 11s):
Well, it, it was quite a challenge to keep up with the changes we would, we would start writing about something far in the future, like drones, like, you know, electric air taxis, or something, and then have to change it to keep up with a times we offer joke that we were spending so much time rotting about the future of energy that we would have to sell it at the history of Energy while at the time we completed it. But it was also a very much fun and interesting to stay up with the technology changes. And as they move rather rapidly and some areas that we covered in the book

Jeff Wood (5m 48s):
Or something that you’ve learned while your writing, the book that you are surprised about in terms of like learning something new, cause you’ve been in the business for such a long time, it seems like, you know, new things aren’t necessarily a surprise to you.

Roger (5m 58s):
Well, I don’t know that I ran across the lot. That was a totally new surprise, our surprise at how some things can take off on some things we did take off rather quickly. I was just talking to Michael the other day back when I was a department head at one of my other jobs, 25 or 30 years ago. Now it was to set up a telecommuting in the city of Austin and encourage people to work from home. And we did a lot of initiatives and efforts in that to try to shift a work from home culture. And frankly, it just didn’t work where you had very little success in that. And I have been surprised that even with the COVID pandemic of how quickly we have adjusted to a work from home technology by race, and that’s been one of those surprises, also electric vehicles really push in electric vehicles for a long time.

Roger (6m 55s):
And then his st around 2006 to 2007 of the thinking shifted and the automobile industry and the electric utility industry or environmentalist are all in the spice of a couple of years. Certainly there seemed to be a decision that, yes, this is the future. And now you have every major auto maker pushing for electric vehicles in transitioning to electric vehicles and the future. And in retrospect, that was talking that it didn’t move it at all for decades, decades, and then suddenly changed quickly. What do you think it changes so quickly? Well, I think it was a combination of political and technological change.

Roger (7m 35s):
I got to take that there has been pressure on climate change that was built into the two thousands on Transportation. But I think that the middle of two thousands, the battery on an advantage reached the point where suddenly when we started out by pushing plug-in hybrids only had a 40 mile range or so, but that was enough to cover the average Americans daily drive in the city. And when we are convinced general motors and others to come up with the plugin hybrid, that would be a, at least partially electrified. They battery technology is advancing faster and up that very soon or that problem was overcome.

Roger (8m 20s):
’cause that’s what I heard when I came back in 2005 on the automakers, AI is the batteries. You are never going to be there. We’re never going to build these is, it just doesn’t work. And I think the shift in battery technology with the lithium ion batteries was the major change.

Jeff Wood (8m 37s):
It’s interesting because in the book, you all talk about how some things have changed and some things haven’t changed. You, you mentioned, you know, a lot of the stuff that has happened, especially in energy production, you know, was anything before in 1914, for the most part. I’m wondering why is that the cutoff, Y as in 1914 cutoff, what does that mean for even in the future of innovation, we have all those things that wouldn’t change, you know, now, but there’s all these things that do change. Like you were talking about Moore’s law and technology from the door and chip perspective in all that, but some basic things haven’t changed.

Roger (9m 10s):
Well, I, I think the trick is to recognize that technology changes at different grades. And we’re going through a period recently where there was a lot of hype about how all the technology is doubling every a few years and capacity and speed and so forth. And that’s certainly been the case and information and communication, technology, computers, and communication equipment and so forth. But as I mentioned in the book, some fundamental technology to generate electricity, really solid period of change in the Lake, you know, from about 1880 to 1915 or so, and not much changed since then.

Roger (9m 54s):
And so you have to recognize which technology areas are really changing in which ones or not. And what that will mean, what it means is information and communication technology and computers and technology are advancing so rapidly. There has got to make a lot of our environments smart. It’s going to make it responsive to us his phone. And we will be able to understand and interact with our environment. That does not mean how we were a bet. You have a new way suddenly of generating electricity, which everything, one zone that you didn’t have two years ago or four years ago. And so we have to look and see which technologies are changing rapidly, which ones or not, and what is going to mean.

Roger (10m 41s):
I think it’s going to mean that our future technology it’s going to be very smart and advanced, but at some fundamental parts of the technology and not just energy, but maybe food production and some areas like that are not going to really change as fast as we like to think about it in the future.

Jeff Wood (11m 0s):
It’s always interesting. You know, you all just passed a light rail election, a ballot measure. And what we hear it from. The other side is always that the transit is a 19th century technology from opponents. And everything’s seems to be a 19th century technology. I mean, automobiles in the 19th century technology. So it’s funny to think about it in those terms when, when people are like, well, you all that stuff is old hat, but its actually, you know, we’d just have to improve upon the base level to get that technology to help the base level of the thing we already know works to make it better. It seems like,

Roger (11m 31s):
Right. I mean, in, in this case we are not suddenly having something that it replaces the automobile we’re electrifying the automobile so that we don’t have a pollution problem from it that we’ve had traditionally. And so there’s changes on the margin. So to speak of the technology that we’re looking at, what’s

Jeff Wood (11m 49s):
The, Energy Efficiency Megatrend well,

Roger (11m 52s):
The, Energy Efficiency is a statement that Michael and I came up with. There is sexually saying that all technologies is continually moving and the direction of Efficiency and Energy conversions and I’m using Energy and a broad sense of the world, not just a gasoline and electricity and so much, but you know, as Einstein showed us, everything is made up of energy of some sort. And when we convert anything to do work, to perform work, we use technology to optimize that, that conversion to make it easier, to use less material, to do it with less motion to do it with less time.

Roger (12m 36s):
And this is The Energy Efficiency Megatrend and we think that it affects all technology at different grades, but that will mean that in the future, our basic functions of building some Transportation and Power agriculture industry will Meet their functions. With less material, less motion in less time, less Energy conversions.

Jeff Wood (13m 2s):
Is there something that you’re worried about?

Roger (13m 4s):
Well, there are plenty of things to worry about it and, and it’s important to point out that technological changes themselves are not necessarily solutions to anything is how we use a technology and apply that technology that makes the difference. And some of the fundamental problems with food and water and so forth are going to be very difficult to solve with technology. You know, with climate change, I think has reached the point where it’s too late for us to really avert very serious climate change consequences. We certainly need to transition to a corn free environment and the economy to deal with that.

Roger (13m 50s):
But you know, we have a lot of sea rise and such Built in at this point that we’re going to have to deal with. I, and technology can solve part of that problem, but not all of it.

Jeff Wood (14m 2s):
Yeah. And, and, and I know you mentioned the book or talking a little bit about techno optimism and I see a lot of that out there and it seems to be folks that feel like, well, we can just go up on our Merry way and continue doing things like we’re doing, but technology will save us. Do you see a lot of that when you would discuss the idea’s in the book?

Roger (14m 19s):
Well, I do see a fair amount of that. Like I I’ve been in the environmental movement for many decades now and it’s encouraging to see so many people with a, a, an environmental sense of mind and an effort, but it is a little discouraging to see the number of people who feel like, Oh, if we just do this, so if we just passed the green new deal, or if we just, you know, put solar on our roof or do this or that, then going to be fine with all of them is going to be solved. And I just do not think that’s a realistic understanding of the situation that we’re in and we need to move as fast as we can.

Roger (15m 4s):
And as completely as we can to transition our economy to an economy that is sustainable, but we also need to recognize, so we’re going to have to add mitigation measures and other measures to deal with the climate change that’s already built in and that we’re going to be facing.

Jeff Wood (15m 24s):
Yeah. And you talked about the silver buckshot are the silver, not the silver bullet, numerous ideas and not just one.

Roger (15m 31s):
Yes. It’s very easy for people to get into advocating for their particular technology. You know, the answer is nuclear or no, the answer is Co causes cheaper and chaos. You know, solar is a real answer. And well, we pointed out is first of all, there was no technology that I know of that is completely pure and it has no downsides, wind, and solar and so forth. All the technologies have some environmental impact that you’ve got to deal with, but we try to focus on looking at a regional energy solutions when you, instead of doing a silver bullet approach and saying, everybody in the country should be using this technology.

Roger (16m 17s):
We think that it regions all the countries should look at it and walk, there are resources or in terms of renewable energy, what their energy loads or in terms of energy efficiency improvements and maximize those. And in some cases, and some regions have the world at some times of the year, I am doubt for that efficiency and renewable energy storage alone. We’ll be handled all of the needs. In which case, perhaps they should be looking at nuclear reactors or other sources that do not put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Jeff Wood (16m 50s):
Yeah. And you talked about that too. I found the discussion of different places, really interesting. The differences between what helps reduce emissions in Cleveland versus like Seattle in Austin. So what are the differences between those places? And I also have another question as like how can federal policy be written in a way to help each of those individual places reach their goals, but not prescribing the exact same thing for all of them.

Roger (17m 10s):
Okay. Well, first as to the differences, of course, I’m from Austin, I know also runs a utility fairly well, and we all have somewhat of a balanced utility. We pay closer to 35% renewable. She and I on another 20, 30%, 20% or so from nuclear and most of the others, natural gas. And we were working on that. Seattle as almost a hundred percent renewable, they are basically hydro powered and have a lot of wind power coming in to their system now. And then the Cleveland Ohio area, it is still primarily cold by us. And so the point we make and the bookie us, if you started talking about some technologies that everyone likes like electric vehicles, for instance, or whether it is in a changing out light bulls for energy efficiency, light bulbs, or such that those solutions have different impacts and are effective in some areas and not as effective in others, changing out light bulbs in Seattle is not going to be saved your missions.

Roger (18m 16s):
’cause, they’re already running on a hydro and when they are, but we should change at all the light bulb’s in Cleveland, as quick as we can, we call them it directly impacts the coli missions, electric vehicles, or a deal to go in to Seattle because it would be running on hydro power or what might that much different in Cleveland and salt have a middle ground and Austin, which has about half an hour hang up. So the ideal is to let the regions looking at what their net renewable energy resources or their energy load, so that they have their electricity mixed or utility mixed and such, and gave some guidance and helped from the national level to help them develop a regional energy plans that maximize first theory, energy efficiency, then optimize for whatever renewable resources they have in that region with an energy storage, and then add what they need either transporting in more renewable energy or not.

Roger (19m 18s):
Now the national level can do some things that can’t be done on a regional basis, transmission lines coming from our wind and solar centers that cross many States really needs to be handled by four at the national level. And there are some policies like that that can be very helpful to the regional energy plants.

Jeff Wood (19m 40s):
It’s a really interesting, I mean, the idea that a certain city has a certain target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I am interested in that difference between light bulbs and EVs, especially in, in a place like Cleveland. I know that, you know, you wouldn’t be able to reduce emissions in Cleveland because it’s still the same amount of missions, but then there’s also like the second layer of things, which is the pollution locally as well. The point source pollution as it were the emissions from the vehicle in terms of brake dust, in terms of internal combustion engine and all of the particulates and all of that stuff too. So there’s that all of these orders of magnitude that seemed like there a part of the discussions as well.

Roger (20m 13s):
That’s right. And we’re calling about priorities here in terms of what you do first, as opposed to the second and third, we wanted to change Cleveland’s electricity mics to renewables. At that point, you will to have a, what were saying is if you want reduce the most greenhouse gasses in the shortest amount of time, you do the light bulbs first, and then you work on getting the vehicles in second in this particular region.

Jeff Wood (20m 43s):
And the book you talk about, Energy talk about Buildings you talking about Transportation from numerous different types of transportation modes. I’m curious why you didn’t mention it as much a land use.

Roger (20m 53s):
Well, it was just a scope of the book. So we focused on Buildings Transportation and Power And, that is a, an awfully big chunky to buy it all to begin with. Well, we also, we left out agriculture and industry and some major sectors and own land use. We just had to deal with it peripherally because there is certainly an issue, but we have to just limit the scope of the book two, the building site and building some sales.

Jeff Wood (21m 22s):
There’s an interesting part that kind of hints at land use. There’s the, the difference in the ability to be zero energy from multi-family in larger buildings and single-family housing, or kind of a low density housing, the ability to be zero energies, easier for the single family. Then it is for say a larger building. I’m curious how those too kind of differences fit into that opposite reaction of land use from a transportation standpoint as better if it’s more of a clustered.

Roger (21m 47s):
Yeah. So then of course there are trade-offs here. I mean, there is not one solution that fits all the needs. And again, this gets back to the differences in technology, as I point out early in the book in regard to renewable energy and on-site generation, because solar sales and batteries are at the level of technology. They are, we are going to be able to have single family homes and small commercial buildings that can be net zero energy from just the amount of sunlight can land and other resources that are hit that building site, that location, but because of urbanization, most people in the future are going to be living in multi-story residential and commercial buildings.

Roger (22m 32s):
And you do have some multi-story buildings that are net zero energy Today The, and Seattle all of the bullet foundation and Rocky mountain institutes building and so forth. But these are still limited to the energy that hits that site. And if you have a high substantial Energy load of computers or a restaurant in a building and so forth, you are simply not going to be able to convert enough sunlight and other resources hitting that site to make it zero energy. Now it can still be clean Energy. You can still have it be solar powered or a wind power by transmitting in the energy from a wind form or solar form are outside of the area.

Roger (23m 21s):
But it is a cautionary note to all of the people who are advocating that we change our building code and require. For instance, all commercial buildings must be net zero energy buildings in the future. That’s not realistic. If you define net zero energy as getting all your energy needs from the building side itself. It’s interesting also of you mentioned

Jeff Wood (23m 46s):
Data centers and you mentioned a number of almost, you didn’t say this in the book, but I thought that when you add the energy vampires, you know, the data centers, indoor agriculture, and you mentioned Bitcoin mining, which is something that seems to be sucking out a lot of energy. Are we going to get a handle on these kinds of Energy zombies kind of things that we’re going to continue to need? ’cause we need this computing power. We need this ability to, you know, have the cloud, et cetera, or maybe we don’t, I don’t know, but, you know, are, are we going to be able to get ahold of these super suckers as it were?

Roger (24m 17s):
Well, I think moderately. So I think that the advances in computer Efficiency and it advances and the design and operation of data centers and how we were and where we are locating them in wanting them and so forth is to a large extent offsetting the amount of growth in the energy demand that they’re producing. So I think if we had not been doing those same things, we would be four or five times even greater consumption than we are today, at least. And so I think we were having a moderate success in overcoming that nonetheless, in the book, we think that the computer usage is going to be one of the primary forms of new growth in the country.

Roger (25m 2s):
And we’ll take over a larger and larger percentage our growth. It certainly does. However, offset some other forms of energy consumption. I mean, they were two inch studies for instance, about the amount of energy we’re saving by purchasing stuff over the internet, supposed to driving to the mall and so forth. So there are certainly a lot of energy savings involved, but there’s a lot of new energy demand being created with the a, a big Wolf with computers.

Jeff Wood (25m 33s):
There’s so much stuff to calculate. There’s so many, there’s so many Energy uses. You know, you mentioned driving to the store versus having it delivered on a root with other deliveries. There is, you know, whether you have light bulbs that are energy efficient and your house, et cetera, how do we make sure that we’re measuring the totality of our consumption and figuring out how to, you know, conserve?

Roger (25m 55s):
Well, there’s not a single after that, I just do a lot of due diligence. We have to make a real effort to be aware of what we’re consuming and the impacts of it. Then, you know, the challenges that the consumption patterns and the generation pattern shift, and we’ve gotta be aware of when those shifts take place. And sometimes it’s dramatic like a drop in oil consumption that has occurred because of the pandemic. Other times it catches us by surprise, like the Bitcoin mining, suddenly you’re a small town sees there. The energy usage is sore calls up a new building that wasn’t in place.

Roger (26m 38s):
So there’s not a single solution, takes a lot more elegance on our to stay up with the changes. Thank you.

Jeff Wood (26m 47s):
Another question I had for you was what’s the future of, of the public utility you worked for Austin energy for a long time. Is there a future for public utilities or energy providers that are owned by cities?

Roger (26m 58s):
Well, I think the reality, and in fact, I think one of the changes she will say in the electric utility industry is that so-called distribution utilities. That is utilities that own the poles and wires in a city that transport the electricity, as opposed to the generation utilities that own the power plants and such, I think the distribution utilities or going to evolve to pretty much either a municipal owned business model or co-op owned or a non-profit Awesound simply because are analysis shows that there is a much money to be made in the future, whether it was a lot of distributed generation, a lot of energy efficiency, a lot of energy storage and that kind of environment.

Roger (27m 47s):
And there’s not much money to be made from managing the poles and wires and keeping that operating. And so I think that you will see a lot of the initial polities moved toward a municipal utility model for a while, the bigger utilities fighting it out over what are the new big generating plants are going to be solar forms or wind forms or hydrogen or something like that.

Jeff Wood (28m 14s):
What does that mean for say, like, if everybody goes to say EVs and we have vehicles in homes that are drawing energy and maybe even providing power back in to the grid at certain times of the day, what does that mean for the utility? Or are we going to see the garage be the replacement for the gas station in that sense?

Roger (28m 33s):
A yes. From personal experience. So that’s mine. I got an electric vehicle about a year or so ago, and I don’t have a charging station. I plug it right into the wall socket that was in my garage is already there. And every building in that instance is, is a filling station for what it means for the electric utility. Yes. That the poles and wires, our distribution systems are not set up for the us first. They were set up to deliver electricity in one direction from the utility two, the home, they, we’re not really designed to store feeding power back from the home, from a solar panel on the back to the transformer. It can handle some of that, but you’ve put a whole bunch of them on it, in that transformer’s going to have to be changed out.

Roger (29m 19s):
And it’s the same way with the electric vehicles. One or two we can handle if there are a career for Tesla to get put in on the cul-de-sac, if you want to blow that transformer on the pole, it’s got to be changed. And so again, you’re going to see the small, the municipal are the distribution utilities. We are going to be the set with lot or necessary upgrades. The stay in pace with this decentralized Energy situation we have. And again, that’s one, I think that they’re going to revert pretty much to a cost of service model, where they provide the capital when they run the utility and they get a regulated rate of return on their investment in doing that.

Jeff Wood (30m 4s):
There’s a discussion of the book about excess heat. And it makes me think of the heat Island effect in cities, and also to a certain extent, environmental justice issues. Certain parts of cities are more susceptible to the heat Island effect than others. And it’s been that way for a long time focused on low income neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, et cetera, in a future with interconnected Buildings power. Transportation, you know, how do we ensure that the benefits of all of these new technologies and the connections between them are distributed equally?

Roger (30m 33s):
I do not have an answer to that. And I think the primary reason he has, it’s mostly not a technological issue. There are some technology involved, and I think that frankly, distributed generation is a very democratizing and that it puts power in a literal, really electrical power in the hands of individuals. And World were just consumers Before have now become pro-sumer, we’ll be producing and consuming electricity. So to some extent it is equalizing, but I think making sure that the technological advances simply do not make the rich richer and the poor poor is not something that I think is easily is handled by technology.

Roger (31m 17s):
There are social and economic and political issues that have to be resolved to do that. And I, I wish that I, if I did the answer to that, I would have been in a much more exciting book.

Jeff Wood (31m 32s):
I guess that was my other question. Is, are you worried about that this might lead to more concentrated political power or capital accumulation, like the, what we’re seeing with Google and Amazon, but it seems like your thought is that maybe if it actually goes the other way.

Roger (31m 45s):
Well, again, I think that you have to look at different sectors in terms of Power over information exchange and Media and so forth. I do think the speed and concentrate in certain areas. If you look at things like the access to electricity in all the benefits that that has, I did not think of as being concentrated, I’ll take it as being in fact, the decentralized and, and that’s a very important particularly and other parts of the world before we were just getting access to electricity. It’s a sign. So it depends on what aspect of technology you’re talking about as to whether we are benefiting or not, you know,

Jeff Wood (32m 22s):
And a lot of fantastical ideas and the book, lots of interesting stuff to noodle around. And you’re in your mind, what do you have a favorite one? Do you have one that kind of stuck out to you that you’re excited about that?

Roger (32m 31s):
I guess over the years, I’ve gotten excited about several different server, different portions, but I think that are excited about the fact that our building’s in vehicles and the technology is developing in to what I call city in a period of machines that we are starting out by talking to Syria and Alexis and so forth. But you know, more and more, we’re starting to live and work and move about inside very sophisticated robots. Our technology is becoming a city and to the point appearing to the point that we can interact with it as individuals. That’s an exciting prospect.

Jeff Wood (33m 11s):
Yeah. It was interesting to read about that. So this is my last question. And I’m going to ask you your own question, what reduces greenhouse gasses in the shortest time at the least cost?

Roger (33m 21s):
I think that, and I, and I have not done a formal analysis of the us, but here’s my gut reaction. I think that you’ve got four areas, mass deployment of wind and solar and the electricity section in electrification of light duty and heavy duty vehicles and reforestation. And I think when the analysis has done with the state of technology, that it’s going to die, that focusing on those four sectors who would reduce the most greenhouse gasses in the shortest amount of time at the least cost. Okay,

Jeff Wood (34m 1s):
Well, the book is the future of Buildings Transportation and Power Roger where can folks find the book

Roger (34m 7s):
It’s available on Amazon or Barnes and noble. And hopefully you can order from your local bookstore, it’s a widely available. Awesome.

Jeff Wood (34m 16s):
And where can folks find you online if you want to be found online? All, I really don’t have it

Roger (34m 21s):
Of an online presence, but we can go to our authors website. Michael has an online presence and I have an email contact, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions of anyone who wants to talk.

Jeff Wood (34m 34s):
Awesome. Roger, thanks for joining us. We really

Roger (34m 36s):
Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Jeff Wood (34m 43s):
And thanks for joining us. The Talking Headways podcast is a project with The Overhead Wire on the [email protected]. Sign up for a free trial of The Overhead Wire Daley, our 14 year old daily city’s news list by clicking blink at the top, right of The Overhead wire.com. And please, please, please put the pot, you know, Pat you on.com/the Overhead Wire many thanks to our current patrons for their ongoing support. And as always, you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud overclass Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. And you can always find the traditional [email protected]. See you next time at Talking Headways.


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