[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find. Now, temperate zones and tropics climbs, and through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine, good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly K squid raudier show focused on environment, sustainability, and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. We all know that solar electricity is the fuel of the future, but can we go solar without damaging the environment? Solar farms in distant places need transmission lines to get their product to the market. Storage of solar electricity requires batteries, and one element in particular is critical to both the electronics and batteries that are increasingly vital to the societal decarbonization enterprise. Lithium. We've heard about some of the risks and hazards of lithium batteries, but what about lithium extraction? Where does it come from? Who is mining it, and who is affected by that mining today? Sustainability now welcomes back San Jose State University environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney, who's been studying the environmental impacts of renewable energy sources, with a particular focus on solar farms in the desert, new high voltage transmission lines to bring that electricity to consumers and the materials that go into the renewable energy infrastructure.
Dustin, welcome back to sustainability. Now, by my count, this is your third appearance on the show, and I think you hold the record. So let's make this one a good one.
Okay, let's begin by having you tell our listeners about yourself. You know, background education, research, other activities.
[00:02:13] Speaker C: Great. Well, I am a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University, and I've been teaching there for 13 years.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:02:24] Speaker C: And before that, I was a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley in the department of Environmental science, policy, and management, where I was really kicking off some of the work that I'm doing today around thinking about how to plan for energy transitions, how to think about the land use implications of a renewable energy system, how to think about supply chains and what the labor that makes the things that we'll be producing in the future will be. So that's where I started that work. And then before that, I did my PhD in environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And before that, I have a master's degree in environmental policy and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering with a minor in physics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Both those degrees and I worked in the chemical industry for a few years earlier after my undergraduate education as a process engineer. And today I work on largely solar energy commodity chains. So I look at the lifecycle impacts of solar from those supply chain issues. Who's making the solar panels, how are they made the land use issues, where are the solar panels going? What kinds of conflicts might arise? How can we do that better? And recycling. So how do we recover the materials that go into solar panels to make sure that they're properly disposed of and that we have more materials that enter the decarbonization economy and not our landfills. So that's where the work I'm doing, I'm doing a little more work on lithium ion batteries, as we'll talk about as well.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: So if you could give us a kind of a wholesale summary of the state of all of this, what would that be? Are things looking good in terms of all lifecycle of solar or what?
[00:04:34] Speaker C: I think it's mixed. I think the question is mixed. So it depends on the context. So if we're talking about are these impacts from solar energy better or worse than natural gas, obviously the answer there, I think most people would agree that the impacts of solar energy are much fewer. We don't have the climate change concern so much as we do with natural gas. We don't have the water use impacts and the air pollution impacts much more sustainably. But I'm more interested in differentiating better solar from worse solar. So I'm not interested in comparing last our previous energy economy to our future energy economy. But I'm trying to navigate what the future looks like and how to make the products that we make, in this case solar panels, more sustainable from the get go. So there's a lot of differentiation in the industry. There are solar farms that go on sensitive habitats, and there are solar farms that are built on restored or remediated landscapes. So those are very different impacts. We have some solar panels that are made with a lot of coal fired electricity, and we have some solar panels that are much lower in their carbon impact. So there's a lot of variation within the industry and we're trying to get them to be more sustainable from various elements, from their carbon intensity to their land use practices.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: So when you say better and worse, you're talking about those kinds of impacts and not necessarily the panels themselves, right?
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Correct. Yeah.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: Well, last time you were on the show, you talked about solar farms in the desert and mentioned something about transmission lines. Can you talk about the differences between utility scale solar on public lands, on farmland and degraded lands, and how transmission shapes the patterns of solar development?
[00:06:35] Speaker C: We have been building a lot of solar.
California has 20 gigawatts or so worth of utility scale solar. These are very large power plants that are several square miles to tens of square miles in size. So very, very large, usually made of the same solar panels that you could put on a roof. And that's where we could start to say, like, we have options for how we build out a solar economy. But we have been building some of those projects. I'm going to say maybe 20% of the solar projects that are being built in California, Nevada, Arizona are being built on public lands that are intact ecosystems. So these are systems. So the public lands are lands that we have in the United States that are really a remnant of the Homestead act in the general Land Office. They were lands that were never given away to settlers as they moved across the west. And at one point, the federal government even tried to give it to states, and the states didn't want it because it took too much effort to manage lands that were arid and couldn't be developed for agriculture. So today, most of those lands reside with the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Land Management has developed a solar leasing program. So just like we get a lot of our oil and gas from public lands in the United States, somewhere on the order of 20% of our fossil fuels are taken from public lands. We now have programs to lease public lands for solar and wind.
What that means is that when we put projects on public lands, we are automatically causing an environmental impact, because these are relatively intact ecosystems compared to, say, for example, agriculture, or lands that were formerly used as agriculture, which is probably more like 80% of the solar farms in the western United States, California area.
So those projects get installed and built without any controversy. They're built quickly.
They're often welcomed by the community who are looking for other revenues besides just the agricultural revenues, whereas these projects on public lands are much more impacted. They're impacted partly because of the ecological criteria that I mentioned before, but they're also public lands, meaning that they're lands that are accessible to most of us in the United States if we're able to get them. So taking public lands and doing what you might describe as a virtual privatization for a private company who's now allowed to fence off this big ten square mile parcel, scrape it with bulldozers, and install solar farms, that in and of itself is seen as controversial, not just from the ecological impacts, but also because of the multiple uses of those lands. And that's one of the things that makes this interesting with the Bureau of Land Management, because they are an agency that really doesn't have a mission not so clear, at least not like the National Park Service, which is supposed to, like, get us all to be in parks and enjoy parks, or the National Forest Service, which is partly about wilderness management, but also about sustained yield of forestry. The Bureau of Land Management, because it's got all those remnant lands with those different uses, just has a lot of different users who want to be using those for different land for different purposes, whether it's oil and gas developers.
Hard rock mining is an activity that happens on a lot of our public lands.
We use public lands for recreation, not just hiking way. We think about walking in these landscapes, but recreational off road vehicles use these lands. Horses, horseback riders use these lands.
So the Bureau of Land Management has multiple and competing organic missions in it that makes it hard to. Hard for them to have a clear path forward unless there's something that is dictated to them by Congress. So in this particular case, Congress in 2005 opened up the American west to solar development, the public lands on solar development, by. In the Energy Policy act of 2005. And that has led to many, many applications for these particular parcels. So there are definitely a wide variety of impacts from utility scale solar. And when we think about environmental impacts in the American west, it's really these projects that are on public lands that have the most significant ones.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: I'm curious, do the owners of the solar farms pay any royalties on the solar energy?
[00:11:35] Speaker C: Yes, they do. There are fees. There are fees associated that are both based on acreage and megawatts. And that's something that the industry complained about for quite a while. And actually, under the Energy act of 2020, signed by Donald Trump, which expanded the number of lands available, or that were mandated to be developed by the Bureau of Land Management from that 2005 policy, which said you have to build ten gigawatts of renewables to 25 gigawatts, it was raised to 20 in the intermediate years, but they also dropped the rents on lands that would be leasable to solar developers by 70%. So they're giving them a bigger break than they had before on this particular topic. But to go back to the transmission.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Point, Justin, before you go on, my question is, when an oil company pumps oil from the ground on public lands, they have to pay a fee, a pretty small fee, on every barrel they pump. So my question was, do the solar companies have to pay anything for the solar energy that they capture and turn into electricity? I know, I understand they pay leases, but do they pay anything for what is, after all, a common resource commons resource?
[00:13:00] Speaker C: The answer is no. They're not paying anything per kilowatt hour.
So when solar farms generating electricity and selling that, there's no payment back to BLM. That's why the BLM's lease fee has a megawatt number. So if you develop 500 megawatt solar farm, you're paying a certain fixed fee based on that per megawatt number.
But you raise a really important point, which is that the Bureau of land, and this is, I think, a really interesting piece to the story about public lands, which is that the oil and gas industry is supposed to, partly because they've, the Bureau of Land Management has been empowered to do this.
Some of those royalties circulate in the local community.
So when that money gets paid on a barrel of oil or natural gas or whatever it is, hard rock mining even is similar. Some of those fees, some of that money is supposed to stay in the district office area, but there's no such mechanism to recoup locally the fee money that's going into these solar developers. So it's basically going to the solar development fund that the BLM is collecting from these leases. So that money just goes to Washington, DC and does not make it back into the local community. And that's a point of contention often from people who are seeing these projects built on public lands, because they say, not only are you making that land no longer accessible to me to use, recreate, do whatever else I would have otherwise done on that land, there are no public benefits that circulate locally in those communities. So they see that as a challenge. And I think the BLM also has recognized this as an important challenge for them getting acceptance for solar on these public lands.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Well, go on and talk about transmission lines. I interrupted you.
[00:15:02] Speaker C: So transmission lines are super important, as you'll hear from anybody who's talking about how to decarbonize the electricity grid, they say, we need a lot more transmission built to be able to move solar around the country, to move wind around the country, etcetera.
And it turns out that transmission lines and access to transmission lines are really what solar developers are after. So when we talk about opening up all this land to solar development, in this case, in 2005, it was 22 million acres. And right now there's a western solar plan update where it could be up to 55 million acres, roughly the size of New Mexico. So a very, very large area, not all that would be developed, but they would be able to pick within that.
It turns out that having access to land is one thing, but really what everybody wants is access to transmission. So you want land that's really close to transmission lines. If we go back and look at California, 1950s and the 1960s, population is growing, the economy is growing. They don't have enough energy to power the state.
So they couldn't build coal fired power plants in the state because the air quality issues, notoriously Los Angeles air was dirty. Burning coal was not going to be on the menu there. Natural gas would have been an option, but at the time, it was prohibited to be burned in power plants by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who was concerned that there was not enough gas for the pipelines. If power plants were suddenly competing for that supply. And that changes, obviously. And then eventually we open up a lot more natural gas with that fracking technology that comes a couple decades later. So where did we go for power plants? We built coal fired power plants all across the intermountain west. We built coal fire power plants in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico.
And those power plants were built in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and we built transmission lines across our public lands to connect them. So what does that mean? That means that this legacy infrastructure where we've connected coal fired power plants to power Los Angeles and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, now has a whole bunch of very valuable places along those transmission lines, especially as those coal fire power plants are turned off. Right, where you're hearing about all the beyond coal. Sierra Clubs campaign shut down coal fired power plants across the west. The economics are changing of these facilities. So they're literally turning down, they're turning off the coal in much of the intermountain west. A couple power plants left, Navajo generating station, the famous one that was knocked down just a few years ago. But those power lines have capacity now. Now, without the power from the coal fire power plants, there's available capacity on some of these power lines. So what that meant was the public lands, because, again, we chose to build power lines across public lands because it's really easy and fast to do so, right. If we wouldn't have sent it along more urban or metropolitan or even suburban landscapes, it was easy just to build them right across public lands. And at the time, there weren't the same protections we had today, too. So that is part of that. So today, now we have all these very valuable access points for transmission along those public lands. And that's where solar developers actually want to go. If you give them a map and say you can have anything within this area, they're just going to look for where the transmission lines are and try to get as close as they can to those. And then, and even at that point, they don't actually know how valuable it is. So this is, you may have heard these stories about these very long interconnection queues, how the whole system is clogged up with all the reviews, and these aren't environmental reviews. Some people are misinterpreting that and saying, oh, this is the National Environmental Policy act. Environmental review is slowing down solar development and wind development. No, these are actually reviews from the system operators, the people who run the electricity grid. So what are they doing? They're doing, like, heat tests and power flow tests to make sure, like, if a solar farm goes on a certain part of the grid, it's not going to melt stuff or it's not going to overheat, and that's going to be able to deliver that power. So even when a developer is like, they think they're close to a transmission line, they actually don't know this information. And this is why they actually, the system is gummed up because you have multiple transmission, I'm sorry, multiple solar developer, or one solar developer submitting multiple applications because they're not sure which is the most valuable one. And this is partly because the utility planning process is very opaque. We can't see into it. It's very dynamic, too. So from their perspective, they're just seeing it. Used to be we had hundreds of power plants, and it was easy to monitor them. We know when they're going to be on, when they're going to be off. Now we have tens of thousands of power plants. So the system is rapidly evolving. So you can understand why the utilities have to do these tests. But what it means is that it appears that there's a rapid.
Or it appears that there's. That the rapid build out of solar is causing this log jam. And it kind of is. But anyway, the main point is that the valuable places for solar are along those transmission lines. So, in Nevada, which we had talked about last time, we talked about the green, the Green Lake project, which is connecting basically Las Vegas to Reno, Nevada. And what we're seeing right now are tons of applications for solar projects along public lands, along that stretch of land, along that stretch of corridor between Las Vegas and Reno, because they know a transmission line is coming, and they know there's going to be a bunch of substations and they're going to try to build solar farms along that. So why is that important? That's important because people are talking today about building transmission lines all over the place. In fact, you can go back, there's actually plans for similar ideas in 1920s, 1930s, about the big federal grid that would be delivering power across the US, but we're still split up. Right. You have a big chunk of the western United States is not connected to Texas, it's not connected to the east coast. But people are talking about trying to do more big power interconnection. So the reason that understanding this idea that transmission lines create value for solar developers, why that's important is because you don't want to drape power lines across habitat. You don't want to drape it across areas that are important culturally to Native Americans. We see a project right now called the Sun Zia project, which is basically New Mexico, southern Arizona, and that's been sued now a couple times by tribes who are saying they weren't consulted properly, that they don't approve the projects. It's going through a culturally important landscape, etcetera. So it's very important for people who want to see this big, interconnected, low carbon grid to understand that certain pathways that the transmission lines could be built could bring more habitat loss, more cultural resource damage, and things like that.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipchitz, and my guest today is San Jose State University professor Dustin Mulvaney. We're talking about the life cycle impacts of renewable energy, particularly solar, and especially solar farms throughout the west and their connections to transmission lines. Dustin, can you sketch out an alternative system to this one based on centralized solar farms and long distance transmission lines and whether that would be operate better or worse or.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there are multiple possibilities for us to achieve low carbon electricity. There is.
I think the dominant narrative is this one about building more transmission lines to deliver more large scale solar to our urban areas, to our electricity grid.
But that's even challenging a little bit. So often when you hear about how cheap utility scale solar is, that's obviously just talking about the solar project. It's not talking about the associated infrastructures. An alternative vision would be one that's more decentralized, that brings power generation closer to load, that doesn't look to transmission lines to solve all the problems. That also looks to things like micro grids, that looks to using more rooftop solar integrated with batteries. These things called virtual power plants, where the system operator, instead of controlling just a large scale solar, where there's a whole bunch of panels in one site, is looking across a community and thinking about the generation from all those rooftops and using that basically to mimic what a power plant would be doing otherwise.
There are different paradigms. There are people who do all the modeling that would say, oh, well, the distributed system, that's going to cost more because the economics look better for utility scale stuff. But cost is not always clear. So when we see prices, for example, there are prices to ratepayers, some of that price cost to taxpayers, there's cost to the system, there's costs to the shareholders. So even what we see as like, the cost of energies is not giving us the full price of things. But a system where we have some utility scale solar and a much larger portion of distributed energy is one way that we could organize a grid. Take California and Texas right now, as just two examples, California and Texas have about the same amount of solar installed. I think Texas has just passed California in terms of utility scale solar.
So that's about, let's say 20 gigawatts in Texas, 20 gigawatts in California. California has about 16, I think, going on 17 gigawatts of distributed solar as well. So we actually have a lot more solar than Texas because Texas only has two gigawatts of distributed solar. So you could see 20 to 17. So it's almost like a one to one ratio for every solar panel in the desert. We got one on a rooftop in California. In Texas, it's ten to 110 solar panels and a utility scale project and only one. Both places are pretty sunny, so that's probably not the reason. But it's all about the policies and the incentives to build out a system that's a little more balanced. You can make the case that California should have a larger portion of distributed to utility scale solar, given how far away that utility scale solar is coming. We need more power in our urban areas. We're never going to shut down our natural gas power plants unless we bring more power closer to load because we're running power plants for resource adequacy needs. We're running natural gas power plants because we're worried about voltage sags and things like that because we don't have enough renewables in Los Angeles, in Silicon Valley, in San Francisco, we need to Sacramento. Most of our renewables are actually trapped in southern California. So there's a case that could be said, well, we should just expand the transmission line from southern California to northern California. We did that recently. So we've already widened that pipeline after the Enron fiasco in the two thousands where there's manipulation of power markets from the deregulation of our electric utility.
So there are different visions. I think they're competing visions.
I feel like there's a lot of momentum right now behind the big infrastructure decarbonization move the transmission lines. Utility scale solar seems to have a lot of wind behind its sails. They have a lot of support.
That's where the incentives are. That's where the utilities prefer. So there's a lot of headwinds right now against that alternative vision where we are putting our future energy system into an organizational frame where we're seeing it much more local, much more distributed. Now, the other thing we could say is I've been talking about impacts from utility scale solar projects. Again, those are really impacts on public lands. So you could make the case that maybe we shouldn't be putting solar projects on public lands at all. Maybe Congress should rescind this BLM mandate. All the other projects that we're building in West Texas, by the way, there's no public lands in Texas, so they're able to build 20 gigawatts without public lands. California, again, most of those projects are actually on private agricultural lands. So we could envision a system that is more distributed, that's more decentralized, and that where we do have utility scale solar, we're putting that on degraded lands. And we have a lot of oil and gas lands, for example, that are actually on BLM.
But in the hierarchy of uses in the BLM system, there's not a single oil and gas land that's leasable or leased, if it's leased, that's already kind of tied up or under production that the solar industry is able to get. So, like, all of these public lands for solar development are in addition to the public lands for oil and gas. Whereas we might envision a system where maybe the federal government says maybe we should not do so much oil and gas, and let's replace the oil and gas production with solar farms and cite these projects on already degraded lands, which many of these oil and gas lands are pretty degraded. There's telephone poles all over.
But the federal government has land that's not even leasable. I'm sorry, that's not leased right now, but leasable. So they're holding lands that no company has made a claim on, but they have to plan to lease. And I'll just add one more piece to this, which related to the Inflation Reduction act, which I'll make sure that your listeners understand. The inflation reduction act was a policy that was passed, I guess, summer of 2022, which has all sorts of incentives for low carbon energy supply chains, building battery factories, putting solar on your roof or in the desert. All those incentives are in this inflation Reduction act. And that Inflation Reduction act said that if the federal government offers a right of way, which is the technical term for offering a lease to a solar developer, they have to hold an oil gas lease within the next six months.
So now, even through that Inflation Reduction act, we've kind of tied solar development on public lands to oil and gas production on public lands, which are infinite wisdom.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Yeah, transmission is pretty expensive, isn't it? I mean, I know that. That in California, it makes up, actually at least half. Transmission and distribution make up half of the retail electricity bill. Now, is that the cost, the actual cost of transmission, or are the utilities getting rents above and beyond the cost on transmission? I'm just wondering about that particular aspect.
[00:31:00] Speaker C: I don't know if I know enough about that to say whether or not our bills are representative of the costs of transmission. I think a few things, being in PG and e territory here, PG and E is spending a lot of money undergrounding lines and upgrading lines. They've been sending lots of people up to reinstall these reclosers, essentially, circuit breakers on the power lines, because their power lines have caused so many fires in the area.
So, yeah, it is a curiosity like how much we are paying for the equipment side versus the energy side, which used to be what most of the cost of electricity was, that generation side. But now it's more and more about transmission distribution. But we're burying a lot of our power lines. San Diego Gas and Electric really was the first to start doing this after the witch fire in 2007, and they have buried a significant portion of their entire grid, actually down there. And they have some of the highest rates in the country as well. So I think transmission is expensive, and the process by which we understand costs to utility versus profits to utility is opaque enough that I actually don't know.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Okay, well, that's a fair answer.
You're listening to sustainability now. This is Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is San Jose State University environmental studies professor Dustin Mulvaney, who has been studying the impacts, life cycle impacts of renewable energy for, what, close to 20 years now. Right, Dustin?
And we were just about to start talking about lithium. What is lithium? Why is it so good for energy storage and batteries? And what are its advantages over older chemical batteries?
[00:32:56] Speaker C: Lithium is an element that is on the periodic table, and it's really important for batteries because it has a high capacity to store energy.
We. And it's also very light. So when we look on the periodic table, the fact that it's number three after hydrogen and helium means it's the third lightest element. And the advantage you can actually look at back 120 years ago, you'll see electric cars with lead acid batteries, but they were really, really heavy, right? So you'd have to have. I actually don't even know how many lead acid batteries you'd have to get to get anything like we have today. But you see pictures of cars that have, like, 20 or 30 lead acid batteries, and they probably only had a range of a couple miles back, back then. So that's the main advantage of lithium, is that it is just super high density battery, that it is able to deliver power quickly, and it is very light. So it's very good for automotive applications and what we call traction batteries that are in electric vehicles or plug in hybrid vehicles.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: And where else is it used?
[00:34:07] Speaker C: Lithium is used in a lot of different things.
It's even used in, like, greases, industrial greases and things. But it is also used in batteries. For every device that we have, you think about your computer, your phone.
Electric power tools are another significant source where we saw pretty rapid adoption of lithium ion batteries. If you think about, like, an older. The battery generation before this were usually like a nickel or a cadmium based battery or nickel cadmium. And those are much heavier. So you can even imagine, like the power tool, like a drill, being much, much lighter with a lithium battery, who wants to buy a heavier drill? So having lighter power tools has been another market for them. But really, it's about. The future of lithium is about batteries for cars and some grid storage. So grid electricity batteries are really important, too. We have the biggest battery in the world right now, not far down the street from us. We have actually an EPA, Us EPA grant to study the moss landing power plant. And that project is, again, probably will continue to be the largest battery in the world, replacing what was once California's largest power plant there in Muslin, although there still is the natural gas power plant. But we have a pretty big battery.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: Wasn't there a fire or explosion at that battery plant last year?
[00:35:33] Speaker C: There was. There's actually three fires from 2021 to 2022. There's two different battery operators there. One of them is PG and E and Tesla. They own one of the systems. And the other one is a developer called. Named Vistra, who develops a lot of big batteries in California and across the world. And they had.
The fire that made the most headlines was because of some improperly installed valves on a cooling system.
The water came out of the valves and made their way into the batteries, and it caused the battery fire. And there was actually a shelter in place order for the town of Moss, landing for quite a few hours while they figured out what was going on and whether or not the air was.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: Toxic is free lithium, highly volatile, that.
[00:36:28] Speaker C: I'm not sure about. But lithium batteries in general are susceptible to something called thermal runaway.
And basically what happens is, when one of the barriers that separates the positive and negative charges in the battery breaks down, it moves across that and could rapidly cause a fire. So you might remember many years ago, there was actually a Boeing aircraft that had some lithium ion batteries in the back of it, and that caused the fire. And that plane was temporarily halted until they could figure out what the safety issues are there. So we see this with.
It's often used as against electric cars, to say, oh, look, electric cars catch on fire. There's plenty of gasoline cars that catch on fire every single day. That's, you know, I don't want to mislead people, but. But electric cars are susceptible to fires. You know, they have had fires partly because of the battery issue. In fact, you know, we. We own a plug in hybrid car, has a battery in it. And I had a. I got a recall notice at one point that said, like, don't park this car in the garage until you bring it back for a recall, because it could cause a fire. So that's happened in several instances. In fact, there's a big outbreak of fires in New York City because of all these e bikes. So these people are storing e bikes inside of buildings, and people, actually, I remember I was talking to someone at the national renewable energy lab, and they just said, we have a policy, no e bikes allowed in the building.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Really?
[00:37:56] Speaker C: Yeah. So, anyhow, so, yeah, they're susceptible to fires. And, you know, where else they're susceptible to fires at the end of life. So we're seeing a lot of.
MRF is a materials recovery facility. That's a place where all of our recyclables go. All your e waste goes, and they separate all the stuff apart. And some of those lines where they're processing electronic waste, if there could be a little battery in, like, a hallmark card or something like that, causes a, you know, fire that causes millions of dollars of damage, which all comes back down onto local government. So managing batteries is really important across, for this fire safety reasons is important across its whole life cycle.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: So I shouldn't park my electric bike in my garage?
[00:38:39] Speaker C: Well, just be aware, there are stories about what happens.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I hear the stories, right, but. But that's, you know, some people say.
[00:38:48] Speaker C: Maybe it's just you don't want to charge it. It's probably fine if it's not. It's probably something to do with the charging, I think.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: I assume lithium didn't have many uses prior to its introduction into batteries. So when it's often the case, when formerly wasted materials find new uses, we're told that the material is a new gold, and lithium is being touted as a new gold. It's strategically valuable and of limited availability, and so we could run out and be deprived of our smartphones. Now, is there any substance to those kinds of arguments? How much lithium is out there, and is it enough, or will we have new batteries before the lithium runs out?
[00:39:27] Speaker C: That's a great question. That's the. The big money question people are asking. So, based on what people have modeled for what we need to do to decarbonize transportation and our electricity grid, and maybe even industries and such, that we definitely do not produce enough lithium today to meet the needs for battery demand.
[00:39:50] Speaker B: So is that in the United States or globally? Globally.
[00:39:54] Speaker C: Okay, globally. There's not globally enough. Most of the lithium in the world today comes from South America and from Australia, and there's different methods of getting it. Australia is doing a lot of hard rock mining to get lithium. In South America, they're doing a lot of brine extraction. People may have seen these very colorful photos of the evaporation ponds where they. If you look closely, you'll see the little drill holes all across that landscape. They drill holes, they pump the water up, and they put it through a bunch of solar evaporation, plus some chemical treatments to separate the lithium there. And we're seeing it also be developed in clays as well. So, up in northern Nevada, there's a place called Thacker Pass that has just been approved to develop lithium mine there, what's called the McDermott caldera. McDermott Caldera is an ancient volcano that's supposedly similar to the Yellowstone volcano, and it left a huge deposit of lithium up there. And we've known that lithium has been there for a long time, but like you said, there's never been a desire to extract it because there was not a valuable commodity on the other side. So that's been the story of that. Now we're also seeing in California the development and promotion of Lithium Valley. So what is lithium Valley? Lithium Valley is the Salton Sea. So you might remember the Salton Sea from those stories about the formation of the lake from the.
Or the ancient lake that had formed over and over, over years, was finally filled somewhat permanently, as we have today, from diversions of the Colorado river. If you can imagine that that giant lake is a result of the Colorado river and it's sustained by Colorado river water. That's the imperial Valley is the largest water user on the Colorado river.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I seem to recall that that was completely unintentional, that there was some sort of canal break or something like that, which flooded the valley.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a great book called the Settler Sea that tells this story.
And in that framing of it, that narrative has become the dominant narrative of how that lake was formed, that it was formed by this accident that happened as they were building dams and canals off of the Colorado river. But that area also has had historic Lake there, Lake Kaweah, and had formed, been ephemeral even. There's documentation of it in the late 18 hundreds or so. But the point remains that the reason there's a lake there today is because of flows of the Colorado river that are used by the imperial irrigation district and sent through canal networks. And that's the most fascinating map you could ever look at, is look at the. Look at a map of imperial counties canal networks. It's just an incredible infrastructure that has been really. You know, if you go out there and see it in real life, it's pretty primitive. It's literally ditches of just moving water all through that landscape, through one of the more productive agricultural places in the world. That's where much of our winter crop comes from. If you're eating artichokes certain times of the year, they're probably coming from Imperial county, even all the way up here in Santa Cruz county, where we grow most of the artichokes, because of the way that agricultural production can occur all year because of the warm temperatures, really, even in the winter.
And they grow a lot of grass and hay and alfalfa and things like that. Down in Imperial County, a lot of that is exported. So you sometimes hear stories about how we are exporting our water and hay to Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia doesn't do something like this. They're not going to use their valuable water to grow alfalfa.
They'll find someone else to do something silly as that, like us.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronny Lipschitz, and my guest today is Professor Dustin Mulvaney from San Jose State University. We've just been talking about Lithium Valley, which is where the Salton sea is in imperial county. So how is lithium being extracted down there?
[00:44:11] Speaker C: So I described before the primary ways that lithium is taken out of the ground today are hard rock mining, which you might fold clays into that, as well as hard rock, or it is taken out of the ground in the form of brines and evaporated in lithium Valley. It's a somewhat unique situation. We have what's called the Salton Sea anomaly. The Salton Sea anomaly is a geothermal field underneath the part of the Salton Sea, but mostly a little bit to the southeast of the Salton Sea, so mainly imperial county. And if you. In that history, there's been a lot of geothermal development. In the 1970s, there was a big rush to build geothermal in the eighties, again. So we've actually have a bunch of operating geothermal power plants down on that geothermal anomaly using that hot water that's already down there. So the proposed idea, and there are three companies that are doing different processes for this, is what's called direct lithium extraction, or DLE.
So, direct lithium extraction is taking the brines and passing it through what you might just simply call a filter. It's using membrane technologies that are able to differentiate lithium from other things. So it's kind of a messy process in the sense that when they pull these brine, this geothermal anomaly brine, I call it the geothermal anomaly, because often people think that the Salton Sea is the source of the water for lithium, and it's not. This Salton sea doesn't have very much lithium in it. It's what's below the Salton Sea. But the challenge with these filtration technologies, where they're using these membranes, is it's hard to select for a certain metal. So they're coming, like, what's coming in the. Coming out of the brine's got, you know, 200 parts per million lithium, but it's got all these other metals in it, too. So if you're trying to filter all the metals, that's pretty easy, right? You just come up with a filter to filter out all the metals. Like, you'd filter out your coffee or something like that. But in this case, you're trying to, like, let a couple of the coffee grounds through and filter out the rest, right? Or you're. You want to capture the lithium amongst all of the different ions and dissolved metals and things like that that are in there. So that's the idea, though, direct lithium extraction from geothermal brines. That means that not only could you extract this valuable lithium resource, you could also run a geothermal power plant. And the state wants more geothermal power plants. Because we have too much solar and wind in our renewable portfolio mix, we don't have enough of what they call baseload, geothermal, baseload renewables, meaning that the power plants are running at night or they're running more or less 24/7 so in fact, in the renewable portfolio standard, in the resource planning for the state of California, the state has identified and carved out a specific requirement that can only be met by a geothermal or offshore wind. But offshore wind won't be built by then. So this is really going all for geothermal. So there's a carve out in the renewable portfolio standard that's going to require, or it's going to allow for these geothermal developers to now sign contracts with our electric utilities to meet the 100% clean energy by 2045 goal.
But the power plants are, the fact that they're able to also extract the lithium makes them extremely valuable. So the, you know, it's one thing to run a power plant, but the lithium is worth way, way more. So if someone can figure out how to do this correctly and sell the lithium, they're going to be running a very profitable facility compared to just a geothermal. It's several times more revenues that could be generated from that. So very valuable stuff. Now, the county of imperial recognizes how valuable this stuff is, and they recognize what changes might be coming. And that's why several years ago, they passed a lithium excise tax.
It's funny, we don't even have an excise tax for oil and gas in California, by the way, but the lithium excise tax is intended to ensure that there are some revenues available for local government operations and such from the development of that resource. And the idea would be that it could, some of those revenues would stay in the community and help job training programs or whatever other things that might have to happen to benefit that community.
[00:49:08] Speaker B: Will the benefits actually be distributed fairly? I mean, whenever there's a gold rush, the miners usually get the shaft ultimately right. And I'm just wondering, since Imperial county has a very low median income and is largely latino, I mean, whos actually going to benefit from this windfall?
[00:49:32] Speaker C: Yeah, its a huge issue in the area because its not completely clear who would benefit. So lets you know, on the tax itself, they havent fully designed the program, but the idea is that tax would be a pool of money that could be applied to by nonprofits or other agencies, or essentially things that would help benefit the community.
Doing restoration around the lake, for example, is an issue.
The thing about the Salton Sea is that the lakes drying up partly because there's less flow of water from less agriculture. And what that means is, as that lake bed recedes, it's exposing all sorts of really bad contaminants, including ddt still and things like that from all the agrochemicals that we had put on on the agricultural fields many, many years ago. So as that lake recedes, it's exposing people to air pollution. So what that means is that the restoration of that lake could benefit the community. So to the extent that some of that lithium tax will end up with replanting vegetation along that playa, that could benefit folks there. But those are indirect benefits. And Sidebar there's a ballot proposition to get rid of the excise tax already, so that could disappear completely.
But the community benefits are what the county's trying to think about with the planning process. So what the county of imperial and the environmental justice groups that I speak with are saying is that they're concerned that they'll just be another extracted community. So what they would like to see in their vision is if we're going to extract the lithium, we want to process the lithium.
We want to take the lithium. We want to make the battery cell packs, we want to make the battery modules, we want to make the cars that the batteries go into, because every time you move up, you start looking at higher wages, you start looking at more likely unionized workers, whereas, like these geothermal power plants and the lithium extraction, those jobs are probably right around on the lower end of the pay spectrum. They're not going to be your highest paid jobs. Whereas if you move up and move up in the value added industry across the lifecycle of that battery supply chain, now you're talking about better jobs. And now as you move close to that battery, as you move closer to the battery supply chain, by the way, the UAW is going to come after you, meaning, like, they're going to come recruit you, because that's the UAW United Auto workers strategy for how the transition affects their workers is they're not looking at themselves just as automobile manufacturers. They're looking at themselves now as battery manufacturers. So you're already seeing, like, announcements from battery factories that they're being organized by UAW. So it'll take UAW is not going to be organizing the direct lithium extraction plant. Not yet, but they could be at some point. But so all to say that using unions as a proxy for better quality jobs and making sure that communities see more of the revenues and it can prove the problems that they have. Again, this is this part of the state has a heavily impaired airshed. It has really bad air pollution. There are people who suffer from asthma there. There are people with all other sorts of pulmonary distress associated living with an area where there's a lot of agrochemical pollution, there's a lot of particulate matter pollution, a lot of pollution that drifts in from urban San Diego over to. In suburban San Diego over to this particular area. A lot of air that drifts over the US Mexico border. Right. So this is an airshed that's from truck traffic waiting to come in. Right. So there's all sorts of issues going on there. And to the extent that these developments can help improve that situation, I think that's. That's a good thing. But you have to stay skeptical because this is a. This is capitalism, man. This is. People are looking to take advantage of everybody everywhere. So you have to really be on top of all the players, what they're doing, every activity, because they take advantage of the situation to benefit themselves. And then we're, you know, the community will be left hand holding the bag at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:54:05] Speaker B: Well, Dustin, we're at the end of our time together. Is there anything that you might want to add that we haven't addressed? There's a lot you could say. I know, but briefly.
[00:54:16] Speaker C: No, that's. That's it. I think for folks who are interested in solar and land use, the solar. Western solar plan. I'm sorry. The Bureau of Land Management's western solar plan is being revised. Public comments are due on April 18. You could just Google Western solar plan and look at what's going on there. And if you want to follow what's going on in Lithium Valley, just Google Lithium Valley, Imperial county, and you'll get right to the processes that are going on there. We have a specific plan where the county's planning all the zoning for this future battery supply chain that they're hoping to have there. But they're also doing a programmatic environmental impact statement, which should try to ensure that the communities are not overburdened by these new developments and receive as many benefits as they can. So email me for more info if you want.
[00:55:06] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Dustin, thank you so much for being my guest on sustainability now. I think this was probably the best of the three shows we've done together.
[00:55:15] Speaker C: Super fun. Well, thanks. Always great to chat with you, and we'll do it again sometime. Keep you posted.
[00:55:19] Speaker B: Okay. You've been listening to a sustainability now interview with Professor Dustin Mulvaney, who studies the environmental impacts of big solar and its life cycle, and the associated materials and transmission lines and whatnot that go along with it. His email address is dustin mulvaneymail.com dot. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilityNow, as well as Spotify, Google podcasts and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Ksquid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:56:10] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs, and not through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through freezing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
