Phase II of Renewable Energy in America

National Policy Conference

November 28-29

Cannon Caucus Room, Washington, DC

American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE)

  In the world of conferences and public speaking, timing is everything, also.  And as Mike said, I’m getting on stage here at 10:30 for a session that I think was built to end at 10:00.  So I promise you I will be brief.  And you can repay me by reading the book I just wrote, and if you like it, tell other people about it.
<Laughter>
Well, let me just say quickly, it is great to be here with a bunch of good friends, Mike Elkhart [ph?] and a bunch of people I see in the audience here.  For another speech I was giving recently, I thought, you know, what can I say about the nature of friendship?  And so I went to Google the words, “quote and friends,” in order to find a good quote about friendship.  And can anybody guess what I came up with?  Googling the words, “quote and friends” I came up with quotes from the television show, “Friends.”
<Laughter>
And so looking for inspiration, the first quote I found was from Chalmers, who said, “Yeah, I go to the gym.  Yeah, I try to go four times a week.  I don't know.  But I’ve missed about the 1200 times.”
<Laughter>
I did find some actual quotes on friendship, however.  I found one that says, “Friends are God’s way of making up to us for our families.”
<Laughter>
I would say, in my case, <inaudible> is absolutely not the case.  I’ve got wonderful friends and wonderful family.  Some beautiful Hallmark inspiration, “Friends are the chocolate chips on the cookies of life.”  “Friends are the bacon bits on the salad of life.”  Mark Twain said, “A friend is somebody who will back you when you’re wrong.  Anybody will support you when you’re right.”  I will say Mark Twain did not live long enough to see the energy debate in this decade, if he thought that anyone will support you when you’re right.  And my favorite quote, actually, as I look through this, was from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, “Friends should be counted among the masterpieces of nature.”  So it’s wonderful to be here with all kinds of good friends.  Just a quick word on this agenda, and we can move on.  I have worked on climate change and energy for many, many years and have always wondered why is it that we have been talking about oil for three decades and have made such little progress?  And so about two years ago, I started digging into this more seriously, thinking hard about it.  And three quick conclusions about this, in a story.  And we can-- happy to talk more about this later.  The first is, when it comes to oil, the fundamental issue is a lack of substitutes in our cars and trucks.  The fundamental issue is a lack of substitutes in our cars and trucks.  It is a much more important issue than the import issue, which gets all the political attention and political rhetoric.  And we talked about this a little bit last night at the reception.  I made the point, you know, if I’m thirsty, and I don’t want water, I get orange juice or milk.  If I’m hungry, and I don’t want a hamburger, I get vegetable or pasta.  If I want to leave this hall, and I don’t want to use petroleum to go any significant difference, I basically can’t do it.  I mean, there are electric trains and in some places in the country, we have bicycles, which will take us if we’re not going too far.  But 96 percent of the energy in our cars and trucks is oil, is petroleum.  It’s one commodity.  And that’s, by the way, a domestic figure and the global figure.  And it’s that fact that drives so many of the national security, environmental and economic problems.  And on the import issue, by the way, you know, we haven’t imported a drop of oil from Iran in 25 years.  But that doesn’t prevent Iran from playing its oil card in multilateral negotiations over its nuclear program.  And of course, the carbon content of imported and domestic oil is roughly the same.  The real issue here, the fundamental issue that we should be paying attention to is breaking the grip of petroleum in our cars and trucks.  Second quick point.  In order to do that, the single most potent tool that we have is connecting cars to the electric grid [ph?].  We have this vast infrastructure for generating electricity in our country, and in many countries around this world, with plugs that reach in outlets that reach into every home and business.  It does us almost no good, in terms of getting off of oil, because our cars and trucks can’t connect to it.  You know, I mean, many of us in this community, we often say the claim, “We need solar energy and wind energy to get off of oil.”  And sometimes, you see people say, “We need nuclear energy to get off of oil.”  Those statements are only true if we transform our auto fleet and we connect our cars and trucks to the electric grid.  Now, the good news is this technology is coming.  It’s happening.  I’ve been driving one of these plug-in hybrids around for the past couple of months here.  It is a fantastic experience.  Let me tell you.  I’ve got a conversion.  It’s a Prius, 8123 batteries.  It took the spare tire out of the back.  They put in a lithium iron battery, very light.  It’s lithium.  It’s the lightest metal.  And a plug.  And I go home every night, I plug it into a regular extension cord in my garage.  I get 30 miles on a charge.  It costs me the equivalent of about 75 cents a gallon to recharge this with electricity at DC’s rates.  If I drive more than 30 miles, it just kicks over to the gasoline engine.  So it’s not range limited, in any way.  This car, I mean, I was getting about 100 miles to the gallon.  It’s got this great little sensitive gage.  And I called up the guy who owns this car.  I don’t own this car.  I’ve been driving it just to test it out.  And I said, “I’m getting 100 miles an gallon.”  He said, “That’s ridiculous.  We get much better than 100 miles a gallon.”  And he came, and we went driving a seven-mile loop around the city, with this very sensitive gage.  It registered less than a tenth of a gallon of gasoline.  And the gage showed 343 miles a gallon.  And also, this car is not flex fueled, but it could be.  And if it were and you were using E85, only 15 percent petroleum, you’d be getting, you know, I don't know, 1500 miles per gallon of petroleum products.  This technology is here.  It’s now.  It’s happening.  People here know General Motors is actually in the lead on this technology, has announced the Saturn Vue and the Chevy Volt to come out in 2010 and 2011.  I go up in Southeastern Michigan, it’s exciting for me to see a-- I mean, the communities around where I grew up have been devastated by the lack of vision of the American car industry over the past quarter century.  I think this is the type of technology-- I mean, this type of technology, in particular, actually, will help to revitalize the American car industry.  I also, by the way, on the global theme of this conference, I got a wonderful email about a month ago now, from somebody in Vietnam, who had seen an interview I did on this topic, which distributed <inaudible>.  I’d never been to Vietnam.  And he wrote me and said, “You know, you should be talking about the fact that in Vietnam, we plug our scooters into the electric grid.  And we have electric scooters that are out there.”  And I was just in Beijing two weeks ago where they’re doing the same thing.  And so I mean, this technology that’s got lots of applications, it’s going to be-- I believe it’s going to be transformational.  Final subsident [ph?] point on this, biofuels are also a key point of the answer.  There’s a big discussion to be had about biofuels.  One observation I will make.  When I started writing, “Freedom From Oil” about two years ago, everybody I talked to was favorable about ethanol.  It was amazing.  Raving enthusiasm for ethanol.  I’ve been out on book tour for the past month or two.  I’ve gotten many, many more critical and skeptical questions about ethanol than I have favorable ones.  I mean, the pendulum has really swung on ethanol.  And for those of us who work in this area, I think it’s interesting to ask why.  Part of it is the run up in corn prices, I think.  Part of this is people starting to understand many of the sustainability issues associated with corn-based ethanol.  And actually, some of the biodiesel production in tropical rain forests.  I’m a believer in ethanol.  I’m a cautious believer.  I think, clearly, corn based ethanol is a transitional fuel.  We need to move towards other feedstocks.  I interview a lot of people in my book.  One of the people I interview is the guy who, probably, you’ve all heard from, Vinod Khosla.  And he will say that we’re going to get completely off of gasoline in 25 years, and we’re going to entirely replace our gasoline stock with cellulosic ethanol.  The first time he said this to me, I thought it was interesting he made a billion dollars, which was about a billion dollars more than I’ve ever made.  And you know, maybe, he knows something.  And so I went back, and I read the technical literature on this.  And the second time I talked to him, I said, you know, “Venod, I’ve read the literature.  And this is a wildly optimistic claim you’re making that we can get off of gasoline in 25 years, with cellulose ethanol.”  And he said to me, “Look.”  He said, “I’ve got several 15 million dollar bets down on different plays in this technology.  I know a couple of dozen other people who also have 15 million dollar bets down on this technology.”  He said, “I think, with all the money and all the brain power that’s going into cellulosic ethanol, we are going to see dramatic breakthroughs.  And I’m sticking by my claim we’re going to do this.”  So I don't know whether he’s right.  But he’s been right about some things before.  And I think we’re going to make a lot of progress in this area.  My favorite trip in writing this book was to a town called Reynolds, Indiana.  And Reynolds is a town of 547 people, which is between Indianapolis and Gary, in the Corn Belt there.  And they have decided, in Reynolds, Indiana, that they are going to use only renewable energy.  And they want to get completely off of anything but renewable energy.  And just, you know, by the way, to stress the bipartisan theme that, you know, has been in some of these remarks.  This northern Indiana, very Republican part of the country, and they want to get completely off of <inaudible>, use only renewable energy.  And it’s, actually, not that easy for a little town to do that.  But they convinced Verifund [ph?] to come build an ethanol plant, and they’ve got an ethanol plant there.  They picked out one gas station in town.  They converted the pump to an E85 pump.  For promotional purposes, they got GM to even give them some discounted flex fuel cars.  And then, they started buying up more.  So their transportation system is getting there, and it’s almost off of fossil fuels.  And the next step is electricity.  And they’re a livestock town.  They’ve got more than 100,000 livestock.  And they’ve had a huge waste disposal problem.  And they decided to use that waste to make electricity, and they built a plant-- or they’re building a plant.  And they want to get off of the grid and use livestock waste for electricity.  And I think, you know, it’s incredibly exciting to see this.  And I talked to the town President.  His name is Charlie Vanborst [ph?].  And he said to me, “It’s hard to get people to believe in something that’s never happened before.”  And I think that that is the basic issue here.  You know, in oil, we grew up with a transportation system that relies on oil.  And our parents did, our grandparents did.  We just think that it’s normal, but it’s actually deeply abnormal to have a global transportation system that relies completely, 96 percent plus, on oil.  And I believe it’s deeply abnormal to have a global electricity generation system that relies so much on dirty fuel some.  And so then, I was driving back from Reynolds.  And I had rented a GPS box from Hertz for $10 a day.  And this was, like, nine months ago.  It’s the first time I’d done this.  And, you know, I programmed in the airport.  And as I was driving down the highway, it said, “Turn right in, you know, five miles.  Turn left in 100 yards.”  And I was all excited about this.  And I went back and I told my teenage kids about this.  And, you know, they were, like, laughing at me.  They said, “Dad, you’re the last person in American to ever use a GPS box for the first time.  All of our friends parents have had these in their cars for, you know, three years.”  But it was amazing.  And as I was driving along, you know, in blissful delight of this new technology.  I was thinking, you know, when I was a kid, it’s not just that we didn’t have a little black box that talked to you and told you to turn left in 100 feet.  It’s I never had that thought that, you know, maybe, at some point, I would be doing this.  I never even had the notion of a technology like this.  And, you know, I think with, you know, all of these 50 million dollar <inaudible>, all of the money, with all of the attention, with all of the intention that is going into the clean energy area, that by the time my kids get to be my age, they’re going to look back.  And there will be technologies that they will say the same thing about.  You know, they will say, “We never even had the concept of an energy technology that would do this for us.”  And I think, with all of that, that we will be free from oil.  Thank you very much.
<Applause>