Flegal had just been ribbed by David Roberts for criticising green groups, and was explaining why she gets called abundance-coded. She grants first that efficiency measures — peak shaving, virtual power plants, getting more out of the existing grid — are genuinely important and that she has written policy on them. The line is the turn: they are a part of the answer, not the bulk of it, and no optimistic scenario changes that.
Stop telling me I criticize the green groups, David. You're going to get me in trouble.
For approaching this with a kind of scarcity mindset. Talk about what you mean by that.
Here's where it gets a little complicated. And like, this is probably why I get like abundance coded. I think in my view, we are in a very unique historical moment where we have significant demand growth, the kind of demand growth that we could only imagine in our decarbonization models, but could never grapple with. Seriously, we have the richest actors in the economy with apparently a willingness to pay quite a bit of money to power compute. And so like, I think there's a lot of opportunity here. The question is, what are the most catalytic things that we can and should be doing in this moment? And the truth is there are kind of two imperatives that are sometimes kind of intention, but both really important. One is affordability politics, right? And that's where all of the stuff on like get more out of the existing grid, peak shaving, VPPs and DERs, all of that stuff is really important. I have in fact written about policy ideas that states should use to like do better on that front. So I am not at all dismissed. Missing those things. But it is also the case that, as you know better than everyone, we are not going to rooftop solar our way to a decarbonized economy. It is an important part of it, but it is not actually the bulk of it, even, even under the most optimistic scenarios. Like we need inter-regional transmission. We need a lot more utility scale, clean power. These things are just true. Batteries are great, but they're not going to solve this problem on their own. And so my big issue is: are we kind of penny pinching? Are we overly focused on penny pinching at the expense of generational big thinking on like rebuilding our grid for climate?
Well, I'm glad you're raising this about the affordability politics because I feel like everyone in the Democratic world and associated groups is just herding in this direction. But we need growth of the grid in the long term. We need a lot of investment, and that's going to cost money. So like there's a lot of things you could do to save money in the short term that would forestall or delay or cut off that investment that you need in the long term. I think that's basically the dilemma you're raising. And of course, this is where, you know, the voice of Jigger comes in saying like the stuff you're talking about, the grid utilization and stuff like that, is how you navigate that dilemma. That is how you get short-term affordability while still allowing for long-term investment. And I kind of feel like nobody really disagrees, or at least informed people don't really disagree. This is another one of these sort of fake fights between do you want grid utilization or do you want investment in new generation and transmission? Obviously, you want both, right? Both is the obvious answer, is it not?
Yeah, I think that's totally right. The one other thing that the layer that I would add here is like that kind of assumes that you have two options, which is reduce or increase the amount that we're spending on things. A third option is like change who's paying for stuff.
And