‘Efficiency is a Renewable Resource’

Conversation: Bruce Nilles

Bruce Nilles has been working to green American energy for almost two decades, and he has a lot to show for it. A lawyer by training, he began his career as a trial attorney with the US Department of Justice’s Natural Resources and Environment Program in the 1990s, then moved on to EarthJustice before settling at the Sierra Club, where he spent 15 years campaigning against coal. One of the masterminds behind the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, Nilles helped shut down more than half of the US’ existing coal plants, and defeat nearly 200 proposed ones.

When he joined Rocky Mountain Institute in 2018 as managing director, it was to pursue a different type of energy work — addressing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning natural gas in buildings. The means? Electrification, i.e., replacing natural gas appliances with electric ones, the benefits of which will only grow as our grid becomes greener.

I sat down with Nilles at Earth Island’s Berkeley office this summer to discuss the promise of renewable energy. His optimism was quickly obvious. Nilles says we already have most of what we need to make a full transition to renewables, and he is confident that bright minds will dream up the technology we need to get us the rest of the way before long. Of course, he’s also a realist — he knows it’s going to take a lot of work, particularly given the current political climate, to fully transition away from fossil fuels in time to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Still, given his enthusiasm, I left the conversation with a glimmer of hope that we might just get where we need to with clean energy and energy efficiency in the short amount of time we have left.

— Zoe Loftus-Farren

The renewable energy sector is a lot larger than when you started your career, but it still isn’t accounting for a huge share of our energy production. What are your thoughts on how far we’ve gotten, and how we can get farther?

When I started my work in the energy sector back in 2000, 2001, the landscape was pretty bleak — we were burning boatloads of fossil fuels. And the reality was that clean alternatives were more expensive than the fossil fuels, for a variety of reasons, including that the technology was fairly nascent. Fossil fuels also get a lot of subsidies and are built at scale.

We’re really at this inflection point [now] where renewables in our electricity sector today make up 10 percent. Hydro, which has some significant problems, makes up another 10 percent. And wind this year will, for the first time, be the number one source of clean energy. So they are growing very nicely. Not fast enough yet, because the goal here is obviously to get all this done in the next ten years. But it’s all moving in the right direction, which is very exciting. And we’re not having to ask people to do the right thing and it’ll cost more money. We’re saying do the right thing and you will save money in most instances.

So would you say that with existing solar and wind technology, and storage technology, we have what we need right now to make the transition to 100 percent renewables?

We certainly have all the technology to get clearly to 80 or 90 percent. We spend a lot of time within the environmental community and elsewhere arguing over whether we can get to 80 or 100 percent. The truth is today we’re at 10 percent. And no one disputes that we can get to 50, 60, 70, 80 percent with existing technology. Now how we integrate it all — that’s the last piece we need to work out. But in no way should that slow down the trajectory. We’ve got to get the fossil fuels offline, we’ve got to build wind and solar and storage two to four times faster than we’re doing today, at least, and how you integrate that last piece, we will work that out in the next five years. I have complete faith in that given the enormous acceleration of progress we’ve made.

Why is 80 percent seen as a threshold?

Well, the fossil fuel folks love to say, the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. True fact. [But] the beauty is that if you are smart about how you integrate wind and solar across a large geographic area, the wind is usually blowing, and the sun is usually shining, somewhere. And the storage that we have developed today is great for getting us through several hours.

The question people are wrestling with is [long-term storage], and this is largely an issue in the northern climates. People use England as an example all the time: There are times in the winter when energy demand is high to heat homes. It’s kind of a bleak, cold rock in the middle of the Atlantic, particularly northern parts. It has a very little solar in the wintertime. And when the wind stops blowing, which it can for a week or two, sometimes even three, what do we do for that once-every-ten-year event? And that’s the storage capability that people are still trying to work out.

There are also people who do say that solar and wind aren’t energy dense enough, that they take up too much space. What’s your response to that critique?

Well, it’s an interesting critique. Because if you’ve ever had the good fortune of going to West Virginia and the misfortune of seeing mountaintop removal coal mining, the landscape destruction in the pursuit of coal [is huge] — [they are] blowing, literally, the tops off of mountains, filling in more than 10,000 miles of streams with coal mining waste. If you’ve been to Montana, or Wyoming, [you may have] seen the football field after football field of destruction from coal mining. And then flip over to the destruction of fracking and oil production. On the western slope of Colorado, pictures from the air [show] the land literally looks like [it has] measles, for mile after mile after mile.

So yes, wind and solar do have an ecological impact. There’s no question about that. [But] no one can seriously say that the destruction caused by fossil fuels is anywhere close to the little impact that renewables have.

And of course, part of our solution — and this goes back to the early days of David Brower and Amory Lovins fighting large coal and nuclear projects in the West — is: We need to use less. We are prolific wasters of energy unnecessarily. We know we can squeeze enormous amount of savings out of the system.

How do we do that? How do we reduce demand?

So my new project, after focusing on coal for 15 years, is now working on: How do we get gas out of buildings? And one of the most exciting things is that the new all electric appliances are super efficient. There’s tremendous saving potential in the devices we use in our homes and at work and elsewhere to cut enormous amounts of demand, as well as better insulated homes and other things we can do.

Historically, the federal government has played an important role, as have the states, setting standards on how efficient our fridges and other appliances are. There remains an enormous opportunity to keep that momentum going. People describe efficiency as a renewable resource because with every increasing application of our engineers’ ingenuity, and our systems designers’, we’re able to be using less and less energy as we go forward. We’re just need to keep that momentum going.

We’ve been talking mainly about the US, but how do we think about this on a more global scale?

If you think about the amount of buildings and other infrastructure that is likely to get built in the developing world over the next 20, 30, 40 years, it is staggering. Think about the number of air conditioners that will get purchased in developing countries that have historically either never had them, or, because of a warming climate, are going to need them. If you simply extrapolate out with current technology, the energy consumption is far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

So, it is critical that the US is not only modeling how we are taking our enormous wealth and doing it right, but also helping these other countries to jump over the very wasteful energy intensive development path that we took.

And what else should we be talking about when we’re having this energy discussion?

Energy issues have a profound equity impact [with respect to] who is paying the true cost of our reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear [energy]. I was just in New Mexico, meeting with some folks from the Navajo Nation, and reminded that they have been bearing the brunt of our uranium mining for 40, 50, 60 years. This would not happen in Marin County. This would not happen in Palo Alto. This would not happen in Beverly Hills.

We’re finally giving more attention to the enormous inequity in our society, [and to] environmental injustices, and energy is a very big piece of that puzzle in terms of who is living next to the extraction, who is bearing the brunt of the extraction, who is bearing the brunt of the pollution, and who is bearing the brunt of climate change impacts. It is, of course, those who have contributed the least that are paying the highest cost.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.