S David Freeman former head of the biggest US utility company tells us we can go to Zero Emissions for baseload & peak power now

Beyond Zero talks with S. David Freeman, head of the Los Angeles Port Authority and former head of the largest U.S. utility company, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

S. David Freeman podcast

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Scott Bilby: This morning on the show we are very pleased to be interviewing S. David Freeman, American engineer and attorney. He has had a 50 year career in the U.S. energy industry, holding key positions in power utilities and helping successive US administrations develop and implement energy and environmental policies. He is also the author of Winning our Energy Independence and has been called an energy visionary. Good morning Mr. Freeman.

David Freeman: Good morning to you, it's afternoon here but there's a morning in Australia.

Scott Bilby: I'd like to start off by just trying to let people know, that because in Australia, we're still being told the same thing that you're being told in the US, that renewable energy is basically a sideline cottage industry. We know it can go commercial scale and very quickly, so can you just quickly give us a little bit of information about you're background, and how you know that we can move to commercial-scale renewable energy pretty soon.

David Freeman: Well, I have been a utilities executive most of my life, and when I was chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is a utility much larger than anything in Australia, we were buying thirty million tones of coal a year, so I know a bit about coal, and the one thing I do know for sure is that it is not clean, it is dirty and that anyone who tries to tell you differently is just speaking falsehoods.

Australia has more solar energy than it has coal. I think the misleading impression that has been left is that the existing energy industry has plenty of money and they advertise on television and elsewhere, and they're trying to leave people with the impression that they are essential and the sun and the wind and growing things are just small bits of energy, very diffuse and kind of a sideline.

Scott Bilby: That's a good way of putting it.

David Freeman: The opposite is true. Obviously there would be no life on this Earth without the sun, but the energy that we can use from the sun every day, coming down free of charge is enormous, and more, much more than enough to meet our needs, and its inexhaustible.

So basically, this civilization of ours is using what I call the three poisons, coal, oil and nuclear power, and we haven't put our minds and our money into developing the much larger sources of energy, namely the renewables, and over time the renewables are cheaper than the coal. The problem is, the price of coal does not include all of its costs. It doesn't include the health effects on people just from ordinary air pollution. It doesn't include the risk to the whole society of global warming, and it doesn't include the risks of a third world war, or people being blown to smithereens by a nuclear blast. In an age of terror, you know, shifting to nuclear power is like going out of a frying pan into a radioactive fire. So, we have a lot of learning to do and we need for the next generation to recognize that we're in a life or death struggle for the survival of the civilization that we have now, and we have just got to raise the bar on the solution package.

I think that we've made progress in understanding the problems with the help of people like Al Gore and others that have hammered home the danger, but we need the equivalent of an Al Gore on the solutions side, and to combat the propaganda of the existing purveyors of poison.

Matthew Wright: David, it seems certainly that our government, and we saw it a couple of nights ago on Lateline, which is an Australian Broadcasting Corporation nation-wide television program where our climate change minister, Penny Wong continually said and implied that there's no solutions to climate change without clean coal. Now I understand that with you're knowledge, and maybe you can tell us a bit about how you've worked with coal, the coal mining industry and running coal power stations, and what you think of this idea of so called 'clean coal'?

David Freeman: Well look, I mentioned just a moment ago I was the head of the Tennessee Valley Association under President Carter. We had a lot of coal fired power plants. Coal is inherently filthier than dirt, and anyone that uses the phrase 'clean coal' is misleading, either deliberately or otherwise, misleading the public. It is the most carbon intensive of all the fuels, so when you burn it you are emitting more carbon into the air than if you were burning anything else. But then the local air pollution from burning coal is well understood but we've become complacent about it. It's the fine particulate matter from coal that goes past you're nasal passages into the deep recesses of your lungs, and into your bloodstream. It's a killer. And coal contains all sorts of things like mercury, lead etc., that are not even controlled, so the phrase 'clean coal' is oxymoronic, it is just blatantly false, and the reason they're getting away with it is that people do not see and touch coal any more.

When I was a kid, coal was used in furnaces at home, and when you had to stoke the stoker, you knew how dirty coal was. Nowadays the coal piles are in remote locations at power plants. We've stopped using coal for heating in the home because it's so damn dirty, and filthy and polluting. So, you know there is a river in Egypt that flows all over the world, it's called 'denial', and I think that some people in the coal business, beholden to the coal industry, are in denial.

That's just a fact and we certainly have alternatives. In fact it's interesting, we have an Australian company that's come over here with marvelous new technology for large solar power plants that are very economical.

Scott Bilby: We've actually interviewed David Mills here on this show.

David Freeman:They've built a plant in Australia, they're building a larger version here. The photovoltaic technology is being supplemented by technology where we simply heat oil and make electricity in an ordinary steam turbine with the sun. And if you look at the cost to society, coal is the most expensive thing on Earth, and solar power is the cheapest.

Matthew Wright: Absolutely, and that technology from David Mills, for our listeners, they can log onto our website at beyondzeroemissions.org, and we've interviewed David Mills and just the other day he released a study which we will also have on the website , that [says] you can run 90% of America on solar thermal technology. Perhaps you can tell us about that?

David Freeman: Well Ausra, the company that's making a name for itself in America, and hopefully will also make a name for itself in it's native land of Australia.

Matthew Wright: We hope so too and of course we have a fantastic solar resource. So it's always mind blowing to us that we seem to invent all the solar technology and then the scientists leave and it gets commercialized in Germany, China or the United States, so for Australians it's a very difficult one to understand and obviously those vested interests are what's causing this problem.

David Freeman: There's not much doubt about that and I took civil engineering and I've worked with engineers. There's a tendency to want to build tomorrow what you built yesterday because you're very comfortable and people that suggest something new kind of ruffle the feathers of engineers who know who've been building coal fired plants and they view it as a threat. And with all due respect the most imaginative of the engineering profession did not go into the electric power business, they're into electronics and other things where they're making a bundle. We have resistive behavior and that's not peculiar to just America or Australia or any country. And so we have to overcome it and that means that programs like this are very, very important to educate people to what can be done because unless the people know that there is an alternative it is not likely to take place, because the vested interests, like one senator once told me when I was working for the U.S. Senate, he said I was suggesting some amendments to a bill involving the oil industry and he said, 'Son, this Senate has not been bought but it has been rented on this issue and you're wasting my time!' And the influence of money on politicians, no matter what country you're in, is enormous and there's a brainwashing factor to it. I mean, people tend to believe what they say because it helps them with their campaign contributions and other things. I'm not saying it's criminal, I'm just saying that it's a fact of life that has to be overcome by the public raising the issue in an unmistakable manner.

Matthew Wright: In your book, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How, you said that with lignite, and as the head of the biggest power authority in the United States, the Tenessee Valley Authority, you said that you had actually gone and ended some ideas about mining lignite. Funnily enough, in Victoria, Australia we have some of the world's biggest lignite reserves and unfortunately we strip-mine those and run 90% of our electricity on that. Is that something we want to be doing?

David Freeman: It's near coal, it's very low grade coal, and I don't know what the quality of the lignite is in Australia and it is by its nature less energy-intensive and more pollution-intensive even than coal and I'm very proud of the fact that when I was the head of the utility near Austin, Texas we stopped the lignite mine before it got started even though they'd already bought the equipment. It's a travesty of major proportions for an area that has got such enormous solar power like Australia to be burning coal or lignite.

Now, I'm a utility executive, I'm a realist, you can't just shut down everything you've got overnight, but you could have the law in Australia that says from this day forward there will be no new coal-fired plants, no new lignite plants, no new nuclear plants and that all of the future belongs to the sun and the wind and efficiency measures. That's what we've got to do all over the world and there's no point in pointing the finger at the Chinese or anyone else unless we start showing an example that they can follow and I think that if we did they would.

Mark Ogge: David, In Australia, the argument about the Chinese and the Indians - the Chinese becoming the largest emitters of Greenhouse gases in the world is commonly used as a reason for Australia not to cut our emissions drastically. People say it won't matter how much we cut our emissions because our efforts will be swamped by the Chinese and the Indians.

David Freeman With all due respect that is a very defensive argument that is merely an excuse, not a reason. First of all, on a per capita basis the Chinese are emitting very little pollution compared to Australia or the United States. Let's just get that straight. They are just beginning to enter into an energy intensive economy like we are already in. But more importantly, if we don't show an example, I mean they're using the technology that they've inherited from America and Europe and the West. If we started doing what I say, and all of our growth would be with renewables used efficiently, then we would have a very strong basis for urging the Chinese to do so. And they have shown that they are as interested in utilising the latest technology as anyone else is.

The problem is that the latest technology that we're peddling over there are nuclear power plants and quote "Clean Coal". We are stabbing ourselves in the back, so I think the argument that we should keep setting a bad example because the Chinese are following our bad example, is really one of the most facetious arguments I've ever heard.

Matthew Wright: And finally and just quickly, because we want to move onto solutions, because I know there is a differentiation in America in terminology, here Clean Coal means 'carbon capture and storage', can you tell us about the lunacy of 'Carbon Capture and Storage'.

David Freeman It's a figment of the coal industry's imagination. Let me put it bluntly, if 'carbon capture and storage' was such a great idea, why don't they implement it on an existing power plant? They're not doing that, they continue polluting as usual and holding out this theoretical possibility as an excuse for building new power plants. And then when someone has them put their feet to the fire and said, 'Ok what is the cost of a new coal fired plant with coal capture?', their numbers became astronomical and it is very clear that a solar plant would be cheaper even on the incomplete basis of the pricing of energy. So, they're painting themselves into a corner.

And of course, if there is anything uncertain on this Earth, it's the geology of the Earth. The Earth moves, the idea that you're going to put away huge amounts of carbon and tuck it away, sort of like under the rug and really expect it to stay there over thousands and thousands of years, is in my view it's ludicrous. There is a little bit of it used to help push oil out of the ground, but if you look at the enormous volumes of carbon being emitted it's just a PR stunt and if it were a viable technology then my challenge to the coal industry is apply it to existing power plants! They won't consider that because it's too expensive and so what we have is the people selling poisons trying to hold onto the business.

Ordinarily, if something is recognised as poisonous, we outlaw it. We had a little bit of lead in the paint in toys over Christmas, we had a fit and we should have had a fit. But the poison from burning coal, burning oil in city streets and the dangers of nuclear power, are just enormous compared to the things that we label as poison. We've just become very complacent because these industries are among the largest capital aggregators in the world, they've got more money than the government in some ways and they're pouring advertising at you and now they are trying to sound like good guys, 'Oh we're for solar and wind too', except that they put 99.5% of their money into their oil business and coal business, and 1 half of 1 percent into renewables. They are spending more on advertising than they are on renewables.

Mark Ogge: Mr. Freeman, just getting onto some of the solutions, including renewables, we were very inspired by your book, Winning Our Energy Independence...

David Freeman You can get that on amazon.com if somebody wants to purchase it.

Mark Ogge: Yes, we'll put some details up their on our website. We're very inspired because a lot of Australian politicians put forward the view that you can't run an economy on renewable energy sources, and your book states very clearly that you can run an economy 100% on renewable energy sources and you outline a very concrete program how that might be achieved in the short term. We're very concerned by the urgency of the climate change issue and we were hoping that you could say a few words about the importance of, well firstly, that it is quite possible to run an economy, an advanced Western economy, on 100% renewable energy and about the importance of getting started straight away with doing that?

David Freeman I think the most important thing is to start in earnest. It will be a 15, 20, 25 year transition. But its 20 years from the day we really start. In the day we really start, the world changes because you're no longer under the extreme influence of the oil producing nations. They begin to start worrying about whether they can sell their oil. You really unleash the brain-power of the whole Western and Eastern world in focusing on improving our renewable technology.

We could do it with what we have, but we're really at the T-Model stage of fuel(?) cells, and big solar and plugin, hybrid cars and electric cars and all the things we know. People don't realise that the space industry that's been developed is perfectly capable of putting small satellites in space and giving us solar power at somewhere around 10 cents per kilowatt hour with just a satellite sitting in sychronous orbit and microwaving the electricity to Earth. There are heavy winds at 30,000 feet that can be harnessed and that electricity brought to Earth. We will have such an exciting array of advancement, it will be the equivalent of a second Industrial Revolution, and we will end up with an energy supply that will be everlasting. It's a challenge that ought to really excite the younger people and it just needs to be explained, and people need to understand that 'Yes, we can' as Barack Obama says nowadays. Because we can. The technology to harness the sun is here, the technology to harness the wind is here. We know we can take this renewable electricity and simply separate water into hydrogen and oxygen and store that energy in the form of hydrogen, and then use that hydrogen for everything we're now using petroleum.

So, we don't need, it's not like the Manhattan Project during World War II where we needed to advance something. It just would be a gigantic effort to move away from the poison and utilise what Mother Nature is providing to us free-of-charge. I think that we need a world-wide movement to say that this is what we demand of our elected, public officials. It's going to take a combination of people understanding it can be done using their purchasing power, but supplemented by laws in various nations to outlaw the poison. If you outlaw the poison, the energy industry is not going out of business. They will immediately shift to the renewables and it will be a giant leap forward for mankind.

Matthew Wright: So David, you're saying there's no problem with baseload renewables? That's baseload solar, baseload wind?

David Freeman Listen, we know how to store, just think of it very simply. You can take solar power and store it in the form of hydrogen and then use the hydrogen to power power plants to firm up your system. In the interim, I'm not opposed to using natural gas as a transition while we develop the whole solar, hydrogen economy. I've run electric power systems, and you don't need to have coal and you don't need to have nuclear. You can firm up your system with natural gas plants that will kick in during the peak hours and firm up your supply.

Dr. Mills and his solar technology gives you about a 60% load factor so that the solar power is almost coincidental with the major uses of electricity. Believe me, the ultility industry is perfectly capable of using storage mechanisms and natural gas peakage to supplement the wind and the sun and have a reliable power system. Anyone that tries to tell you differently is just making excuses. There will be a transition, and I'm not in favour of shutting down all the existing power plants. I am in favour of phasing them out over time and everything new be renewable.

And let's don't forget that the opportunity for using energy more efficiently are still enormous. The new LED lighting uses 15% of what even an efficient light uses elsewhere. So, the march of progress is there. I don't know how many new power plants need to be built in the next 10 years. It could be that efficiency will provide a good chunk of them, and then we start replacing the bad stuff with baseload solar, which covers most of the hours, except at night, wind plants, and then we firm it all up with natural gas which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels.

Matthew Wright: That's fantastic David, and if anybody would like to purchase David's book, they can check our website. We're going to have to leave it there and we thank you very much, and it's really important. We'll be getting this onto our policy makers because we know that you're a fantastic resource and letting them know what your thoughts are because you've run a power system as big as Queensland, Victoria and NSW's system combined, and I think that puts you in a pretty good position to provide advice to the Australian legislators and policy makers and leaders, and I know you're into leadership and I know you're a true leader. So, thank you from the Beyond Zero team.

David Freeman Thank you.

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