Julia Pyper has been at the top of our list since we started The World Changing Podcast in 2022. Why? Julia is known for her in-depth coverage of the clean energy transition, has a cross-party climate policy podcast, "Political Climate," and is now VP of public affairs for GoodLeap - a fin-tech company helping millions of people join the clean energy transition.
Her work has been published in HuffPost, Scientific American, and The New York Times. In this conversation, we dive into the connection between public policy and clean energy innovation, discussing how the Inflation Reduction Act opens up new opportunities for individuals to benefit from adopting clean energy technologies. Julia helps Flo (finally) understand how virtual power plants work. Greg and Julia find a surprising similarity from both of their childhoods growing up on farms.
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Her work has been published in HuffPost, Scientific American, and The New York Times. In this conversation, we dive into the connection between public policy and clean energy innovation, discussing how the Inflation Reduction Act opens up new opportunities for individuals to benefit from adopting clean energy technologies. Julia helps Flo (finally) understand how virtual power plants work. Greg and Julia find a surprising similarity from both of their childhoods growing up on farms.
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What is The World Changing Podcast?
Join us as we talk to the skeptics, supporters, and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. Hosted by Greg Robinson and Flo Lumsden, an Aston podcast produced by Chorus Studios.
Julia Pyper: So you have this decade long bill that's designed painstakingly with lots of stakeholders to set America on a path to harness and boost the growth of new technologies and clean energy. But that was $370 billion. That one storm just caused $110 billion of damage. Different metrics, obviously, but it puts it a little bit into context of like, man, this climate thing's costing us some real dollars.
Greg Robinson: Welcome to the World Changing podcast. Was that too much? Yeah, that was probably too much, but let's keep it. We'll keep it anyway. How about this? If we do the podcast and the world doesn't change, then we can take that out. Welcome to the World Changing podcast where we deconstruct the projects and products that are moving us towards a decentralized and carbon free future. We'll talk to skeptics, supporters and innovators in the fields that depend on electricity to run their industries, which is changing every single day. I'm your host, Greg Robinson, co founder of Aston Labs, a decentralized infrastructure company. And on the other side of the camera here we have Flo Lumsen, our producer, and she will make sure that the train stays on the tracks while we do this.
Flo Lumsden: We are thrilled to have Julia Piper on the show this month. Julia began her career covering clean energy as a reporter in D.C. A senior editor at Greentech Media, and a staff writer for E. News. Her writing has been published in HuffPost, Scientific American, and the New York Times. She went on to work with cleantech accelerator New Energy Nexus, where she supported the California Sustainable Energy Entrepreneur Development Initiative, calced. Today, Julia is vice president of Public affairs at Good Leap, a fintech company focused on accelerating the deployment of sustainable home solutions. She's also the creator and co host of Political Climate, one of my favorite podcasts on energy and environmental policies. In this episode, we talk about the relationship between public policy, regulation and innovation. Julia helps me understand what virtual power plants are.
Flo Lumsden: And of course, we talk about how our childhoods lead us to where we are today. Please enjoy.
Julia Pyper: Okay. Does this sound any different to you guys?
Greg Robinson: A lot different. Yeah.
Julia Pyper: Yeah. Really? Can you hear the microphone now?
Greg Robinson: Yes.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, the microphone. Yeah, I can hear the microphone.
Greg Robinson: So great. Just so you know, we usually just do like a. Like a running start. The first place to always start, I think, always informative, is where'd you grow up?
Julia Pyper: Yeah, where'd I grow up? I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada, and then grew up mostly in an area called Milton, Ontario. So it's like an hour and a half Outside of Toronto, a big city most people have probably heard of, but it gets pretty rural pretty quickly in Ontario. And so we actually had a farm where we had a bunch of horses and we bred horses. And my, you know, jobs were always cleaning stalls on weekends. And it's Canada, so it's cold and, like, walking out to fields with buckets of water and your fingers are falling off from the ice and riding around on tractors. And my brother still works for a tractor company today, Kubota. And so that was kind of growing up.
Julia Pyper: I don't know if it was torture or not, but my mom was, like, worried about the horse's hooves, right? She didn't want them to get damaged. So one of my jobs was literally roaming all over 25 acres of pastures picking up stones so the horse's hooves didn't get damaged. I'm like, cool, thanks. It was like manual labor of, like, the worst kind. I'm like, it's very meditative. Grabbing a heavy stone, putting it in a wheelbarrow, totally shuffling along. That was my life. The horses came first. Although I think my mom still loves me.
Greg Robinson: That's amazing. I think I shared when we first met that I grew up on a dairy farm. And we had. At the beginning, we had rock picking, which was a thing kind of similar to what it sounded like you were doing, which is like, this hand, this manual thing. And then eventually, and we'll probably, in some of our conversations, talk about, like, tools and, like, how tools can be applied to make things go faster, namely in the clean energy space. But, like, in farming, it was amazing just in my childhood to go from rock picking by hand to, like, these giant machines that would pick an entire field that you just towed behind a tractor, and it would pick the whole field. And then I was like, oh, wait.
Julia Pyper: That was an option? Yeah.
Greg Robinson: And it was like, oh, we don't have to work as much. It's like, no, we just have to do additional jobs. We just have to work just as much.
Julia Pyper: Just as much. That's interesting. I did not know that rock picking was a universal farm thing, but I guess it makes sense.
Greg Robinson: Your brother probably has a rock picker thing that tows behind a Kubota and is solving the problems for mostly children, I think, because I think rock picking.
Julia Pyper: Was a mostly the child labor issue with the rock picking. Yeah, they fixed that one.
Greg Robinson: I think it was.
Julia Pyper: I'm so glad we bonded over this. Apparently there's. There's more of us out there picking rocks out of pastures. Yeah, it's totally.
Greg Robinson: It's totally a thing. So you didn't do that very long though. That wasn't like you didn't choose that as a.
Julia Pyper: Like that wasn't my career path. I wasn't like, this is for me. Yeah, no, I mean, I. We still like have connections to farms and that whole community. I moved along though, from Ontario, you know, went to school in Quebec and Montreal, did grad school in New York. Got my first real job in D.C. As a reporter covering clean energy and climate policy and politics and got to cover a bunch of legislation on the Hill and get that whole world understood. Riding a little train under the Capitol and kind of being thrown off the deep end as a Canadian suddenly covering really closely American politics policy. And that was at E News. And it was a great place to launch a career. And I think it's been quite a journey here. I've been living in the US for, gosh, over a decade plus.
Julia Pyper: Yeah, since 2010, so 14 years. So this is now my community and I do it as a day job now working on clean energy policy for a company called Good Leap, which is a technology company offering financing and software to the home sustainability space. So think like solar storage, heat pumps, EV chargers, drought resistant landscaping, even that whole world. But I think like everyone, your childhood experiences kind of morph what you do and where you go. And I think having sort of a connection to folks who worked with their hands and built stuff, it sort of informs my opinion. Working now with contractors, I think preservation of natural environments is important to me. Although I do think I'm really more of like a. An environmentalist who sees the economic opportunity.
Julia Pyper: And that's really because I think I see a human prosperity opportunity and ways to have greater equality and future growth prospects and things that excite people and allow them to have better quality of life. And I think energy is at the center of that. Not just like a little piece of it, but like pretty central. And so all of that, I think kind of goes, speaks to my roots in different ways, as probably does for everyone.
Greg Robinson: When you came to the States, were you already like a student of US politics or were you just like coming in and like learning it all? I mean, kind of just like drinking from the fire hose, learning it all.
Julia Pyper: I mean, anytime you go to a different country and learn a different political system, like Canada has a parliamentary system and how Congress works here is very different. Don't go back and quiz me on how Canadian government works now though. I mean, even though I do follow it very closely. But yeah, I had A lot to learn. I was a poli Sci undergrad and English literature, so kind of lent itself to becoming a journalist where I sort of had the issues and then had sort of a background in writing and. And had long worked on journalism stuff, going back to my high school paper and announcements and all that nerdy stuff. Just rock picking and doing the announcements. Guys. I had no friends, so here we are. I have at least one. My husband, but no. So I always.
Julia Pyper: It totally lent itself to working in policy and politics. I kind of knew I wanted to go that realm. I really believe in the power of journalism, though. I could have stayed a journalist forever. Whole story for another podcast another time is what's happening in the journalism industry. Please subscribe to your local newspapers. I think it should be a rule that wherever you live, you have to at least subscribe and pay money for your local newspaper and keep that reporting and then probably have like one national subscription as well. That should just be like our civic duty. But that aside, thanks for hearing my TED Talk. You know, journalism gives you this great ability to get to know an industry.
Julia Pyper: And having covered that space for over a decade, and just my journalism career allowed me to kind of go into the private sector with a lot of knowledge of how policies work. You know, people get influenced by different things, whether it's to grow a business, to have power and influence, to just be issues and sort of motivated by passion projects. It's sort of those three things like, were you motivated by power, money, or doing good in the world? Those are kind of like oversimplified. But I think policy sits at the center of a lot of that. And even though a lot of people are not plugged into policy day to day, it's really wonky. We've learned, especially in recent years, you can't ignore it because it's really powerful and we all kind of have a voice in it.
Julia Pyper: And so journalism kind of feeds into that too. It is a responsibility to shine light on policy developments, hold our leaders accountable. So I always loved that and now work on it in a different way of trying to actually make the change directly and deploy more of these clean energy solutions I've been writing about for so long.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned tools before and I've never thought about policy as like a major tool in the toolkit. I was mentioning to flow before we did this, I was like, I'm so nervous to like, go in deep on policy because I'm like, I. I'm mostly thinking about, okay, what is it? Why is it there? What's it going to block, if that makes sense?
Julia Pyper: It's like block is what you went to.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, it's like what is.
Julia Pyper: Couldn't possibly enable exactly what is.
Greg Robinson: It going to stop us from doing? And I think some of that comes from like my upbringing on the farm where it was like, if I can't pick up the rock and go do this, if I can't feed the cow and like if I don't have the absolute, just one to one direct freedom to do these things and there's anything I have to be thinking about in the back of my mind of then it's like it just. I was sort of raised in that world where policy is limitation on the farm. That's what it felt like. You know, if there was something that like I need to accomplish this job and there's this thing that I can't do now and again, just voices around me. It wasn't me, it wasn't like, oh yeah, I'm, this is my doctor. And it just.
Greg Robinson: The voices around me from the people who are also working. It's like, government won't let us do this. And there was a lot of that talk of like they're here to keep us down and so moving into energy. I'm curious, like having grown up in that for you and then going into journalism, how could you, and you could just try to heal my childhood or something like that. How would you flip that around if you were met with somebody who said.
Julia Pyper: I charge $100 an hour for therapy. Separate bill. No, no, let me try to heal your childhood on policy. No, but I hear where you're going with that. And it's part of government's role is to create rules so we don't have this sort of lawless society. Right. So that can feel like an infringement. But it's usually designed with a purpose in mind. We may not agree with those purposes. Of course folks in power can create policies that do the bidding of one set of stakeholders or another. So that's why I get to come back to like go vote, engage, write letters, be engaged in the process. Because I think it's really easy to be like, policy doesn't affect me when in reality it does. It affects like our food systems, it affects our energy systems.
Julia Pyper: Things you may not be thinking about, going about your daily life, but where you get your power from and what it costs. Let's just focus on that. Depending on where you live, like what you pay each month on your electricity bill. Is determined by a very small group of people. There's like 65ish of them nationally in America. Public utility commissions that determine what utilities can charge you. A lot of Americans don't think about the role of those specific individuals every day, but they wield an enormous amount of power. Billions and billions of dollars. We're all pretty much required to pay to have electricity. And that's a process that's really opaque, frankly. You have to intervene and have regulatory lawyers to really engage in those procedures which our trade groups do.
Julia Pyper: But as an average individual, you gotta actually show up to a hearing if and when those opportunities come up. And it's a pretty big demanding process. But nonetheless it's one of those things that you may not think about but is really affecting your life. And that can feel like a limitation. You are getting power and a service for it. But I just point that out as one of those levers of power that you know, is with us every day and really does matter. It can also be really enabling, right? Like hopefully talk more in this episode about the Inflation Reduction act, the ira, a massive federal bill that is going to accelerate clean energy adoption in major ways with some twists and turns, but that's a thing that policy enabled.
Julia Pyper: It's going to enable more jobs, more onshoring of manufacturing of clean energy technologies in America, more prosperity, hopefully if we maintain this policy for its intended lifetime and it doesn't get, you know, change too dramatically. I think of policy as an essential. We need to make decisions. One of the things that piqued my interest early on in IT, and I'd mentioned this to you in a quick, you know, intro is I. My grandfather was an engineer. He worked in construction and he was just matter of fact, he loved reading all the newspapers every day. He was a economist subscriber and like read it cover to cover every week, which is inhuman, but no one can read it week, two week. It's a lot.
Julia Pyper: But he was one of those guys who really did and he would cut out little like clippings for me and even when I went to university he would like put them in old fashioned mail like actual clippings of articles with little post its of like this is important and underline little pieces. And maybe that's also partially why I became a journalist. But he was just pointing out things. One of those articles was how the Canadian Coast Guard was going to have to think about budgets for more icebreakers in the north because ice was starting to melt.
Julia Pyper: It was very like matter of fact, it wasn't even talking about drivers of climate change or pace of climate change is just like what is the Canadian government going to invest in dollars and cents in new icebreakers knowing that we need a greater presence in the north now that ice is melting and these routes are opening up? How do we actually monitor that region of the world is pretty inhospitable. They're right there. That's a policy decision. What is this country going to invest in real national security terms to protect our population for generations to come? You need policy to make those decisions. These are taxpayer dollars that need to be wielded in sensible ways.
Julia Pyper: And it was so fascinating to me that climate change was just like feeding right into this very like nuts and bolts conversation about massive military ship that were all going to pay for as taxpayers. And that's when I was like, oh, climate isn't just like, you know, a thing you can choose to kind of believe in or not. And you know, if you want to hug a tree, great, but if not, don't. Like our military is making strategic decisions around it. Our economy is have to use energy. We know this. Where that energy comes from is absolutely pivotal. Obviously Canada is a massively energy producing country in and of itself. So to me that wasn't just like a side issue.
Julia Pyper: It was again one of the big issues of our societies that allow people to grow and prosper, not to mention globally where access to electricity is still not universal and you have people delivering babies in the dark with limited access to like medical devices and care because we haven't hacked that one yet. So it's fundamental to our experience that we're on this little rotating planet. So that's I think what kind of draws me to it. I'm not a great environmentalist, I'm a good like humanist that like thinks energy is central to our human experience.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, it's interesting how like having the luxury of a long term view if you can think about the macro effects of climate change to humanity, like that's kind of a luxury to be able to think about that because a lot of people are just thinking like how am I gonna feed my kids tonight? To your point of like just this matter of fact thing that is happening, we need to solve it. And I think sometimes like that's where a lot of that rub comes from, where people who have this luxury to think about these existential threats to humanity, they should be thinking about those and for sure like solving these issues.
Greg Robinson: But there's the voters are voting on these policies in many Cases are just voting for like the grocery bill and the gas bill and are my lights on and do I have childcare and do it. You know, so it's these very like Flo and I were talking about how like what's going on in western North Carolina right now for the eastern North Carolinians who have friends over there or you know like visit there often or spend a lot of time there. Like it feels helpless because it's like there's these short term like real moment to moment things happening over there that there's like they don't have a toolkit they don't have.
Julia Pyper: In the wake of Hurricane Helene. Yeah, yeah. Incredibly brutal. I think it's something like I need to fact check this but something on the order of Lake Tahoe's worth of water slammed into that region. Right. Like a massive amount of water. Another yeah. Sad thing that maybe puts up point on the real brass tax of climate change is the inflation reduction Act. This once in a generation bill that's going to change a lot of different aspects of the clean economy. Authorized and appropriated around $370 billion just from that one storm. And just to date because they haven't finally tallied it all up. The storm, Hurricane Helene is going to cost $110 billion in damages.
Julia Pyper: So you have this decade long bill that's designed painstakingly with lots of stakeholders to set America on a path to really har and boost the growth, manufacturing, deployment, all kinds of new technologies and clean energy, not to mention other healthcare and associated pieces of that bill. But that was $370 billion. That one storm just caused $110 billion of damage. Different metrics obviously, but it puts it a little bit into context of like man, this climate thing's costing us some real dollars and we have to invest in mitigation. And there's a lot of what the IRA is focused on is more clean energy technologies to decarbonize. But at the same time these storms remind us like the clock is ticking and we have to like both accelerate on mitigation as well as resilience and adaptation. Because that bill is coming due to.
Julia Pyper: And so we can't really afford not to because that's really what people I think are going to engage with when it comes to climate is what did that do to my backyard? And oh my gosh, my house is flooded. So that's really expensive. And by the way, something we do at Good Leap is like helping the whole home, including even things like mold remediation in places that are affected by climate impacts. So anyway, it's just. Yeah, that. That's the brass tax. Whether or not the word climate ever comes up may not be relevant, but it is true that's how a lot of humans experience is going to be with climate change or again, their energy costs every month or how they get around and access to transportation and is it polluting and giving their child asthma.
Julia Pyper: Like that's where the rubber hits the road are naval ships.
Flo Lumsden: I haven't bought bottled water and years. And I bought a ton of bottled water to donate yesterday because it's just, you know, it's a metal. What is it Wheel hits the. What's the metaphor. Something hits the road.
Julia Pyper: Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Situation where yeah, I don't love buying bottled water, but people are desperate for clean water and we didn't ever think that the mountains would be hit by a hurricane in this way. And so weren't prepared, you know.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, were talking before. Yeah, were talking before this about like that. Again, going back to the toolkit, it's just like what in your point about resilience, like there's just if you don't have the policy toolkit, you don't have the financial toolkit. Like what good leap is providing to homes if you don't have, I guess the technological toolkit in some cases. But a lot of times, like in energy and water and all this, it really is like money and policy. And those are not. Those are very tightly linked, those two things.
Julia Pyper: Yes.
Greg Robinson: Right. And it's like I think people will miss that. Especially like, you know, I've spent most of my career interfacing with like venture capitalists and a lot of times those pieces get missed. Not so much anymore. I think there's enough like there are now like climate focused VCs who are really doing the work to be like what actually needs to be here. And even a vc, which I think you know pretty well, who has actually linked policy to their venture capital firm. Like it's one. Is that your. Does your co host of your podcast, does he work there? Yeah.
Julia Pyper: Brandon Hurlbut Overture vc. Exactly. So that's an example of like these were political policy people who worked at the DOE and elsewhere who've since grown a government relations firm, but separately created a venture capital firm that yeah, understands and puts policy at the heart of it, knowing that's going to mobilize and make possible new business models that America is really leaning into for the first time. So why not have that at the heart of your venture capital strategy. You know, in the past I think private industry thought, oh, you're too policy reliant. That's all risk. But also not that there's no risk, there certainly is, but it's also yours for the taking.
Julia Pyper: Like if you learn how to utilize government tools and like, you know, apply for that grant, get that grant, it could get a new business model started in America that maybe one of our competitors is already working on, but we really want to invest in further. The one thing that's the most bipartisan thing out there today is like competition with China and being anti China, you know, in Congress, that's pretty much the one of the issues that everyone comes together on and supporting more business in America, making in America and I think IP in America. And so that's one way government can help get new ideas going. Because the private sector is not really ready to step in until you sort of cross that valley of death, as they call it.
Julia Pyper: So a new startup concept has to kind of go through this, you know, development cycle of maybe coming from a lab, getting tested in the real world, having pilots reaching demonstration level, then reaching scale. Right. And those, there's a lot of different twists and turns in that journey. I used to work with New Energy Nexus, a startup accelerator. And like it was fascinating to see the entrepreneurs with so many interesting ideas and tweaks on technologies or new software solutions. But getting to scale is challenging. And that's where other countries have government step in to have targeted programs or funding mechanisms available to help get us those companies to the next level so that the private sector can step in and help scale from there.
Julia Pyper: But you do need that, you know, somewhat of a strategic plan to enable that if you want those industries to grow in, you know, within your borders. So it's great to see the US as I think being more proactive on front, on that front. Great to see venture capitalists starting to engage more in policy because I think it can help support the businesses they support. But let me say as a whole, I think clean energy is still woefully under invested in policy and also the political process. I know there's a lot of money in politics. It's not like a savory topic, right? Citizens United, separate issue for a separate time.
Julia Pyper: But it is true that if you don't get to know your political leaders and help elect leaders that understand the industry and are curious to know more, then you can't be surprised if you don't end up with policies at any level of Government that didn't at least be open to new business models in the clean energy industry. So voting matters. Knowing who you're being researched on, who you're voting for, having a chance to interact with them. Invite a politician to your next ribbon cutting, have them tour your lab, have them see the projects in action. It helps have our decision makers better decision makers. Right, when they're writing massive energy bills or working on streamlining permitting, as they are right now in Congress at the federal level, like, what does that look like? What is.
Julia Pyper: What's going to really make it easier to build in America? They have to see and feel that. And so I think companies need to engage more in the not only policy process, that being traditional lobbying on, say, a bill, but also the political process of getting to know someone outside the context of one piece of legislation, supporting someone at a fundraiser. Again, money in politics is not super savory. We know industries, you know, influence through that mechanism. But it's also true that we as an industry have been to fundraisers where we can't even scrape together, like, 10, $15,000 to support someone who's a major climate champion. And so I think that's a little unfortunate because that person may lose their seat next time, just given the realities that they need to, like, campaign and have some money to do so.
Julia Pyper: So I encourage folks to lean in more on the policy and political side, too, actually.
Flo Lumsden: So our last guest was Ryan Kushner from the accelerator Third Derivative.
Julia Pyper: Yes, I know Ryan. He's the best. He is the best.
Flo Lumsden: I hung out with him in San Francisco. That's where I met him. One of my main questions was for him was, they're doing a lot of grid augmentation startups, like battery augmentation for car charging in parking lots that you can plug into the local electric power grid. And I was just so curious to hear, like, well, how do you scale that? When there's a lot of conversation around utilities being not very proactive about modernizing and improving the grid, like bringing innovation into their infrastructure network. And one of the conversations Greg and I have talked a lot about is just incentives and how difficult it can be to change the way things are when it's like kind of a monolithic structure.
Flo Lumsden: I love that you're talking about getting government involved, because in a lot of ways, our power utilities are sort of part of the government. There's like, you know, there are regulated.
Julia Pyper: Yeah, I use a. Regulated monopolies. And, yeah, even your local government will have a governance structure if it's a Municipal utility, they'll still have a board or something to answer to. So yeah, I think the point there is like policy is already happening. Like utilities are very engaged in policy. They have to be. That's like they are entirely regulated or regulated in various ways. So yeah, which is part of the challenge. Right. Is like how do you as a maybe entrepreneur or startup in the sector influence a pretty complex and frankly expensive process when it comes specifically to utilities and engaging on the regulatory front. That's where the regulation couples with the legislation.
Julia Pyper: And if you can set rules of the road through law that then regulators have to respond to, that's another way to engage and say, hey, let's pass 100% clean energy bill as you've seen states do. And you set that kind of high level goal at the legislative level and then you can have the conversations on how that works on the regulatory side. But it's a whole thing. There's a lot of pieces to that puzzle. And being innovative in the energy industry overall can be challenging because energy is kind of inherently risk averse sector. Right. We want people to have consistent access to power. Utilities are old businesses that aren't the most innovative all the time. So certainly can make it harder to deploy new solutions in that context.
Julia Pyper: But that's again why we have to educate decision makers on why it's so key and really beneficial to economies and society.
Greg Robinson: Yeah. I'm curious about the work you're doing at Good Leap. Like it's an interesting dilemma when the customer profile of a utility changes so drastically. They've been regulated and the reason they earned that monopoly status was because they would serve everybody sort of equally. And now good lieb. And anybody in this space since 2010 has been going to these residential customers and saying change who you are as a customer to the utility. You're going to either add solar, you're going to add batteries, or you're going to add, you know, an electric car. It's like you're radically changing that customer profile and you're sort of fragmenting the customer profile for the utility. The utility is looking at you and saying, wait a minute, no, you're, now you're weird. And now I've got like three different types of customers.
Greg Robinson: It's like starting a business or especially a venture backed business. The whole point is to have one type of customer and just focus on that because if you have many types, it just gets too complicated. I'm curious, as you're working on policy with utilities, how challenging is that to talk a utility into More fragmentation of their buyer profile or do you not really have to do that?
Julia Pyper: Yeah, the whole prosumer trend of consumers actually becoming producers of power through adopting things like solar and storage. Look, utilities are smart. They have their own programs that leverage assets at the distribution grid level. So I have zero concern that utilities can't do complicated things. Rates themselves are very complicated. In California there's already multiple rate classes for different types of consumers at different, you know, we have time if use rates here, we have electrification rates here. Utilities know how to do rate structures. I have no concern with that. I think the core of the issue is less about can a utility manage a complexity than it is around our utilities being properly incentivized to do innovative things. And that includes we don't have performance based rate making.
Julia Pyper: In most places where the utilities evaluated whether or not they had really good service and met a set of targets like decarbonization, like reliable power, you could evaluate a utility based on those metrics. Not just. We decided you can make 5% on whatever amount of money you put in that 5% seems reasonable. The end of conversation. What if that became a more multifaceted conversation and there were other metrics that were easily understood that evaluated performance. I think that's one of the things that would help make sure utilities are incentivized to do new things. That may seem more complicated, but the utilities themselves propose really interesting and somewhat complicated rates.
Julia Pyper: Like in North Carolina where you guys are based, there's a two part evolution of net metering for residential solar customers in that state that has a battery program attached to it with multiple elements to the battery program. One where the utility has some control of the battery, one where they don't. That was decided in conjunction with the utility. They had no problem coming up with a new plan. We all had to figure out. It's frankly quite challenging for industry to figure out how to utilize those programs because then we had to run that through our economic models. Can you even make things pencil in that environment? I think it mostly comes down to business. For better or for worse, utilities are not incentivized to see demand drop. That includes with something like solar and storage.
Julia Pyper: But frankly, even with efficiency, if you're buying less of their product, it's not great for them. Depends a bit on how they're regulated. So that incentive structure is already set up to not meet some of our climate goals because we're kind of wanting people to consume more. Unless there's some other metric the utility is being held to or they're mandated by, say, a state law to meet 100% clean. So, yeah, the conversations are tough. They are complicated. They're totally doable. I think a principle has to be, how do we continue to have multiple businesses and entrepreneurs who will are deploying the solutions, who are closest to the customers, be able to grow and thrive? Because we know monopolies. Utilities really struggle to provide more nuanced services. They've tried in some cases and hasn't really worked.
Julia Pyper: But how do we work in conjunction with them to make sure they're also made whole and incentivized appropriately to run fair programs? I think one of the most exciting areas here is virtual power plants. How do you start to actually aggregate those consumers who produce their own power and can shift when they use power from something as simple as adjusting their thermostat at certain times of day, all the way to using their own stored battery power or even export their own battery power back to the grid? How do we leverage those in ways that meet utility needs when there's strain on the grid and compensate those customers fairly for that service that they provide?
Julia Pyper: Again, by aggregating hundreds of those users into what becomes effectively a single big power plant that the utility can call upon just like they would a big natural gas peaker plant or something of that nature. I think that's kind of shifting the dialogue a little bit from just like, what is a customer taking off of, or what is a customer doing that, you know, causes friction with the traditional business model for utilities versus how is a customer actually part of a network of solutions that help the whole grid perform better for everybody and hopefully lower costs, too? Cool.
Flo Lumsden: I feel like I understand virtual power plants now.
Julia Pyper: I didn't really.
Flo Lumsden: I didn't really.
Julia Pyper: I wouldn't want to admit it, but.
Flo Lumsden: I didn't really understand what it was, and now I do.
Julia Pyper: So thank you. You're not alone. There's been some polling that shows people like virtual what, but it's literally what it is. Like, imagine a big power plant. You can actually basically replicate that with a software signal that tells a bunch of customers in their homes to do something at one time, which, by the way, they can almost always opt out of. But we're getting to a place where now, how do you ensure that's something that utilities can count on? And there's a lot of exciting work around doing that in ways that like, you know, there's all kinds of services that virtual power plants can offer, either helping meet peak demand or frequency. I shouldn't go into the technical stuff. But there's all kinds of services that virtual power plants can offer.
Julia Pyper: So making sure that the virtual power plants can perform those at the right time and maybe even help offset future investments in the grid itself. Like do you really need to build a whole new power plant or do you need to pay for a bunch of natural gas peaker plants to sit around in case of emergency if actually you knew with certainty you could tap on the shoulder of a few hundred customers and have them meet that need with existing infrastructure? There's real dollars exchanged there in California. We are paying just for the course of like two or three years, $1.2 billion in California to keep a bunch of natural gas peaker plants available just in case we need them during hot days. That's real money again, and we may never ever need to use them.
Julia Pyper: But we had to sign an agreement with those power plants to keep that capacity available. And so there's real trade offs there. What if we actually just tapped on the shoulder of some of our customers and got them to lower demand or shift demand in a way that actually met the grid need and that we didn't have to call on those peaker plants, which is not only saving money, but hey, we didn't have to fire up a bunch of gas plants so.
Flo Lumsden: I could get solar and a battery and contribute to the resilience of the power grid in my neighborhood when needed?
Julia Pyper: Yeah, if a virtual power plant program exists, which goes back to the policy point and why we have policy work to do to show that we should create these programs and there's certain principles we want in those programs, but they are very much policy enabled. And it's exciting to see not only utilities, but the regulators lean in more. And we as service providers in the space, which good Leap's now active in the VPP space, have our work cut out for us too. But I think of it as a very exciting new evolution of that kind of like more tense discussion you were teeing up, Greg, about the prosumers and what does it mean for utilities. But we may be sort of shifting the dialogue there as the whole grid edge discussion evolves. There's clearly value at the grid edge.
Julia Pyper: We know it because in California a couple years ago there was a text message sent out in a panic saying, everybody please turn down your thermostats. That was our plan to keep the world's fifth largest economy from having a massive blackout. It was like one of those missing persons alerts. Like our phones all went off with this alarm, like Turn down thermostat. Really blunt way of doing it. We have much better ways of doing it with technology, with software and we can meet those grid needs. And that's an extreme case, but we can do it every day in multiple different ways in every region of the country.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, yeah, that's the virtual power plant thing has always been like to me such like a simple, elegant solution to especially in like municipal power company districts where or co ops where it's like they're paying so much money to like call them like out of towners. There's like these gas plants out of town and there's these coal plants out of town and there's these nuke plans out of town and they're sending off, they're just collecting bills from their in towners and sending them to the out of towners and it's like 95% and then there's crazy demand charges on their grids and it's like.
Greg Robinson: But you could solve all of that as a muni or a co op by just going to your farmers or your others and saying hey, I could avoid X amount of dollars in demand charges annually if I had this much capacity or if I could build here. Going back to rate policy, this is where I'm not completely up to speed on. There might have been some policy that required these co ops or these munis to buy from a generation and transmission company or something out of town. But. So there may be a policy shift. But the point is like with co ops it's like you got, you have a board or a muni, you have a board and it's usually pretty small. But if you could make money again you went over it pretty quickly.
Greg Robinson: But I think it's important to double click on the fact that these utilities get a certain amount of profit when they spend money.
Julia Pyper: Right.
Greg Robinson: And if they could make, yeah guaranteed rate. So if they can make money, more money by buying like maybe they could buy services from their local grid participants or their customers. If they could buy services and put a larger margin on top of the services they buy locally, then they would make more money. So like their shareholder, if you're an investor owned utility like your shareholders would make more money, you'd drive more shareholder value. If you bought from local, if you bought inside your network versus outside your network, like if you bought from inside your distribution, inside your control area versus outside, that would be always.
Julia Pyper: Well those are the numbers that have to be crunched and why you have to get into the weeds a little bit. And it is regional and it depends on the existing laws for sure. But yeah, there's definitely ways. And there's a really great Department of Energy liftoff report on virtual power plants that if you're at all interested in, encourage people to go check out. That really lays out the multiple ways VPPs can operate. Which by the way, it's not just homes, it could be businesses that are aggregating their demand. So it can be at the CNI level as well. But yeah, it really has to map onto that whether or not it works in the scenario you're describing. People would have to get in there with pencils and figure it out. But it's a real opportunity because it's already happening.
Julia Pyper: Texas is one of the states where virtual power plants are being leveraged the most and in California as well. So there's no politics really. It's just a service provided to the grid. And we can't sleep on the fact that different technologies connected to the distribution grid, that local level really have a key role to play. And I know you've had some guests on the show in the past who've talked about some of the local energy benefits. I think of it also in the context of again, climate, how we kind of started our conversation. 42% of emissions come from decisions made in the home per Rewiring America, an organization that works a lot on accelerating heat pump and other electrification technologies. When they crunch the numbers, it's again decisions.
Julia Pyper: So that would include the car you choose to drive, how you choose to cook your food, where you get your power from, all those things. While individuals aren't the only actors that are relevant in addressing climate change. We need systems change, but the decisions we do make, again aggregated together have a big impact on energy related emissions. And so I'm like, we of course need to harness what happens at the local most closest to the homeowner perspective because we actually have a big influence on carbon emissions, not to mention our daily lives. Like if you choose to say put solar on your roof, you may save some real money. If you choose to drive an ev, you may meaningfully reduce local pollution in your community.
Julia Pyper: That's help that's harming children, you know, you're being part of the puzzle and also probably getting some real benefits. Whether that's resilience, whether that's energy cost savings. Peace of mind during a power outage, you know, can take a lot of different forms.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, and it's so policy is just so fragmented when you talk about this stuff, like when you Talk about like, I was just talking to my brother who lives in a. He has a municipal power company where he lives. And we did the math on it. It's only like 50 megawatts peak. Like that's their peak consumption of their entire immunity. And it's like that. To me, that seems like low hanging fruit for some of these policies. It's like you've got 50 megawatts and you have like quite a few people. It's mostly residential. You have a handful of commercial, like maybe warehouses or something. But very clearly with that type of demand, you're not talking about a smelting plant or something like that in your region versus a Duke Energy where it's like, no, they have major, they have chip manufacturers and massive customers.
Julia Pyper: Well, that's why all this is so important too, because America is now seeing growth electricity demand grow for the first time in like two decades. We were on this like, kind of decline. Efficiency measures had helped us sort of like stay about neutral. Even as the economy grew. We kind of decoupled economic growth from emissions and from low demand growth. But now that's changing. With onshoring of manufacturing, these high energy intensity industries, with crypto and AI, these high energy users, we're back into the mode of like, okay, we need more electrons and we need to leverage everything, every tool in the toolkit to make sure we can not only meet that demand, but meet it in smarter ways so there isn't more strain on the infrastructure itself at various times of day.
Julia Pyper: Because that becomes not only the risks of like bluntly like blackouts and things of that, like, of that nature, but comes very costly. So how do we make sure that's done in an equitable way? I think also the last thing I'll say on distribution grid, you know, DERs distributed energy resources. And why I think it's exciting is going back to my sort of passion for policy and politics and playing a key role. It's what a great way to see how like an individual can benefit directly from the clean energy transition, which can feel lofty, like, what does that mean, clean energy transition? No one's got like a ticker. I don't think of like, oh, we're at this phase of the energy transition now, like our economy hit this level or that.
Julia Pyper: But you can feel it in a real way if, say as over 3.4 million people did last year. So you get a tax credit, like that's what was enabled by the IRA. The treasury reported it out, 3.5 million taxpayers that year alone. Got some kind of home efficiency, electrification or clean energy benefit on their personal tax returns. That doesn't even include folks who use maybe a lease or a PPA to put solar on their roof. It's just individuals who choose to own the system. That's a lot of people. It's actually double what the IRA was. That's actually double what the IRS was expecting. So that's a good chunk of people who got like $8 billion plus back in their pockets. So I'm like, that's cool because those are voters, those are everyday Americans who, you know, have other priorities in life.
Julia Pyper: And energy is one of those fixed costs. We call it energy burden actually how so many Americans have to pay X amount every month. And for especially the lower income communities, they pay a disproportionate amount of what they earn on energy. Cause it is that fixed cost they can't really get away from. So how do we find ways to lower that? And I love that working at the homeowner and like local business level allows you to really see and feel the impact of energy decisions and policy can really provide some great benefits there when we structure it the right way.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, yeah, I do. I have a couple questions about the ira, but I just, I want to make one point about how you said that energy demand is now going up for the first time in 20 years. It's like there's so many of these things that are happening right at this moment that are totally changing the energy conversation. Talking about energy transition implies that we're going from this state to this other state. Whereas now we have all this new demand where it's like, well, that has an opportunity to reinvent because it's expanding, it's all new, it's net new. So we can say, well, maybe we don't serve gigantic industrial customers the same way we served them the first time around. Maybe, maybe it could be redesigned. Maybe it could have a different design to it.
Julia Pyper: Stay hopeful. See, look at you. We're healing your childhood traumas. Policy is not a stick in the mud always, not a barrier entirely. Look at you being innovative. How could policies change to enable better business models? I love it.
Greg Robinson: Yeah.
Julia Pyper: Yeah.
Greg Robinson: I've been doing a lot of this work for the last like 20 years. But my, you know, facial hair is getting really gray in the process. So I'm with you.
Julia Pyper: I'm with you.
Greg Robinson: So, but then the other thing that's really interesting if we think about the financial products is like the other thing has changed radically just in this sort of moment is like, money costs. Some money costs something now. Like, it didn't really cost something for the last 20 years. We kind of were in the zero.
Julia Pyper: Interest rates were low. So. Yeah, yeah, interest rates, which, by the way, if you talk to, like, I don't, you know, folks who are around in the 80s, like, interest rates were way higher than they even are now. So it's kind of like, I am not a Fed expert, but they seem to have thread the needle and we'll see where it goes from here. They thread the needle fairly well in trying to reduce inflation while not skyrocketing interest rates and also while not throwing us into recession. Jury's still out on whether we land the ship, but so far we've sort of skated through it. But doesn't mean that people aren't feeling real impacts from higher interest rates.
Julia Pyper: And yes, the cost of capital goes up as a result, which can slow deployment of clean energy along with any other business, just because it's harder to. It's more expensive to operate.
Flo Lumsden: And Greg, what do you call it? Bankability? The spreadsheets.
Greg Robinson: Yeah. Well, just like making projects, clean energy projects bankable. I mean, that's been like my whole career. You know, it's just like you go into a project and I think the first PPA I was ever a part of was like 28 cents a kilowatt hour, which is like, hey, guy that just graduated from college, like, make sure this is bankable. And it's like, I did the math. It's not.
Julia Pyper: That's a no for me. Yeah.
Greg Robinson: It was just so high. But yeah, with all of these different policies and such, so it's been able to help.
Julia Pyper: It's wild to see some of the international ones, like Abu Dhabi, what have they had PPAs at? Like, we're talking cents.
Greg Robinson: Cents. Less than 2 cents.
Julia Pyper: Yeah. Yeah. Less than 2 cents, right?
Greg Robinson: Yeah. It's incredible.
Julia Pyper: I mean, I think it's thanks to your work. See, you paved the road. Yeah.
Flo Lumsden: Those are power purchase agreements, right?
Greg Robinson: Power purchase agreements. Yeah. Sorry about that.
Julia Pyper: No, no.
Greg Robinson: Yeah. So speaking of other acronyms, Inflation Reduction act, we don't have to spend too much time on what it's called.
Julia Pyper: We don't spend a lot of time.
Greg Robinson: We don't spend much on the Inflation Reduction act part of it. But curious about, like, just if you can just. Even from the Good Leap perspective, what are the programs that. That created that has kind of allowed Good Leap to or enabled or supported Good Leap's work?
Julia Pyper: Yeah. So on the residential side, I mentioned those tax credits individuals can benefit from. So that's if you choose to pay cash to get solar and storage or purchase say a more efficient or electric air conditioner, other insulation and efficiency benefits, things like that are supported by two buckets of the residential tax credits when the customer owns it. So that's the 8 billion 3.5 million customers I was talking about. Many of those are our customers that we help make that purchase with a loan where again the customer owns the system but they used a loan to purchase it. Then we recently got into the third party ownership model. So that's those PPAs you're talking about and leases. Again in the residential sector, you were talking there about larger scale projects you were working on.
Julia Pyper: But we offer that as an option for customers to purchase solar and storage on their home and have us continue to own it and provide the operations and maintenance. And then you as the customer still get either lower, you contract for a power price that's typically cheaper than your utility, or you're leasing the panels and again still getting those energy bill savings, or at least certainty. So that whole ecosystem of third party owned TPO systems has a range of policies in the IRA that help drive that business model. So you have in both scenarios a core 30% tax credit the other customer gets on their own tax return, or in this TPO case the company gets and can pass through the customer in various ways.
Julia Pyper: Plus there are 10% bonus tax credits for systems deployed in what are called energy communities, traditionally fossil fuel communities next to coal plants and other definitions of those regions. And it's actually a lot of America, huge swaths of even California, Texas, places that you think of as being greener. But there's a lot of legacy fossil fuel infrastructure there. And these are communities that have typically been impacted by that pollution for generations. So the concept is let's make sure they're the first to benefit from these cleaner solutions. So that's 30% plus 10% bonus tax credit for that energy community, plus an additional 10% if you are using domestically made products to deploy your system. So you could be looking at a 50% tax credit for these TPO projects in some cases if they can comply with all the requirements. And so that's huge.
Julia Pyper: Domestically made products are probably going to be a little more expensive. That's why we have the tax credit to encourage not only the making of those facilities and making of the products in America, but then this tax credit I'm talking about is on the deployment side. How do you encourage people to actually deploy those in the real world. So that's part of the whole story of how do we make and build in America? That tax credit is a piece of that puzzle. So we, along with everyone else is looking at how do we best leverage that, how do we get the right products compiled together in a compliant way to actually meet the threshold to qualify for that tax credit.
Julia Pyper: And it's just really exciting to see how we're part of the story of like, again, build in America, deploy it in America, and maybe even deploy it abroad once we really get these supply chains rocking and rolling. And so I think American, like consumers can feel good too, that they're buying a product that was maybe made down the road or in a neighboring state. Like that's where we're going here in the near term. So those are just a couple pieces of the puzzle. There's also a tax credit for 1000 bucks for homeowners to get an EV charger that we look at. There's a bunch of home energy and efficiency rebates coming down the pike that various states are going to roll out state by state. There's a lot of pieces to that puzzle.
Julia Pyper: The Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund, a big $28 billion fund that somehow miraculously they got entirely deployed, so appropriated to the bill and then out the door to recipients by the two year anniversary of the ira. That's very fast for government to work. And that's one of the biggest single allocations, if not the biggest ever, this $28 billion to support various type of local clean energy programs. One of those will be to support heat pumps and solar and storage. So we're working on looking at that. And is that an opportunity for us to seize? So there's at least five or six buckets right there of IRA related programs that I think will have a meaningful impact. You know, not to mention workforce training, some consumer education efforts. There's also a novel use of a national security related provision to make more heat pumps in America.
Julia Pyper: It's only about $50 million is being used, but it's actually using the Defense Production act to say that's actually a national imperative to make more of this technology here. So that's just a new and interesting way they're incentivizing manufacturers to make the technologies of the next generation. So we're not just importing it from other countries.
Greg Robinson: Gosh, I feel like everything you just said is like, just falls under that individual empowerment category, which is typically not the main rhetoric in the climate space or the clean energy space. It's typically the people Sort of. It's the rhetoric for people a lot of times, historically at least, fighting against those policies. But there's so much of this that's helping out the local electrician to be able to add new products on their shelf. They're not just having to go answer calls for the broken, you know, H Vac system or the panel or whatever.
Julia Pyper: Like, I do want to note that, like, these programs I talk about do have to be implemented well or else we won't actually see all the benefits. And that's. I think we're still very much in that phase. Tax credits are kind of easier because they're available or they're not. You know, that's kind of understood when it comes to more like rebates and novel types of structures. You know, most people do replace their H Vac once it's broken. So it's hard to have a discussion in that real moment when maybe the baby's crying and it's hot outside and you know, to say, hey, let me pitch you in a radically different technology that maybe you're not familiar with. This heat pump thing that also cools. They're like, what? I just want to make it fix it.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, exactly.
Julia Pyper: It's hot. So we do have to get better and thinking about how existing business models work and empowering those contractors to have more nuanced conversations and not make it so hard to access the rebate because these are more expensive technologies. Oftentimes just sticking with the heat pump example can be almost double a traditional gas powered air conditioner. So you actually need the rebate to make it work. But if we make it so hard to even access the rebate, there's tons of paperwork to be filed and delays. The contractor can't front that money and maybe the customer, you know, doesn't have the money on hand to get the more expensive products. So how these programs are implemented is actually super key. So I'm going to gloss over that.
Julia Pyper: Even though there's a really great story to tell with the ira, the success or failure of it in some cases will come down to implementation here.
Greg Robinson: Yeah. And is that. It's good leap. Do you spend a lot of your time thinking about that? I'm assuming we spend a lot of.
Julia Pyper: Time thinking about that. We're obviously looking at the election and like, what could that mean? You know, there are going to be changes to the ira. So everyone sort of spun up new business models, not new business models, but found ways to leverage the tools of the law. But so that law could change. We've seen 18 Republicans come out and say they don't want to see the IRA repealed, which is really consequential because no matter how the election goes, it'll be very close in Congress. And so a few votes can actually make a big difference in changing or not changing something. And the administration matters too, because I mentioned implementation.
Julia Pyper: And that domestic content bonus tax credit, that additional 10% you can get for using American made products, which by the way, also exists for big, large scale products projects too, that 10%, it's not just residential that we don't have final guidance on how that tax credit works. These are some boring policy terms here. Final guidance, I get it. But point being, you need rules of the road of what you have to do to access that credit, and that's governed by the Treasury Department. They put out preliminary guidance, but this is a question mark. Depending on if there's a Republican in the White House, they could choose to change that guidance.
Julia Pyper: They could make it a lot more challenging to utilize, put a lot more uncertainty in the system to the extent that no one can really count on the credit because we're not quite sure how to comply for it. So that could render that whole 10% bonus unworkable depending on what a different administration decided to do. If they decided touch it at all. I'm not saying they would. It's just one of those question marks of what does this all mean going forward? What are the policies that will exist or we'll have to continue working on because they will affect our businesses in real ways.
Flo Lumsden: That's a really cool example of something you wouldn't know unless you work in politics, you know.
Julia Pyper: Yeah, you might not be following the final guidance timeline on the Treasury Department bonus tax credit for domestic content.
Flo Lumsden: As with everything, there's always nuance to like how things actually get done and applied and where there's always like variety of power levers that might not be obvious. And like the administration overseeing the Treasury Department and how that's implemented is a lever of power I hadn't thought about before. So it's super interesting, right?
Julia Pyper: Which will be guided by higher level things that folks will be familiar with, like how much do we want made in America? Well, what that looks like really matters. Are we saying that a solar project can't have one single screw with metal made from outside of America or one single component that's made outside of America? Or are we saying, okay, no, once it's. If it's met a certain threshold of made in America, we're comfortable with that. Okay, what's that threshold? What's that percentage? That's where we get until the rubber hits the road. Our new famous favorite line. That's where you get down to the rock picking.
Greg Robinson: Exactly.
Julia Pyper: Maybe we can make that line a thing of how these policies work and fundamentally what it actually means for real projects in the real world. And are we deploying clean energy at a greater scale or not?
Greg Robinson: Yeah, it's like food systems are like that, right? It's like, oh, cool that you have organic on the bag, but what percentage of ingredients has to be that in order to be called that?
Julia Pyper: It's like, oh, geez, I never even thought about that. You're ruining my life. I just figured organic was organic. We're good to go. I feel great, let's move on.
Greg Robinson: But there's just some, like, hard to reach ingredients that are only like 1%. And it's like, are you going to throw out the whole thing just for that one? Just for that one deal we won't get into.
Julia Pyper: Incremental is important.
Greg Robinson: Yeah.
Julia Pyper: I always keep in mind this panning out here on climate stuff of like, incrementalism to me is important because it's not like, okay, if the world warms six degrees, like, you know, if we only reduced global warming by one degree from the six down the line, like, oh, it's all over. No, that 1 degree of additional warming could mean exponentially more damage to the planet. So I always keep in mind that even if we don't hit the ultimate goal of, say, limiting emissions by mid century or the end of the century, every incremental amount we do avoid is potentially like massive, catastrophic levels of damage and impact on human lives avoided. And so I think about that when it comes to individual solutions, too incrementally more, even if it's not perfect, is part of the transition. It's part of the world changing.
Julia Pyper: You know, world change we're trying to create. To speak to your podcast title, change doesn't always have to be wholesale. It can be incremental, it can be slow, it can be annoying, it can involve final guidance timelines. But it's all part of making this, making it happen. If you agree that, like, whether you like it or not, change is coming to our economies, to our energy systems, and this is us trying to get ahead of it in both, like a decarbonized way, and I think in a way that benefits America and our allies. To go back to my initial motivator of national security, I think it's again, central to that story, too. Yeah.
Greg Robinson: And there's no. Like, you're, like you're saying even in the products that Good Leap is offering or others are offering, like, offering ways to move away from fossil fuels doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive program from making us more resilient against the change. Like, you're talking about drought resistance, I'm sure, you know, being able to fix mold. Like, those are all reactions to the reality. They're not. They're not all this sort of like, it's not like this altruism, let's save the planet. Like, they can all go together as like, being able to, like, create a resilience against the change. But then also, to your point, even if we drop 1 degree, but we gain resilience against 5 degrees, like, that can all be the same movement. It doesn't have to be a choice between limiting or just becoming resilient against it.
Julia Pyper: So, yeah, speed and scale matter, but as long as we're kind of moving forward, you know, we have to speed and scale at the heart of it. And little teasers, once the election's over, I think you're going to have even more. More kind of, you know, you have even more enthusiastic debates, even among people who largely agree. I think a lot of folks in the clean energy community have kind of parked some of their other debates around, okay, fracking or no fracking. You're seeing Kamala Harris really come out and say, actually, I'm in support of fracking. Pretty wild that the climate community has not come up in arms and been like, whoa, like, that could really lock in emissions for generations to come.
Julia Pyper: And even if natural gas burns cleaner, the pipeline systems and fugitive emissions and all these things, we kind of parked that, I think, right now. And maybe it's an acknowledgement that in this new era of demand growth, we do need to bring back and dust off that all of the above phrase that the Obama administration came up with. Or maybe there's again going to be more debates to come. But we're kind of in this, like, holding pattern until we get through the other side of the election. And then depending on what the future looks like, advocates will go from there. But I do think it's going to be an ongoing debate around how much fossil fuels will remain in the mix, to what extent, I think anyone would tell you they'll be around for a long time to come.
Julia Pyper: It's a question of how and where and at what scale and if we're also going to capture those emissions anyway, we're talking about a lot of big things. But I think it goes again to speak to why policy is going to be at the heart of so much of the energy discussions forevermore and encourage folks to get again engaged in as wonky or as high level as you want to. But there's room for everyone in this community, I think to tell the stories of what they're doing to change the world and make sure those decision makers know about that too.
Greg Robinson: Agreed. Well, I have other questions. I'm going to leave for next time. Maybe after the election or something like that. We'll have another conversation and see how this goes. But I just want to be. I can't believe how fast an hour went by. So this has been amazing.
Julia Pyper: It really flew. Wow. Did I say anything of interest? I feel like I just.
Flo Lumsden: Oh my God. I was like, sound bite.
Greg Robinson: So many things.
Julia Pyper: Oh good. I mean, I feel like I'm opining in a lot of things here, covering a lot of ground, but killing it.
Greg Robinson: I always ask this question, I think you may have even touched on it. But just because I always ask at the end of every show what happened when you were a kid? It could be something you got an experience you had that I guess sort of has like been a guiding or has set you on the path of, you know, all the way through. It could be journalism or like even leading you today where you're helping kind of empower those individuals by helping on policy at could leap.
Julia Pyper: Yeah. Well, I didn't realize rock picking had been so influential in my life until we had this conversation. You know, I think, gosh, I mean, do you think pieces about. If I say like. Well, you know, I think we talked about some of the influence from my grandfather and those economist articles. We talked about growing up on a farm and again my brother still being close to that community where like energy efficiency mandates for tractors has a real impact on farmers lives. So like that's again where you see the rubber hit the road. All of those things really matter.
Julia Pyper: I think honestly one of the things that probably dawned on me was growing up after, you know, seeing 911 happen, growing up and reaching the workforce after the Great Recession, I think like a lot of people started to think a lot about just where we sit in the world. And it kind of like opened my eyes to not just wanting to do something with my life that was like a job, but that I wanted my job to be like the thing that I did in life to make an impact. And so I think just stepping back at a higher level of like, why do I care about all this wonky stuff we've been talking about? I think I became aware at an early age, like, a lot of folks in my generation, the millennial crew of, like, our impact on the world.
Julia Pyper: And yes, we use reusable mugs, and, yes, we ride bicycles, and it's not so bad. There's a whole article I remember about, oh, those millennials keep drinking fair trade coffee and riding their bikes. And I'm like, is that a bad thing? And I think I'm in that crew of people who became somewhat aware and trying to be conscious about what my role is in it. You know, I always loved being a journalist because, like, that was a tool I could bring to the table. I can't tell a community what they need in their community, but I could amplify the voices of those community members. I think about adopting that kind of mentality even in the policy work I do today. So I think that's.
Julia Pyper: Those are some of those big historic moments that probably influenced why I work in clean energy and climate issues and wanting to make a positive impact for humanity, knowing that we live in a crazy world. And I want to have my little piece of it hopefully be a positive impact, whatever form that takes.
Greg Robinson: Yeah, well, the tool of policy or, you know, having the podcast audience or building all that, like, those are all, like, great tools to, you know, achieve that. I love your story about your grandpa and the Economist. I think that's like, when I sort of imagine where you were and you've got this, like, grandparent that's like pulling out Economist articles that he's, like, reading out a weekly. I'm just imagining. It's like, grandpa, I gotta fill the bucket. I gotta fill the bucket with rocks. Like, I don't think I can. I think I could do this.
Julia Pyper: Give me Economist articles later, Grandpa. You know, another thing for my childhood or thing for my childhood I think of is, you know, one of my uncles has worked in the oil industry. Actually, a lot of my family still does surveying in the oil sands area of Canada. And so when it comes to, like, why did I even go on to launch a podcast which still hosts today Political Climate, that has a Democrat and Republican, and we have these sort of, like, coming together conversations, not because we find Kumbaya, but because we all live together as a community and have to find paths forward in real ways. Not to debate climate science, but like, okay, what are we going to do about our energy security? What are we going to do about decarbonization?
Julia Pyper: And so Growing up, I think with people who had different motivations and backgrounds and thought they were also really having a positive impact in the world. Getting people affordable energy is a thing that motivates a lot of people in the fossil fuel industry, or my brother who again sells tractors and is trying to support farmers and our food sources and really loves the technology. Having exposure to people who just are all part of different facets of the economy, I think was an eye opener for me and continues to motivate me today of how do we make sure that these solutions work for everyone and not just disparage people who oppose it on the face, Maybe understand why. Why does this not work for somebody? Why are they in opposition to this?
Julia Pyper: It doesn't mean you always find, you know, common ground, but if you don't ask that question, I think you just end up putting up echo chambers and barriers and then that stalls progress. Whereas going back to incrementalism, maybe, you know, step by step we start to find avenues where we can work together. And that kind of mentality thing's been seeped into me from an early age.
Greg Robinson: Amazing cut.
Julia Pyper: Love that. Maybe that was better than Dash 911, but I'm not being honest.
Greg Robinson: They're both.
Flo Lumsden: It's, you know, it's hard to find one.
Julia Pyper: You can get the 9, 11, 1.
Flo Lumsden: It's hard to find the one moment. You know, I'm sure there's. I can think of three to five moments that really impacted me growing up, but where can people find you, Julia? Where do you want them to find you?
Julia Pyper: Online. No kidding. My address. Where can they find so folks can find me? I'm on X, Twitter. M, Piper P Y P E R. Political climate's on there at polypoliclimate. If you wanna check out that podcast I mentioned. I'm also on LinkedIn. Totally welcome people to reach out there, send me a message. But yeah, love to connect with everyone and so glad that you guys invited me on. I hope this was worthwhile.
Flo Lumsden: Yeah, it's amazing.
Greg Robinson: Thanks so much, Julia. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the World Changing Podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube to hear the latest episodes.