Rachel Strausman:

Climate change is here, and it's really giving the world a run for their money in the sense that the impacts are catastrophic and the solutions are costly and complicated. They range from walking to work to buying sustainable locally sourced foods, eating a plant-based diet, to building seawalls to protect against rising sea levels. So with so many areas that need change in order to ensure a livable future, why is it important to focus on solar energy? 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Well, Rachel, so good to be here and be part of your podcast. Thanks for having me. And solar energy, interestingly, in California, is the largest form of non-carbon energy. So we have over 30 gigawatts of solar energy in California. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But it's a pretty amazing resource already in our state. It's a great question. I mean, there are so many environmental problems, even beyond climate change, that need our attention. But, you know, I think disputes the fact that solving climate change is really the issue of our times to solve. And if you boil down climate change, which sometimes can seem like a pretty complex issue, it really comes down to one simple thing, which won't be easy, but is moving off of fossil fuels and to do that as quickly and with as little disruption to our society as possible. You know, what we need to do to do that is we have to come up with a different way to move vehicles, whether that's a car or an airplane. We have to come up with a different way to heat our homes and buildings, to heat our water for our hot showers in the morning, to cook our food, and to manufacture goods and services. And we have to do all of that without burning coal and oil and natural gas. So that's really the problem and the way to solve it. So there, while there's many sources or several sources, I should say, of non-carbon energy resources that can do those things that can power, you know, make a car move from point A to point B, heat our homes, etc. There's really nothing as abundant as solar energy and the sun's energy. It is just the single most abundant natural carbon free resource on the planet. One fact that I like to kind of encapsulate that is we, you know, 170,000 terawatts of energy fall on the earth continuously every second of every day, which is more than 10,000 times the global consumption of energy to do all of that movement and manufacturing and heating and cooling that we do around the globe as all human beings. And so the beauty of it is we have actually figured out already how to capture the sun's energy to do that heating and cooling and movement and, you know, creation work that energy gives us the potential to do. So we've already figured it out. The question is just how do we deploy it as quickly as possible and get it in the hands of everybody so that we can solve climate change sooner than later. So to really put it more bluntly, we can't solve climate change without solar energy. It is that important and it's that foundational to our clean energy future. 

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah, thank you. And you mentioned that it's important to get solar out quickly and get it spread out very soon. How is that achievable? 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Well, we'll talk a little bit about policy later, I'm sure, but, you know, there's actually first take a step back. There's two really mainstream types of solar energy. One is called solar heating and cooling or solar hot water. That technology basically captures the heat from the sun, just like we would if we went out and we wanted to get warm up in the sunlight. We would be absorbing heat from the sun. Well, there's panels that you can put on a roof or on a building and they'll capture the heat from the sun and they will turn that into usable energy, whether that is through heating and cooling. You can actually air condition an entire building by using hot water or you can just heat water for hot water's sake. So you could have a solar heating system to be able to take hot water showers and not have to use fossil fuels to do that, which is what we primarily do in California and around the country. So that technology is really, really promising. And interestingly for the UCR audience, just a couple miles up the road in Fontana, you're home to one of the largest manufacturers of solar hot water technology is a company called SunEarth, who are just about to celebrate their 45th year anniversary of making equipment here in California. So it's a sort of a really pretty exciting technology and a really cool way of capturing energy from the sun and putting it to use. The other is, of course, the more commonly known solar photovoltaics. So as most people know, that captures the light from the sun, so the photons from the sun, not the heat, and it converts it into electricity through a chemical reaction in the panel. And those two types of solar energy are what really have the potential to drive and be the foundation of our clean energy transformation. In fact, the Department of Energy estimates that about 50 percent, a little bit more than that, of our clean energy future by 2045 will be based on solar energy and it'll be a combination of those technologies. So solar, the way in which we get it out there is by basically through consumer adoption, aided by public policy, and through utility adoption, aided through public policy. And so we could talk more about that. I'm really focused on the distributed or the rooftop side of the market, but both are really important. And here in California, one more thing I'll say is I mentioned we already have the kind of largest supply of renewable energy in California that's coming from solar power. And about half of that is big projects out in the desert, you know, where you kind of big swaths of land are covered in solar panels, but the other half, so 50% of our solar energy here in California is on rooftop so it's distributed throughout the state in our communities. And a lot of people don't know that they think it's mostly utility scale with rooftop just being sort of like a little added on top but it's actually 50% of our market . It's really powerful.

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah, and that actually gets straight into our next question, which among all of the renewable energy options available and specifically in relation to what you were just talking about, as opposed to getting a large plot of land and putting solar panels. Why is rooftop solar in particular, so important to achieving a greener future.

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Such a great question. We need it all, like we need also we need all solutions and all energy renewable energy resources deployed as fast as possible. But the reason why rooftop solar is so important is because, so just take a step back. One other really unique thing about solar that makes it really beyond the fact that the sun's energy is so abundant and ubiquitous is that solar technologies don't have any moving parts. And they are modular so they can either be scaled to be very small, or they can be, you know, added together strong together to be very very large systems. And those two qualities are very different than other forms of renewable energy. And it has allowed us to scale up the market quickly or rapidly over the past decade or so, and we've been able to bring the price down over 80% as a result making solar really the most cost effective energy resource now not just renewable energy resource so it has to do with that unique basic characteristics of solar, no moving parts, and it's modular and that modular kind of dynamic and the no moving parts dynamics enables us to put it and fit it into our built environment, super easy, right so you can put it on a tiny little, you know, at you and your backyard, you know, a little little granny in your backyard, you can put it on a huge Amazon shipping center warehouse, it can be scaled big or small and it can fit into into our buildings and that's really important because one, when you generate electricity, it utility scale power plants, whether we're talking the nuclear power plant in Arizona that supplies a lot of electricity for Southern California or talking about Hoover Dam, you know, in Nevada, or the wind farms and Tehachapi all of the elect those that energy is lost or 10% of that energy is lost as it travels along the wires to get into our cities to ultimately end up in our homes and apartments, and that 10% loss is pretty significant when you think about the amount of energy we consume when you generate electricity right on your own roof or in the parking lot next door, you avoid that line loss that efficiency loss so it's 10% just out of the gates more efficient to build energy and generate it at the point of where you use it. So that's number one. Number two is obviously if we're building our solar plants on our roofs and on our over our parking lots we are preserving open space for animals and the plants that we want to still share this planet with. And again, while there's going to have to be some losses, habitat for renewable energy production, we should minimize that and we can minimize that habitat loss by first building up and maximizing the built environment. Another dynamic that's unique to solar and unique to rooftop solar is that it avoids having to build expensive and sometimes dangerous transmission lines. So all of those far away power plants, even when they're renewable, they have to get into our cities and those are really expensive and oftentimes are what's sparking a lot of the wildfires. So we're going to need some of those again to repeat myself but if we can minimize that we're going to save ratepayers money in this transition to 100% renewable. And another kind of cool element that is kind of a very just a very tangible human scale element of solar as you've probably experienced is and I've mentioned it but it can be actually a source of shade. So we can build them over parking lots and provide shade for the cars parked underneath. A lot of our schools are public schools around California have awnings over outdoor quads because we're California so a lot of our campuses are open air. And those solar canopies provide shade for kids on their lunch break so it's just these small little things, but they're brilliant kind of design elements when you think about, you know, checking multiple boxes, checking multiple goals, all with renewable energy and there's really no other resource that that can do that. And then another element is important to mention is as we continue to experience more erratic weather events or things like earthquakes. It's really important that we have sort of a more resilient source of energy distributed rooftop solar panels, especially if they're paired with a battery can actually keep the lights on for hospitals or for homes and can provide that resiliency, not just every day but also during these catastrophic events that we're starting to experience more and more, not that we want to build our society for that but we have to be realistic, and especially even earthquakes alone are going to be always a constant reality for California. And then last but not least, one of my favorite things that I love about rooftop solar and why I've spent so much of my own career in life, trying to promote it is that it's the most visible renewable energy solution, it is in our communities and humans being human. We love to follow each other, we like to see, oh that's cool I'm going to do that and it actually helps us solve what otherwise seems daunting, and almost, you know, just a small species we tend to get stuck if we see nobody else doing anything for a problem. But if we actually see others solving and taking steps to put out the fire so to speak, we all naturally follow suit, we're very collaborative as you know as animals and so solar kind of captures that it captures that kind of human instinct to collaborate and work together and solve problems. And so it's that visibility in that community kind of tangibility that makes rooftop solar. Just what I think is the most powerful renewable energy solution that we that we have. So that's why again we could use all the resources that we can get our hands on actually and I should mention one more. And that is that distributed solar can actually be built very very quickly; it's the fastest deployable renewable energy resource on the planet. So for a home, we can be up and down on a roof literally in one day. Now if it's a simple system, two if you're adding a battery I mean it's really kind of a cookie cutter system now we've just gotten it down pat, so we can be really really fast and if it's a larger project you know a big warehouse or a big church or a school. It can take a couple weeks, maybe a month, but that's really really fast. The bigger utility scale projects will take years and years and maybe decades to build. 

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah, and I think it's actually great that you bring up how using rooftop solar can have so many benefits beyond helping as a renewable energy source such as providing shade, or that community aspect because a lot of people I think, forget that by helping solve climate change, you're also in general, making the world a better place. Its great that you bring that up. But, kind of going back to what you said earlier about the abundance of solar energy. A lot of discussions about solar energy focus on the accessibility and the practicality of getting solar panels to consumers, and they often leave out the importance of solar energy storage. So why is solar energy storage so essential to a clean future?

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Great question. And I, it is my hope that in a few short years when we say solar energy in California, it is automatically assumed that it comes with a battery. But to answer your question, you know, there's two, two very constant things in this world. One is that the sun will rise every day. The other is that it'll set every day. So what we need to do with energy storage is basically make the sun shine at night, because of course we humans also have grown accustomed to having electricity at our fingertips when the sun goes down. So it's pretty, it's that simple, we need to be able to pair all of this renewable energy, all of our renewable energy resources, only really one geothermal power is constant, right, because it's just tapping into the constant, you know, heating and cooling effects of the of the earth offshore wind has the potential to be also fairly constant, unlike onshore wind. But otherwise, that is a very common attribute of renewables is that they fluctuate even hydropower of course fluctuates. And so energy storage is critical. I think it's always interesting to point out that there's various different types of energy storage. So going back to my solar hot water example, energy storage in that context is simply an insulated tank, a water tank in your garage. So, you know, you heat the water in the day, and then the next morning when you get up to take your hot shower, that energy essentially has been stored in a hot water tank. And so that is energy storage, we didn't have to burn fossil fuels, or even use electricity to heat that water really efficient and terrific. Another form of energy storage that I think is kind of interesting though it has very limited applicability is called pumped hydro. So the idea is you take water down at a low elevation you use electricity during the day powered by solar panels, and you store it in a reservoir, and then at night, you let the water come flow back down the hill and pass through a turbine to generate electricity at night so you are essentially using the sun's energy and storing it in the form of water that is stored up above. It's really clever, but it has obviously pretty limited applicability. The most common form of energy storage is what people think of as batteries. There's lots of different chemistries with batteries, not all of them are lithium based but that is of course the most common, because that is the battery that is really taking off globally with electric cars and with all of our computer electronic devices, various equipment that we're transitioning away from fossil fuels, and then of course pairing that with a solar system on your roof, so that you can store that sunshine during the day and discharge that battery, usually in the evening. The bigger the battery, the more solar energy you can store, and it is, of course, totally possible to be completely self sufficient on your own solar system, but possibly more efficient as a community is if we could maximize the solar available to us by putting solar on every roof, add in a battery to store that energy to get us through the evening hours, and then we can utilize wind power at night to power homes at night. That is, of course, when California doesn't use a whole lot of electricity anyway. So that's kind of the vision but that's the energy storage is sort of that kind of key piece that fits into the puzzle. One other thing that I think is really interesting for people that want to sort of get to know energy storage and think about all of its different characteristics is that it is deployable in an instant. So, when a utility needs electricity or a consumer needs electricity. You know, you literally either just plug something in to the outlet and this battery will kick on or computer; remote computer can deploy a whole army of batteries, all at once to create a virtual power plant. And that is very different than fossil fuel power plants, right so fossil fuel power plants take hours to start up if you know if they've been turned off. They take hours to ramp up to the point of generating electricity for the community. And that is actually one of the big problems with our grid is that we have too many of these kind of old aging natural gas power plants that are super unreliable, frankly. And if you compare that to a battery. It's really pretty striking because again the battery takes zero time to ramp up, it's just always there. There also are no moving parts. And it's very, you know, 21st century computer deployed a technology so it's really unique and it's an important element of how we make all these pieces fit together. 

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah, so kind of moving forward to discussion about policy as we kind of brought up earlier. Oftentimes, national policy will get all the attention, but state and local policy are still very important. So, when it comes to specifically solar energy and storage, which level of government has the most impact and how does that affect what policies are being created. 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

I love this question. You know when I was young, coming out of college and wanting to focus on the environment and climate change and energy issues. I deliberately chose to work in California at the state level for this very reason that state level decisions on energy it's a unique issue in this way, but they have the greatest impact on driving change. The federal government can be certainly very helpful. They can also be a big hindrance, but that really kind of the future of changing the way in which we power our communities is done at the state level through decisions at the state legislature to create incentives, for example, for consumers to adopt renewable energy to create mandates for utilities to modify their portfolio and add in renewable energy. The state regulates the utilities through the Public Utilities Commission, which has a huge impact on consumer choice and consumer deployment and investment in renewables, local level decisions are also really important. So, where is your local mayor and city council on doing things like streamlining the permitting process for going solar? That can be a huge hindrance for people because it adds a considerable amount of cost to solar and time and delay. And there's a lot of things that local governments can do to make that faster and like there's a software that the Department of Energy has developed where every single building department in America can tap into that software for free and provide instantaneous permitting. So, you don't have to literally drive down to the permitting office with a piece of paper anymore. You can just use your computer, you enter in some information and ou tspits the permit, the permission to go build your solar system. That kind of thing is really groundbreaking, but we need all of our California cities and counties to actually adopt it. So, state is number one hands down, local governments would be number two, and then federal government is actually in the third place in terms of importance. 

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah and in terms of accessibility because we were talking about permits, what changes could be made to make solar and solar energy more accessible to the average consumer. 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

California did this amazing thing in 2006, we passed the Million Solar Roofs Initiative and that basically provided rebates to lower the cost for consumers to go solar. It expanded access to a program called net metering, which also created a financial incentive to be able to save money by having that solar system on your roof, and then subsequent legislation has kind of tried to deal with these, the red tape cutting the red tape just to, you know, kind of speed up the adoption of solar, California has recently started to kind of back away from incentivizing rooftop solar. And also really doesn't have a program about batteries right now that's, that's anything significant. And so we really need California to get back in the saddle when it comes to distributed rooftop solar and redeploy initiatives to get consumers to continue to grow solar. We have almost 2 million rooftops with solar on and that includes thousands of schools, churches, farms, apartment buildings, businesses as well as homes. But that's really only scratching the surface. About 10% of California buildings have solar only. So we have way much further to go. And what the simplest things that the state can do is just simply lower the price for people and make it fair and able for everybody; working class, middle class, and everybody alike to be able to afford solar and maintain those savings. So when you go solar you're saving a lot of money and getting a return on that investment, because really when you go solar, you're not just doing it for yourself when you think about it. Again, we've got 2 million miniature power plants deployed all throughout California 15 gigawatts which is the equivalent of about six nuclear power plants and all that was built with private or community based money. And that is so powerful and it doesn't really get recognized enough if you think about it. And we need to do more to incentivize that and make that affordable and accessible to everybody. Batteries are still pretty expensive and the state really should be doing more. We have some funds for people that qualify for low income. So if you earn less than $40,000 a year, you can qualify for the rebates. But we don't have anything for the rest of our community. And if we're going to make energy storage and solar paired, and we're going to get to our clean energy goals we really need to get back to incentivizing batteries for everybody. 

Rachel Strausman:

Yeah, and you're mentioning how we have 2 million mini power plants all around the state, it's such an impactful thing to say. And so that kind of goes into something that I like to talk to you when we talk about climate change on the podcast is that saving our planet from decades worth of destruction is a big task and it's often, seems unattainable to the average person. So what impact can individuals have on the environment? 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, first of all, just statistically, about 40% of our carbon emissions nationally are from things that we as consumers have complete agency over, right it's how the kind of car we drive. It's how we power our homes, how we heat our water, how we cook our food. Those are all things that at some level or other, we have agency over as consumers, and you know not of all of us can just immediately wave a magic wand and go carbon free, though some are doing that, of course, but all of us even students have an ability to make different choices and doing that collectively again this is the power of collective action. It's like we built six nuclear power plants worth of rooftop solar by individual people not giving up by going, I'm going to do my part, I'm going to put solar on my roof, and I'm not going to stop there but I'm going to at least do that. And it's incredibly powerful how small actions when done collectively at a mass scale really really do make a difference so we could cut our carbon emissions in the United States 40% just by making those kind of consumer choices and the second piece of it is then again, are the public policies and initiatives in place to make those choices easier for everybody. And that's where you can get involved in local politics, right so make sure that you know who your mayor is and your city council member and that you're reaching out to them to ask what are you doing to bring more solar energy to my community. Make sure you're aware of who your state assembly member is and state senator and reach out to them and say what are you doing, you know, and be as specific as possible but the biggest thing is just be engaged and be active. If all of us were a little more active in our local government, we would be able to make all the changes that we want to see in our society we're really blessed to have a democracy, but that democracy requires us to be active in it. So to me that's sort of the biggest antidote to feeling like climate change and these other big daunting problems are unsolvable is you just get busy, and you get active and you see that this kind of collective action, whether it's through consumer choice or through political action really really really works, and that kind of feeling is super empowering and it's kind of an overused word, but it's really really true and it's addicting. That's why I've been doing it now for over 30 years. Because each time you win you just like you just realize how we can make that change, and we can do it, you know, each one of us can make a huge difference. 

Rachel Strausman:

What you said about how small change on a collective mass scale can cause a lot of beneficial impacts is just so powerful and I think that really highlights the power of solar energy that it takes one person just to put their solar up to make a difference. And then with that, you're helping take a step towards solving climate change, creating a greener future, making more space for the environment for other animals that might be affected by other options of renewable energy. So solar power is, I mean it's really just that it's so powerful. So, thank you so much for being here today executive director Del Chiaro, it was such a pleasure to speak with you. And we really appreciate it. 

Bernadette Del Chiaro:

Thank you so much, Rachel.