603Podcast with Dan Egan

Clean Energy That Pays Off: New Hampshire Gets Green

• The people places of New Hampshire, Hosted by Dan Egan • Season 3 • Episode 3

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Dan Egan sits down with Sam Evans-Brown, Executive Director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, for a grounded talk about how New Hampshire can cut energy costs while building a cleaner, more resilient energy system that actually survives storms and peak demand.

We start with the unglamorous winner: energy efficiency. Sam breaks down the difference between conservation and efficiency, why programs like NH Saves can jumpstart upgrades, and how weatherization, insulation, and air sealing can be cheaper than building more grid infrastructure. From there we zoom out to rooftop solar, the massive drop in solar panel prices, what payback can look like, and why you should shop for quotes instead of trusting door to door sales pitches.

Then we go forward. Battery storage and the smart grid change everything, especially as electric vehicles become rolling batteries that can power your house when the lights go out. We tackle wind power on land and offshore, including New Hampshire’s wind history, the economics of offshore wind under high interest rates, and what marine science says about environmental impacts, fishing, and the reef effect. 

If you care about New Hampshire clean energy, lower electric bills, EVs, solar, wind, offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine, or home electrification, this is the episode for you. Subscribe and share this with a neighbor who hates their energy bill.

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Season Three Kickoff And Sponsors

Dan Egan

Hi everyone, I'm Extreme Sports Pioneer Dan Egan. And I'm excited to welcome you to our third season of the 603 podcast. This season, we'll continue exploring the personalities, communities, outdoor adventures, local legends, hidden gems, and authentic experiences that define life here in the 603. Of course, a big shout out to our sponsors, Mat River Coffeehouse, right off of exit 28 in Campton, New Hampshire. Alpine Adventures in Lincoln, New England's premier adventure destination. And Whalesdale Water Park, New England's favorite water park, where this summer admission is just $29 after 2 p.m. Hey, be sure to follow us on Instagram at the 603Podcast and online at 603podcast.com. Now let's get into season three of the 603. Hey, and welcome back to the 603 Click. I'm Dan Egan joined today by the Executive Director of Clean Energy New Hampshire. Uh Sam Evans Brown joins us today. As a leader of New Hampshire's Clean Energy, his effort is to create a cleaner, more affordable, and more resilient energy system right here in the Granite State. Sam grew up in New Hampshire, and prior to joining Clean Energy, he was a podcast host for nearly 10 years. This is a fascinating conversation about how we get green right here in New Hampshire. Sam, how are you doing today?

Sam Evans-Brown

I'm really good. I, you know, been having a day on the road. I was talking about solar this morning down in Peterborough, and now I'm here hopefully talking about wind.

Dan Egan

I love that. Well, and solar, we'll throw it all in there. Um there's lots so much to do. I mean, it's so interesting today, I think,

What Clean Energy Really Means

Dan Egan

to have somebody advocating for energy. And and of course, this comes with clean energy. Uh, in general, the word clean, what does it mean?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, I mean, that's a thing you can debate endlessly, right? And uh, and in fact, a lot of the sort of inter-movement politics of of what is clean and what isn't um are some of the things I think that uh those of us who are advocating the space get sidetracked with. And I personally don't think that's an incredibly valuable use of our time. Uh and and so uh we have a pretty broad vision. Uh the reason that I came to Clean Energy New Hampshire is because I want to be working to stop climate change. And and so that's really what we're looking for is how do you get to a zero carbon economy? Um, there are, in my opinion, as someone who watches all this stuff incredibly closely, there are a lot of unanswered questions to how, you know, in 2100, where we'll be getting our energy from. And there's an enormous amount of technological change that's gonna come between now and then. And so rather than trying to, you know, conjure up in my, you know, in my cauldron and mix together the perfect energy grid for uh, you know, 70 years from now, I just try to keep my sights set on the North Star, which is eventually we want a 100% emissions-free system. And in the interim, let's work on the things that we know work. And the good news is there's a huge amount of things that have reached cost parity or in fact are gonna save us money in moving in that direction and will also reduce emissions at the same time. So for me, let's work on those first and let's argue about the definitions of what's clean and what's not when when the time is right. Uh, and in many instances, a lot of those conversations are are really something that's you know 10 years out,

Efficiency First And NH Saves

Sam Evans-Brown

20 years out, 30 years out, and we don't have to worry about it yet.

Dan Egan

I love it. So the things that work, let's just list them off. What works now?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah. So the first and most obvious is one that has worked for decades and decades and decades, which is energy efficiency. Uh and uh the the the reason it's hard to focus on energy efficiency is because we are chimpanzees uh that evolved in the savannah, and we're not good at long-term thinking. And and so the idea that, okay, I'm gonna need to pay a little bit more up front, and that's gonna pay for itself over the next decade, is something that many of us struggle with.

Dan Egan

So energy efficiency, making our homes more cost effective. Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown

So so the difference between energy efficiency and conservation is conservation is uh I'm gonna turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater, right? I'm gonna get less energy services and save money in that way. Energy efficiency is saying you're gonna get the same energy services, but it's gonna cost you less. So instead of turning down, turning down the thermostat, you put insulation in the walls. Uh, you swap out your incandescent bulbs for LEDs, uh, you you swap out an old fridge for a new fridge. Uh, and and in many instances, those purchase decisions will pay for themselves, but uh but they often they might take a year, two years, three years, five. You gotta jumpstart it. You gotta jumpstart it.

Dan Egan

That's right. And but there are some great programs in New Hampshire that help you jumpstart that.

Sam Evans-Brown

Right. And so in New Hampshire, the the marquee program there is New Hampshire Saves. And this is New Hampshire Saves, you know, go to New Hampshire Saves, nhsaves.com. Um, these are ratepayer funded energy efficiency programs. You're already paying for them. And so if you're a homeowner and you have not taken advantage of those, you are, you know, you've you've thrown money out the window. You gotta go get what's yours. So uh any home that is that is relatively inefficient can qualify. Uh if and and then there are many measures that that you can you can get without even sending someone to your house. But the but the way it typically works is you you sign up, if your home is inefficient, you qualify. An energy auditor comes to your home, they do a cool test. It's called a blower door test, they strap this frame to your door and they put a giant fan in it and they depressurize the whole house and they find all the leaky spots where the air is leaking in, and they recommend a bunch of changes, uh bunch of interventions, so insulation, air sealing, weather stripping, all sorts of stuff like that. And then and then they'll pay uh up to $8,000 for you to get all that done in your home. Um, and and the reason that this makes sense is that particularly when it comes to saving electricity, um, essentially we have two options, right? So the electricity grid, you gotta meet demand and supply instantaneously at every moment of the day. We don't we have very limited energy storage. And so, and so in order to do that, you have to build the entire grid to meet the peak moment uh of demand, which is typically August when air conditioners are cranking full blast. So we have two options to serve that demand. We can either let demand grow out of control, and then we have to build new infrastructure, new power plants, new transformers, new power lines to meet that peak demand, which you know, the analogy here is like imagine if you had to build a highway to Martha's Vineyard to meet 4th of July. How many lanes would that highway have? Like, that's how the grid has to be built, is you have to have as many lanes so there's never a traffic jam, because if there's a traffic jam, that's blackouts, right? So uh so that's option number one, and that's really expensive. Option number two is we invest in energy efficiency measures in people's homes to

The Grid Is Built For Peak Demand

Sam Evans-Brown

avoid having to build that 20 bazillion lane highway. And that's what those programs, that's how they pay for themselves.

Dan Egan

And it's uh that leads to the question I wanted to ask you is how good is our grid? Everybody talks about the grid in the US as not a great grid, but specifically to New Hampshire, what's the status of our grid?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, I mean it it's it's hard to characterize with great uh sweeping broad brush strokes, but but uh I I I'll I'll go for it anyway, because you told me to. Generally speaking, the electric grid is a hundred plus years old. Uh and and you can go out, we could go on the street right now and we could look at some of those old canned transformers mounted on those poles, and some of them are probably from the 1960s, right? So uh, but the ben the beauty of it is the grid is a very, you know, it's an enormous machine. Like if you think about it, the the electric grid is the biggest single machine in the world. It's it spreads all the way from the east coast of the United States out to the Rocky Mountains, and that whole thing is one big machine. All of the electrons in that machine are moving synchronously, and if they get out of out of whack with each other again, you have blackouts. So it's one massive machine, but it's a very simple machine, right? And and so whenever people say, Oh, the grid is so old, I would encourage you to not worry about that because there are for-profit investor-owned utilities whose job is to make sure that all of that stuff is working and is up to snuff. And and frankly, we interact with them quite frequently and they're very good at their jobs.

Dan Egan

So you're talking about becoming energy efficient in the house, right? Yeah. Uh that's thing number one that works, right? Right, that's right. Energy efficiency. And so, and then the other thing, you know, is all my people, my buddies on solar, yeah, they're putting energy back into the grid.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah. Yeah. So so so solar, and this is, I think, one of the great undertold stories of the past 10 years. So you can go online

Solar Gets Cheap And Pays Back

Sam Evans-Brown

and and and Google this, and I encourage everyone who's listening to do it. There's this thing, a term called the levelized cost of energy. So Google, levelized cost of energy, solar. And what you'll see is that the that and levelized cost of energy is essentially how much you have to pay someone to build a power plant. And you can do it for any type of tech, you can do it for gas, you can do it for nuclear, and you can just get that number, and it's a way to compare technologies to each other. The levelized cost of energy of solar has declined by 90% in the past 10 years.

Dan Egan

To put in a system on your house.

Sam Evans-Brown

On your house or on in a field or wherever. It's gone down. Yeah, it's gone down dramatically. And I think people don't even realize this. So so we we put solar on our roof or the roof of our house in 2015. I did it myself. I did it with a friend who works works for a solar company and he made it sure I didn't electrocute myself and die. Uh, and we climbed up on the roof and we put the thing up there, and we decided to do it ourselves because you know, I went to a local solar company and they said, hey, we can do, you know, 4.3 kilowatts, $18,000. And I was 20-something years old and I was like, woof, that's a lot. And so was able to save a bunch of money by doing it myself. Uh in 2022, we had only covered half of our roof. In 2022, a friend of mine came to me and he said, Hey, our house is really, really shady. Uh, can I put my solar panels on your roof? And can I we can share the bill credit between our two electricity accounts, which is you're allowed to do it, it's something called group net metering. And I said, you know, I'm an a nerd, and I was like, Yeah, I want to figure this out. So we figured out how to do it. He we signed a really complicated lease agreement, it's 40 pages that basically says, uh, you can you know, I lease you space on my roof for zero dollars a year because we're friends, and uh and and we we contracted with the solar company and they put them up on his roof. He got so I got 17 panels, 4.3 kilowatts, $18,000. That was the quote. Just a few years later, he got 12 panels, so fewer panels, 4.8 kilowatts, more power, $16,000. And that was just the space of a couple years. Wow. And that's been happening steadily over the course of the past 10 years, and it continues today. Right now, solar panel prices are so low that if you're manufacturing solar panels, it's actually a really horrible business because the prices are so low, it's hard to make money as a manufacturer.

Dan Egan

So this this is progress, though, right? That is progress. And um, so has that come from the government's uh subsidies to start these companies up?

Sam Evans-Brown

So uh it's a very complicated story, the story of how solar got cheap. Uh the short version has been a a uh process of globalization, essentially, and and global governments competing against each other. Um so essentially what happened is you know, the early, the very, very early days of solar, the only markets were satellites and like oil rigs. So in the 70s and 80s, that's where they were slapping them, was where it was really expensive to get grid power to. Um then they went to, you know, it was like remote well pumping on ranches was the next early market. And eventually they started to put them onto onto rooftops. And the thing that really goosed the market was uh Spain and Germany in the in the early 2000s introduced something called a feed-in tariff, which was just a set price. This is how much we will pay you to put solar on your property. And it was really, really, really generous. And in response to that, China said, oh man, we can we can make money doing this. And they invested massively in subsidizing their domestic manufacturing uh industry. And so and the early market was was Germany and Spain. And so that's where the huge boom in Chinese solar manufacturing came from. And then Germany and Spain then pulled back those incentives uh and China, but China drove the cost of solar panels down so much so fast that it led to the global boom in solar power that we're seeing today.

Dan Egan

And so you and your buddy now, um, what's the cost-benefit of uh him having panels on your roof for both of you? Yeah, so so for me, I was just being a nice guy. There's no benefit for me. No, you weren't getting any of the benefit uh back into the on your bill or no, so so uh we have our own array.

Sam Evans-Brown

So there's there's two arrays on my roof. Yeah. There's there's one that was installed in 2015, one installed in 2022. And you can look at them and they look different. Um and we get the credit for mine, he gets the credit from his. Okay. Um and and but roughly right now, the payback for putting solar on your roof is about seven years, depending on how sunny your roof is, depending on a number of factors, depending on how good a price you get. And there's a PSA to everybody, shop around. Do not answer the door. If a door-to-door solar salesman comes, you're gonna get a bad deal from them. Shop around. It's just like getting a furnace, get three quotes, take the lowest one. Um, and but so so typically it's about a seven-year payback. Um, and if you were to look at it in simple as a simple investment, it usually beats the stock market. It's between seven and eleven percent return on your investment. So you've been happy. Oh man. Like, and and that's the other thing about this, it doesn't, it goes up there and doesn't do it, it doesn't take anything. There's no there's no maintenance. Like I'm not out there like shoveling the solar panels, like the snow slides off on its own. It just they just work. There's no moving parts. Uh, and and yeah, that's fantastic.

Dan Egan

And what have you eliminated uh with the addition of that? A furnace?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so we don't we we built new, and because I'm a big energy nerd, we built a super insulated house. It was built to what's called passive house standards. I have a party trick at our house where I turn on the fan over the stove, and and when the fan is blowing full blast, the house is so airtight that uh you can feel the suction when you try to open the door that the of the fan pulling in on the door. So um, so we have a super insulated house. Uh it's heated. We have a wood stove and we have an air source heat pump, which is an electric, electric heat source. Um, and and we don't we don't pay a bill. Or we have we don't, you know, essentially we pay the minimum bill each month, uh, which amounts to like 200 bucks a year for all our energy. And that's we have two electric cars uh and and so we don't pay for energy. That's amazing. Or we paid for it all up front, is what I should say.

Dan Egan

And you're charging your cars from your own from your solar?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so I like to nuance this a little bit. The answer is on an annual basis, we use as much energy as we as we generate. But moment to moment, because we have a grid interconnected system, it's an open question as to where those electrons are coming from. You know, you don't know where an electron goes. Because of physics, we don't know where any electron goes. We can model it and like make guesses, but um but but I I would encourage people to So in other words, in other words, you don't know that it's direct from the panel.

Dan Egan

Yeah. The panel's going into the grid.

Sam Evans-Brown

And and if I if you're using your share. Yeah, if the sun, and if the sun's shining on my panels and I plug in my car, and the sun is going to my car instead of to out to the grid, it means that some power plant somewhere does have to respond to the fact that I've plugged my car in. So so I I always remind people if you're we are a society, and if you're connected to the grid, the whole grid has to work. And so you shouldn't think of yourself as an island. We are in fact a community that's trying to solve this all together.

Dan Egan

Right. So you're not off the grid.

Sam Evans-Brown

We're not off the grid.

Dan Egan

You're part of the grid.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah. I love it. And I think that's better, right? The grid, the grid's incredibly valuable, right? Like hospitals, factories, like like we get so much benefit from the electric grid. And and I I think off-grid homes are, you know, they can work sometimes, but they're not the solution. We got to clean up the whole grid.

Dan Egan

So I heard this program, uh I I'm pretty sure it was NPR, but I'm not sure.

Storage And The Smart Grid Future

Dan Egan

Uh that we could become our own storage as well, and that would save upgrades to the grid. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Tell me about that. Because I this is the little next frontier.

Sam Evans-Brown

This is the next frontier. Right. Okay. So, so um all right, how to how to break this down? Well, first of all, um, you know, so so energy efficiency has always paid for itself. Right. Solar started to really become cost effective in like the 2013 to 2016 time frame. Really, now it's if you if you're not if you have a sunny roof and you're not considering solar right now, you're throwing money away. Um so solar became cost effective. Wind actually was utility scale, the big wind turbines, those became cost competitive a little earlier than solar, actually, like 2000s-ish. Um, and that was the first big wind boom. Um, and we can come back to wind in a second. Um, but the the next technology that's following those other ones down the cost curve is storage.

Dan Egan

So um and the car potentially is storage.

Sam Evans-Brown

The car is storage, and that's gonna be storage literally everywhere. This is my forecast. Is that the there's gonna be there's gonna be there's gonna be batteries in your fridge, there's gonna be batteries in your stove, there's gonna be batteries everywhere. And the reason is that um so so again, think of think of the the the highway to Nantucket uh analogy, the highway to Martha's Vineyard. Um, that's a stupid way to build infrastructure, right? Like you you don't wanna build any infrastructure just to meet that peak moment. It's like it's like the parking lot that is sized to fit all the cars for Black Friday, right? It sits empty most of the year, except for one day a year, and that's an incredibly expensive way to do things. Storage, if we are able to have cost-effective storage, if if, which which I which we're gonna, okay, uh uh, then it completely changes how you how you design the entire grid. Instead of having to build that 27 bazillion lane highway to to Martha's Vineyard, you could have just a one-lane highway and you can just proportion out all your cars so that all the tourists arrive at just the right time and they're all stored there on the island. I'm really torturing this metaphor at this point. But okay, so so uh so okay, your house. Yeah. Uh how much is the service into your house? 100 amp, 200 amp? 200. 200 amp service. Um, if you were to say how many, you know, turn on every appliance in your house at once, do you would it use the full 200 amps of service? No. Why do you have a 200 amp service? Exactly. We got to step it down, I think. Because because the because the utility told you to. Right. Because the utility was a bunch of planners were like, I don't know if he installs a hot tub and a cool heater and then he's gonna need this 200 amps. And so they built, you know, they built like a multi-lane highway into your house. If you had storage in that house, you you could theoretically have just like a 50 amp service. You could store up that battery at times when you're not using it, and then when you need it, you could draw down and you would save all the cost of all that infrastructure to serve your house. And that that's just a one-house analogy. And that could be true of a neighborhood, that could be true of a whole city, that could be true of a whole state. It completely changes the way you build the infrastructure of the grid.

Dan Egan

So you started saying that grid is community.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah.

Dan Egan

Right? Yeah. And so this is almost a new definition of community in a way. Yeah. Right.

Sam Evans-Brown

So so here's where it gets interesting, right? So uh your battery could serve just you. Or your battery in your basement, in your stove, in your fridge, whatever, wherever it gets winds up getting placed, could be a resource to your whole community, right? So say you live in a town where uh this you're I live in Concord. Concord is growing. There were forecasts to add like 3,000 housing units over the next couple of years in Concord. There's a substation on the north end and the south end of town, and each of those substations is sized to the demand that Concord had before. As Concord grows, eventually they're gonna have to build a new substation that's gonna cost tens of millions of dollars in order to serve that growing demand. Or you could have batteries in all sorts of homes that avoid the need to spend those tens of millions of dollars on that new substation because instead of just watching your peak demand for your community grow as the community grows, you could just chop the top off the peak by using the batteries to avoid that entire that entire upgrade. And where's the downfall there? So, so uh the real question in all of this is how do we make sure that these batteries are doing what we need at the time that we need them, right? And and there's a lot of different ways that that people imagine how we get from where we are today, which is a dumb grid that just responds to, you know, that we that we overbuild, or uh from that dumb grid to a smart grid where everyone's responding to signals. And it can either be a kind of scary world that a lot of people don't like, where the utility is controlling everything, or it can be one that's that's a little more organic, that's based on price signals where you get paid for your battery doing that service for your community.

Dan Egan

Smart grid. That was the topic. That's the thing. That's the topic. Okay, wind. Wind. So when did New Hampshire started roughly when?

Sam Evans-Brown

1980. 1980. New Hampshire had the first commercial

New Hampshire Wind History And Backlash

Sam Evans-Brown

wind farm in the world on top of Crotchett Mountain. Really? Yeah. It was um, and this is where I was gonna like check my phone because I can't remember the statistics, but uh it was something like 30, oh no, 60, 20 kilowatt wind wind turbines. Regardless, it was a bunch of really small wind turbines that were installed on on top of Crotchett Mountain. Basically came straight from the research lab in UMass Amherst to deployed on top of Crotchett Mountain. They worked really poorly. They after one year, they took them down and they were constantly broken. Uh, but but there's but you you can go up there today and you can see the footings where they had all these wind turbines uh put up there. And they even still have uh at the Crotchet Mountain rehab center that I think is now closed, they had all the old wind logs where they were recording how much production was happening at a given time. So so yeah, so New Hampshire. Had the first commercial scale wind farm in the country, um, and it functioned only very, very briefly. Um, the then essentially then what happened was, you know, and this is a story that we see all the time. It's actually true of the solar industry as well. We invented the tech technology here in the United States, and it reached full commercialization elsewhere because we failed to see the uh the opportunity that stood before us. So uh what happened was that the wind industry really got its start uh in in the Netherlands. A guy named Heinrich Stiesdahl, uh known as the grandfather of wind, worked for a company called Vestus, which is which was a which was a farm manufacturing company. They made tractors and stuff and like farm equipment. And and Heinrich was was one of these classic entrepreneur inventor types who who like couldn't be bothered to go to college and and was uh it was just like his brain was constantly worrying. And and he got interested around the same time as many of folks who got interested in in renewable energy, uh, around the time as the the Arab oil embargoes. And and Denmark was really reliant on foreign oil, their prices went through the roof. And so Heinrich, who had just graduated high school, was like, I wonder how I can, you know, create wind farms that, you know, because Denmark's a pretty windy place that are that work. Uh and he took the three, so the that three-blade turbine design was started to hear in the US. It was not always the obvious thing. The ear some of the early wind farms, there are these, there are these old school uh that you can see single blade wind turbines that exist, and they they're like downwind where they're facing away from the direction the wind is. And so there were all these wacky designs that were tried before we settled on that three-blade design. Heinrich took it from the US, he fabricated it, mounted it on the back of a tractor, and and basically uh uh took the licensed it and sold the patent to Vestis, and they started scaling it up and up and up and up. And that happened in the sort of 80s through the 90s, and and it was it was that move towards that that unified three-blade design um and then making the towers taller and taller and taller that made wind cheap. Um and and so uh the next commercial wind farm that was built in the in the in New Hampshire was Lempster Wind in 2008. Um, it was followed by Granite Reliable. So Lempster's in the western part of New Hampshire. Um, Granite Reliable was the next one. So Lempster was 24 megawatts, so like not small, but not a gigantic wind farm. Granite Reliable was a hundred megawatts, and that's up in like the Dixville notch area. And then uh Groton Wind came next, which is the one that that I think you were introduced to. It's on top of Tenny Mountain.

Dan Egan

Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown

Um, and that and Groton is 48 megawatts. And that was so uh Grant Reliable was 2011, Grotten was 2012. And so that was that was the beginning of the wind boom in New Hampshire.

Dan Egan

And all that goes into the grid.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, and it's and it's sold is wholesale prices. It's just sold straight into the market. Um it and it's there are subsidies, right? Uh almost every form of energy is subsidized in some way or another. Uh, in in the instance of wind, there's something called the production tax credit where they get they get like a couple pennies per uh kilowatt hour that that's that's an additional tax credit that they that they take. Um and and that helps them to make the the books work.

Dan Egan

Um not a fan. That's all around Newfound Lake. I'm not a fan. What what was that about? What was the pushback, uh the anti-wind movement?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so it's funny. I so my organization just had its 20th anniversary, and I was going back through the old binders of meeting board meeting minutes, and um one of the the earliest uh uh meeting minutes that I found was talking about Lempster wind, and it was talking about how there was some pushback to the sighting of the Lempster Wind Farm from a woman named Lisa Linose. And Lisa Linose is the founder of Wind Action New Hampshire. Um, I she she um you know had a family farm that was going to be able to see the Lempster wind farm. Uh and it uh it led to her uh and and I might be actually mixing up her story. So let's let me let me walk that back for a second. I know Lisa had a family farm that was going to be impacted by a wind farm, not sure if it was Lempster, but she was she was involved in advocating against Lempster from the word go. She then led to the creation, she she founded Wind Action New Hampshire, which was which was opposing all these wind farms, and she opposed Granite Reliable, and she opposed Grotten Wind, but she didn't really get any traction until Groton Wind was finished. And then the thing about Groton that was different from the other two is that wealthy lakeside homeowners could see it. Uh, and as soon as Groton went up, Wind Action New Hampshire suddenly had a lot of really powerful allies. Uh and and uh immediately after Grotten, there were three more wind farms proposed for the exact same area. All of them were going to be visible from Newfound Lake, and all of those wealthy homeowners uh were able to put wind in the sails of Lisa Lano's, and uh, and they it was the birth of a truly organic anti-wind movement here in New Hampshire.

Dan Egan

Wow, it's amazing to me. Um, you know, I travel all over the world, so I see these things everywhere, all across the U.S. and I I see them everywhere. Uh and across from the top of Tenny Mountain, uh looking at those, they're beautiful. And it's amazing. It's stunning. One, it's an amazing view, anyways, from the top of Tenny, because you're looking at the whites. So you're looking north at the whites, it's a stunning view. But now you have uh those turbines, and to me it added to it, which was really fascinating. I didn't expect that.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so the the polling on this is interesting in my opinion. Because what you find is about 60 percent of people who look at a wind farmers are like, eh. Uh 20 percent are like you and like me, who think these are beautiful moving

Offshore Wind Is Delayed Not Dead

Sam Evans-Brown

sculptures. They are works of industrial engineering that really show the what what we're capable of as a species. And 20% really hate them. Yeah. And so the whole discourse is really being driven by a really vocal minority who don't like to look at them.

Dan Egan

And so what is the deal now with these wind farms going offshore? What do we know about what's gonna happen here on our seacoast? Is it real? Is it happening? How's and yeah, just start there. What's what's gonna happen off the shores?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah. So when so I uh folks who are listening might know that I worked for New Hampshire Radio. The last thing I did before I left was a two-year reporting project all about the offshore wind industry. And at the time I was really, really bullish and was just like, this is coming, it's gonna be huge, it's such a big deal. Um, the thing that changed was interest rates went through the roof. Um, and uh the supply chain shocks that were associated with COVID made everything really, really hard. And I think those that the combination of those two factors probably set the offshore wind industry back by five years easily. But in my opinion, it's happening, it's coming, it's going to be huge. Um the Biden administration has set a target of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Um, again, gigawatts, megawatts, what does all this mean? New England as a whole, on the hottest day of the year when all of the air conditioners in the in the region are cranking at full blast, will use maybe 25 gigawatts. And so we're talking about enough offshore wind to meaningfully power an entire, an entire region, right? When they're blowing, when they're all blowing at their peak. So that's a huge goal. And my forecast that we're gonna miss it. We're not gonna get all the way to 30 gigawatts. And the reason is because of COVID, because of the supply chain shocks, and because of the inflation that led the Fed to hike interest rates and then interest rates on all of these projects went through the roof. And and the reason that that's really meaningful is that, you know, there's this perception that renewable energy is expensive. Um, the reason that there's that perception is because it's all capital costs. It's all upfront. Imagine if you had to buy 25 years worth of gas for your car on the first day you bought the car, you'd be like, oh my God, I'm never gonna buy a car. I'm just gonna walk everywhere. Like you'd like people would people would lose their minds because we're chimpanzees that are from the Savannah. We don't like do good at long-term math. Um, and renewable energy is the same way. It's all capital costs is all up front. And what that means is you're essentially swapping the cost of the fuel for the cost of the financing. And when interest rates are high, it's a really difficult environment to get uh these these really expensive renewable energy projects done. And in particular, in particular, that's hard for offshore wind because these are absolute capital bombs. If you were to build a so they're hugely expensive, and it's all upfront. So Vineyard Wind One, which was the which is getting built as we speak, 800 megawatts was like $2 billion for a single wind farm. And so when you're in an environment where capital is five, six, seven percent for a loan, that that adds a huge amount to the cost of these projects. And so I think a lot of developers are waiting for the costs of finance to go back down again before they before they move their projects. Um, and and we saw a lot of projects get canceled because money was too expensive, and so they're just they're holding on to their lease. These are federal leases, so they've they've all like bought an area of the of the ocean that they get to develop and they're holding them and they're waiting for a better financing environment before they move forward. So um, you know, 30 gigawatts of wind, what does that look like? Offshore wind turbines are huge. I mean, they're massive. So Tenny Mountain, those are 2.2 megawatts per turbine. The ones they're building out at sea are 15 megawatts per turbine. They are massive machines. So uh 30 gigawatts, we're talking about like a couple thousand of them spread out through the ocean.

Dan Egan

Yeah, it's crazy. And you know, New Bedford, right, is basically being revitalized through uh all these mills and everything, become a manufacturing hub of blades and and everything, right?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so so New Bedford, it's a fascinating story, right? Because remember Cape Wind. Yeah. Uh so Cape Wind was one of these early victims of the anti-renewable energy uh uh movement, and and they ran uh uh uh Gordon, the I forget his last name, the developer of Cape Wind, they ran him out of town. And uh it was it was this weird uh alliance between one of the Koch brothers and and some and the Kennedy family that that stopped Cape Wind from getting done. But the state of Massachusetts invested in this massive offshore wind port in anticipation of Cape Wind getting built. And now finally that investment is paying for itself. And you're absolutely right that if you visited New Bedford, it is a fascinating city. There's this huge Cape Verdean population that came to see Kate to New Bedford because of the whaling industry like a hundred years ago. And and that that whole this whole town, which is, you know, it's a fishing, it's a fishing town, it's not the most economically vibrant city, is going to be completely revitalized as a result of this.

Dan Egan

And so there's a lot of pushback. I mean, there's a lot of talk here that it's bad for the environment at sea, it's bad for the fish, uh, it could be bad for us. Uh as a sailor, you know, I've sailed through those wind towers coming back from Bermuda uh as you come into the vineyard, and it's fascinating, right? You talk about Block Island, isn't it? Block Island, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. And um but what's happening? Is it bad for the environment, pouring all the cement down there? What's happening? Is it revitalizing fish? Is it hurting fish? What's the real deal?

Sam Evans-Brown

So so again, I spent two years going down this rabbit hole. Um you cannot build anything without there being an environmental impact, right? You build anything, there will be an impact. And so and so I don't I don't want to gloss over that. Um, but that said, in my two years of reporting on this and speaking to marine scientists all over the country all over the globe about this issue, and including I rode along with the people who are doing some of the scallop surveys to try to determine the impact of uh on the scallop fishery, everything suggests to me that there will not be some irreversible environmental impact from the offshore wind industry coming to coming to the the east coast of the United States. And in fact, that there might be benefits. So you mentioned this a little bit. There's what's called the reef effect. And this is this has been documented over and over, and this is why when you talk to the charter boat cap captain down in Rhode Island, one of the best places to go fishing is around the Black Island wind farm because you put something in the ocean, sea life starts to grow on it, and fish are attracted to it by that sea life. And so, and so reef effects mean that you're actually sort of creating habitat with the creation of these, with the with the construction of these. That said, you are pile driving a massive uh steel structure into the floor of the ocean. And so there's noise associated with that. There's sediment that comes up, and you've got to you've got to manage those impacts. I believe they're totally manageable. And if you were to ask me as to why there's this discourse in the air that offshore wind is going to be bad for the ocean, I say follow the money. Um there's a really good report about this, that most of the anti-offshore wind uh groups are being funded by something called the Texas Public Policy Institute, which is a bunch of Texas oil billionaires who are worried about the uh anything that's going to put a dent in the demand for fossil fuels. Uh, and that includes, at this point, they they are now funding Lisa Linose, who we talked about as the anti-wind activist here in New Hampshire, who has become the leader somehow of the Save the Right Whale Coalition, which uh which I just find laughable is that is that clearly Lisa is a person who just doesn't like wind farms and is now passing herself off as a whale expert, and you've talked to the actual whale experts, and they will tell you that the thing that is most endangering right whales is the fishing industry. So uh again, to me it's a it's a follow-the-money question. Um uh and and the thing that's frustrating is that I think the there's always a nugget of truth at the center of these arguments, and it's it it's easy to hear something and think like, hmm, that sounds like it might be true. And then you and then it's sort of from that nugget of truth blossoms this whole fiction. And and to me, that's what's going on with the attacks against the offshore wind industry as we speak.

Dan Egan

There are some vocal fishermen uh here in New Hampshire on this topic, right?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yep.

Dan Egan

Uh and they're getting some airway. Um what what is their complaint?

Sam Evans-Brown

Um so it it it's funny because the so the let's take a step back. The wind industry that's getting built right now is to the south of Cape Cod. Um all the the lease areas that have been auctioned so far are in shallow water, and the water is shallowest south of Cape Cod. Um so it's south of Nantucket, south of Martha's Vineyard. That's where the first, the first, that's where Vineyard Wind is, Block Island's even farther south of that, the, you know, New York, the Long Island Sound, um everything's south. The Gulf of Maine is deep water. So we just saw the federal government do its it announced that it's going to auction off lease areas in the Gulf of Maine. Those are deep water. What does that mean? It means we're not going to be pile driving massive uh steel uh towers into the into the seafloor because the seafloor is too far down. Those are gonna be floating wind turbines. The market for floating wind turbines is incredibly nascent still. This is a technology that is still being developed as we speak. We don't know how much it's gonna cost, we don't know what it's gonna even look like. Um, it is 10 years away minimum. So, what are the fishermen in New Hampshire who who fish in the Gulf of Maine worried about? I think it's the unknown. And and I think they uh they have been told by uh a bunch of fishing groups that are frequently funded by fossil fuel companies that this is going to be bad for them, and they're repeating what they've heard. I spoke to Danish fishermen who are living with the offshore wind industry in the Black Sea. Uh, I spoke to Danish uh to British uh British lobster fishermen who are who are putting down lobster pots in amongst wind turbines in Europe. My takeaway from those conversations is that it is entirely possible for the fishing industry and and offshore wind to coexist. And to say more about that, in Europe, offshore wind, the the turbines have been placed really close together, usually in the neighborhood of 0.75 kilometers apart. Here in the US, they're gonna be double or triple the space in between the wind turbines. And that is a concession to the fishing industry, and they're hoping that people will be able to fish in amongst these things. Um and uh the that's a concession that has largely gone completely unrecognized by the fishing industry.

Dan Egan

So we're we're on our way. Solar, right? We've got some wind. Um what what else is out there for clean energy?

Sam Evans-Brown

So so I'm really bullish on EVs. Uh I

EVs As Batteries For Homes

Sam Evans-Brown

have two. We have no gas car left in our life. Uh the first EV we bought was a used Nissan Leaf 2013. It's now 11 years old. Our joke is it's the car on a leash. You know, it's got uh on a full charge, it's got 70 miles of range, which uh is about when the gas light turns on in a normal car. So just to like, you know, the range anxiety is real in that vehicle. But it was $8,000. And it was $8,000 for a car that had 50,000 miles on it. And we're driving right now, especially since we're we're uh charging it uh from mostly at home with with our electricity that's really cheap because we have solar, we're driving at the at the equivalent of a dollar a gallon of gas, right? Uh so it's an incredibly affordable way to get around, and especially as we're gonna start increasingly to see used EVs on the market. Right now, there's a there's a dealership out in Hampton called Green Wave. All they sell are used electric vehicles. And and I'm kicking myself because so okay, we bought the 2013 Nissan Leaf, and then uh we had a diesel Volkswagen Jetta that was dying. And uh and we like we were like, okay, are we gonna sink another you know 2,500 bucks into this car, or are we just gonna give up and get something new? So we bought a Chevy Bolt, got that in 2023, and and at the time, you know, couldn't find many used EVs on the market. The bolt was the most affordable thing. I was like, I don't necessarily love this car, but it's good enough, and we bought one. And then and then a year later, uh, we had an event at Greenwave where they invited us to come, and they've got a lot full of awesome used EVs that are all selling for like 25 grand and they all can go 300 miles and they all drive like frickin' rockets. Uh and uh and and uh and we we had this event where we got to test drive a whole bunch of them, and I was just kicking myself for not waiting an extra year and and buying a used, uh, you know, a used pole star or something like that. Uh so I'm super bullish on this. I think that once you drive an EV, you never want to go back to a gas car because they're so fun to drive. Like you step on the you step on the accelerator in a gas car now, and it's like, today, like when are you gonna start accelerating? Like you're just so used to a car that's so much snappier. And then and the range anxiety, when you have a modern EV that goes 300 miles on a charge, just disappears. You don't even think about it anymore. So today, I'm coming to you, I drove to Peterborough, Concord to Peterborough this morning, did a talk there about solar from Peterborough to dairy. Um talking to you now, and then I'm gonna drive back to Concord, and I'm gonna still have like 40% of my battery left, and I only charged to 80% last night. So range anxiety sort of stops becoming a thing once you're once you're used to them. And then and then this is the killer app is that where I forecast that in the very near future, we're gonna start to have vehicle-to-home chargers where you can uh plug your car in if there's a storm coming, charge it up, the power goes out, and you can start to draw your battery back down to power your house to keep the lights on. Smart grid. Yeah, it's the smart grid. And and and that you go from a world where you'd have to have you know a $12,000 backup generator to one where you just eliminate that expense and you're using your car. So the sh my my our Nissan Leaf, 10-year-old car, 24 kilowatt hour battery. That's double what you that's like four Tesla power walls. We can power we can power a house for three days on our 10-year-old lousy Nissan Leaf. The the Chevy Bolt, which again, most affordable EV on the market, it was 24 grand after the tax credit. That's a 64 kilowatt hour battery. We can power our house for a week on that car. So uh once people realize how you're doing it, we can't yet because the chargers aren't there. So so there are vehicle to grid chargers that that are that are available, but they're mostly for commercial applications. So electric school buses are the early market, uh, and then and then sort of like you know, hobbyists and uh and others.

Dan Egan

Aaron Powell So the low-hanging fruit here on complaining is uh the batteries are not environmentalist, right? It that's you got to get rid of them at some point or they're expensive to make, right? Uh the wind turbines, those big blades are expensive, right? There's no place to trash them afterwards. What do you do with them? Uh wind has issues, right? Some of the they need maintenance, right? Um and there's they're not cheap to maintain. Um so I'm just kind of dumping the bucket out of uh which one of you wants to go.

Sam Evans-Brown

This is what you hear in the media, all these sort of Yeah, and and and I would argue, you know, there again, there's always a kernel of truth behind all of this. Um But the the thing that I find frustrating is that you have uh you have these arguments that in to me seem like they're engineered to take to to uh to needle at sort of well-meaning environmentally minded people and get them to repeat what are essentially fossil fuel talking points uh when they go out into the world. So let's start with batteries. Um batteries, uh so when you say they're not environmentally friendly, what are you talking about?

Dan Egan

Yeah, I don't know. I do you have to get rid of them, right? But you also have to mine them to make them. I don't know much.

Sam Evans-Brown

So so Okay, here we are in a podcast studio. Uh, the desk is made out of wood, uh, uh, and then everything else came from a mine, right? Like if you didn't grow it, it came from a mine. Um, so so uh many people will talk about cobalt and they'll talk about how, hey, like those EV batteries, like they've got cobalt in them. Well, so does probably your laptop battery, so does my phone battery, so does so do most of the lithium-ion batteries that are powering all your DeWalt power tools. Those are those are NMC batteries, nickel manganese cobalt batteries. And we're all fine with it unless it's coming from an EV. And you have to ask yourself, why is that? And it's because Dewalt power tools are not a threat to the fossil fuel industry. Electric vehicles are, and so they they talk about this. But that said, the electric vehicle industry has recognized that cobalt comes from basically one place in the world, Democratic Republic of Congo, it's being extracted with slave labor, and that's really bad. And en masse, the entire electric vehicle industry is moving away from NMC batteries toward lithium-iron phosphate batteries, which are a different formulation. They don't have cobalt, they aren't extracted with whole uh with child labor. That said, they're coming from a mine. Now, if you look at globally, what is all the mining that we're doing? What do you think is the number one uh source of you know digging into the earth to extract uh minerals? I would say coal. Coal, exactly. And so what we're talking about is a clean energy transition that moves away from mining coal and yes, moves towards mining some more of these uh critical minerals that we're talking about. But globally, mining burden, all of the mining that we're gonna do is going to decline. We're gonna do less and less of it. And in part, that's gonna be driven by the fact that lithium, iron, uh lithium, and all the other minerals in there are incredibly valuable. So you mine it once, you put it in the in the battery of a car, and then when that when that car dies, you're not just gonna throw it away. The half the cost of that car was the battery. That's an incredibly valuable resource that you're gonna take, you're gonna recycle, and you're gonna reuse. So, yes, we're gonna open a bunch of mines, but then eventually the number of mines that we're going to need is going to slowly decline as we're gonna just start having a circular economy where we're recycling old batteries. And hopefully, theoretically, this is where I get really excited. We're gonna get better and better and better at making batteries. So we're gonna use need less and less and less lithium to get the same service, the same travel out of those batteries. And so, so we're you know, we'll we'll slowly start to close those mines up again as we're just using the supply we already pulled out.

Dan Egan

So, how about the argument around the fossil fuel supply? That there's a lot of it. And how are we gonna get the big companies to switch when there's just so much supply and what what give me give me that one?

Sam Evans-Brown

Well, so so actually this is is in my opinion a really interesting question and a much harder one than some of the ones that I would argue are sort of like you know, they're they're eye rolls for me. Um there's a book that came out recently called The Price Is Wrong. Uh, and essentially the argument of the book is that uh the real thing that's going to limit the boom in renewable energy right now is that you get less profit from capital invested in renewable energy compared to capital invested in extracting fossil fuels. So the, you know, the average return on investment for someone pulling fossil fuel out of the out of the ground can be north of 10% versus investing in renewables is, you know, seven to 10%. And that's going to limit the amount of capital that we can flow towards renewable energy in the current market structure. So that's where, in my opinion, we really do have to ask ourselves a hard question of does the government need to step in and do something so that so that it changes that dynamic? And what does that something look like? There's a lot of things that we've been talking about for many, many years. Things like a carbon tax, things like uh, you know, but none of that's popular. And and I think it's uh it's going to be a struggle. Because one of the things that I've been I've been advocating for for a while is that we should shift away from this scarcity mindset and scarcity rhetoric where where uh the environmental movement for many, many years, it's you know, it's the Jimmy Carter message where it's like you th you turn down your thermostat and put it on your card again. Not popular. People don't like to be told like you can't you can't keep living your life the way you want to live it. They just wanna they want to turn up the thermostat, they want to be comfortable in their own home. And my argument has been we should say you're gonna have the same energy services that you want, the same quality of life that you have now. We're just gonna make it, we're gonna, we're gonna disconnect that from your environmental impact. Uh, we're gonna do more efficiency, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna we're gonna lit emit less carbon for each of those uh each of those those services. And so the fact that fossil fuels currently are still more profitable for investors than renewable energy is a really big problem, and we have to think hard about how we solve it. Um, you know, the the optimist in me hopes that we just get better at technology and we figure out some way to keep doing it for cheaper and cheaper and cheaper until the until the profit comes. But you know, who knows if we can if we can get there. Solar says you could. That's certainly been, you know, I think I the other one, so so we didn't talk about the battery price curve, which is the one that's really exciting right now. So the, you know, the the Biden administration has set uh in the Obama administration before it had set various uh goals. So there was the Sun Shot Initiative, there's the Earth Shot Initiative, which is about geothermal energy, there's uh, and and they did one for batteries. And it was we need to get to $100 per uh megawatt hour for the price of storage. Um, and the goal was to get there by 2030, I want to say. I'm I'm actually not sure if that's the actual date or not, but like sometime in the future. We're not we're not to the date yet that the target they had set. Today, lithium-ion batteries are selling at $50 a megawatt hour. We've already blown that target out of the water. Um, and so what does that mean? That means you're gonna start to see EVs are gonna start to become dramatically cheaper, you know, and we're we're seeing it in China first. You can get a awesome EV in in China for $10,000, equivalent US dollars. The the um the president of Ford went to China and drove a bunch of China EVs, and his takeaway was they're they've they've leapfrogged us, they've surpassed us in their ability to do this manufacturing. So, like that's gonna start to make its way over to the US. Uh, hopefully it'll be American companies doing it. Uh, hopefully they don't eat our lunch. Uh, and and uh and so so uh that has been the lesson of the past 10 years is that we can get really good at manufacturing this stuff and we can drive them down the cost curves in ways that will make this attractive and profitable.

Dan Egan

And how about tidal? What's happening with tidal power?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so so there's this whole like world of nifty ideas that have not penciled out. And I would argue that both tidal and wave are in are in that category. Um so there have been a couple of instances of people uh deploying tidal power turbines out in the real world. And generally speaking, uh they've been they've been pretty expensive for the amount of power that they that they generate. Um and and the reason why I'm not bullish on them is really that the the the the like they're very geographically specific, right? It's like we're gonna put them in the Bay of Fundy, where there's this huge tidal bore that can really drive that turbine, or we're gonna put it in like you know, this specific channel in Scotland that's got a lot of currents and can really make this thing go. And that as soon as you take it anywhere beyond those few geographic places that can work pretty well, the numbers just don't pencil out. And so, and so when you think about solar, uh the reason solar can get the scale is because the sun hits every part of the globe, right? And there's just like an endless number of places you can put it, which means that there's an endless amount of, you know, you can you can build uh manufacturing plants that can crank out gigawatts and gigawatts of solar panels, and you can learn how to do it better and better and better and better each step of the way, and that's how you get uh that's how you get cheap costs.

Dan Egan

Amazing conversation, Sam. This is really wild. So bringing it back here to New Hampshire, of course, is 603. Um why is it important for New Hampshire specifically to get this right?

Sam Evans-Brown

That's a great question. Um and and it's funny, so Cleaners New Hampshire, we're a nonpartisan

New Funding And How To Use It

Sam Evans-Brown

organization. Um I work really closely with a number of Republican lawmakers who who really get this stuff and have have invested time to become experts in it. Um and and generally speaking, what I find is that no matter what your party is, the more you learn, the more there is a great deal of consensus on this issue. Um and one of the things that Republicans will tell you that I think is true is that you could take New Hampshire and you know, like the rapture could come and everyone in New Hampshire could disappear off the face of the earth and all of our carbon emissions could disappear with us. And it would not impact climate change one bit, right? Because we're just such a tiny part of the global emissions uh landscape that that like we're not really a driver of any of this. So that and that's true, that's just math, right? Uh and and like Democrats might not like to hear that, but it's it's just a fact. Um, so so uh if it's if we're not gonna solve climate change by eliminating our the emissions here in New Hampshire, why work on it? And the answer is that like this is this is a collective action problem. And so it's not enough for just one place in the world to solve this. We all have to solve it together. So I think the reasons to do this in New Hampshire are one, that if we can do it in a way that's cost effective, we should just be saving people money. And that's a that's that should be enough by itself. Two, if we if we do this right in New Hampshire, we can demonstrate leadership to other places to give them innovative ideas of how they could do it right that could then be copy and pasted into whatever their jurisdiction is. And that's where I get really excited, and that's why I like working in a bipartisan organization.

Dan Egan

That's really wild. So uh there is some benefit, of course, economically, that's huge, right, to do it.

Sam Evans-Brown

That's right. Um just a quick fact on this New Hampshire spends six billion dollars a year on energy. Four billion of those dollars are to buy fuel, and they immediately leave the state because they we ain't making any fossil fuel here in New Hampshire, right? And so so uh that's just a really strong argument, I think, for if we bring the the production and installation of renewable energy here, so that's renewable energy jobs, uh that value, that economic value stays here in the Grand State.

Dan Egan

Aaron Powell So what are some programs that you can point to with like what's going on with ski, New Hampshire, for EV and uh and the charging stations?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, so um so so right now, the thing that's that's interesting right now is that uh so here here's my question. Um as just a regular person in the world, uh do you know what the Inflation Reduction Act is?

Dan Egan

I've heard of it.

Sam Evans-Brown

Okay. Uh do you know what's in it? I don't. Yeah, exactly. So so this is in my world, it has totally turned everything upside down. Um the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in 2022. It was not on my bingo card that this was gonna happen, right? Uh the the the the federal government spending, it's essentially a trillion dollar climate package that was called the Inflation Reduction Act because that's what Joe Manchin, who was the deciding vote, needed in order to get the thing passed. Um the the the core of the Inflation Reduction Act is basically just we're gonna extend a whole bunch of tax credits out for 10 years. So we've got a 10-year runway where 30% tax credits on basically anything you could invest in are gonna be there and predictable all the way out to 2032. But beyond just those tax credits, I have a spreadsheet on my computer that's basically a hundred rows long of a hundred different programs that were funded through the Inflation Reduction Act. And they are right now pumping money into getting clean energy built in New Hampshire. An example of that. And it's not just the Inflation Reduction Act, there's also the bipartisan infrastructure law that came right before it. So some examples. Uh, there's something called the National Electric Vehicle Initiative. It's getting deployed right now. That's $17 million to the state of New Hampshire to deploy fast chargers, so super duper fast chargers on the highways all throughout the state of New Hampshire. Um, there's something called the Charging and Fueling Initiative, which is another five, so it's $5 billion, excuse me, $2.5 billion nationally of competitive grants to install slower chargers in communities. That's getting New Hampshire just put in an application for that right now. Um, there's something called Solar for All. Uh New Hampshire got $43 million to do low-income solar on multifamily housing units in manufactured housing communities and you know, essentially anywhere that that there are income-qualified people who want to do solar. So that's $43 million coming in. There's the home energy rebates programs that are $70 million coming to the state of New Hampshire for additional rebates for heat pumps, for weatherization, for any energy efficiency type of project you want to do in your home. So the the money cannons are like firing right now. And and the it's it's coming so fast and furious that it's actually a little hard to keep track of it all. So if anybody listening to this is interested in any of this stuff, now's the time to pursue whatever project you have in in your uh you know, in your ambition and uh and just get connected with resources like Clean Energy New Hampshire to try to figure out how to how to get access to some of these funds.

Dan Egan

Is that what you spend a lot of your time doing? I spend an enormous amount of my time doing. That is exactly right. So people can how do they get a hold of you?

Sam Evans-Brown

Uh yeah, so so cleenergynh.org is our website. Um it's not just me. There's there's 14 of us who work there. Um we have uh half of our staff are what are called their our energy circuit riders. And their job is to be technical assistance for communities in particular. So, particularly if you're looking to pursue a municipal project, their job is to write the grants for you, help you put in the application to go get the money for your town. Um, and the hope, the reason we focus on municipalities is A, because there's only seven of us. Um, but B, that the hope is that uh, you know, it's we're a town meeting state. So your town considers doing solar. They come up with a proposal, they put out an RFP, they select a provider, and then they go to town meeting. And all 200, 300, 400 people, however many who go to town meeting, then look at the beneficial economics of that solar project that you're doing in the town, and they go, huh, maybe I should do that in my house. And so the hope is that there's an education aspect of doing these municipal projects as well, as well as the fact that their municipal projects tend to be bigger. You know, we've got uh we've got towns that are doing five megawatt solar arrays on their landfills, for instance. Uh, and so you eliminate more emissions that way by focusing on those. So you go to our website, get connected with the circuit rider team if you want to do something with your town. Um, and then and also we have on our website just links to tons of resources that if you want to learn more about what's what's available, uh you can you can find out more there.

Dan Egan

So, of course, we sit here, um major hurricanes battling the the country. Uh the winter is changed a lot, I can tell you from a diehard skier point of view. Uh we're not skiing in the woods like we used to. Um politically, there's plenty of divide and conversation and polarization. Um why

Hope Climate Loss And What Comes Next

Dan Egan

should we be hopeful?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, uh it's funny because hope is sort of my id. Like when I when I uh I'm an optimistic person and I try to bring that optimism on this issue everywhere I go. Um we should be hopeful because when I first started paying attention to this issue at the beginning of my career in like the 2010, 2011 time frame, um, the only way out was spend government money. That was the only solution, more government money. And there was never going to be enough to actually change the energy system. Now, the technologies have become cost effective enough that what we're really just saying is like we just need to goose these programs for a little while more until markets create themselves and capital flows into them because people want these solutions and they're just purchasing them because they know that it's gonna save them money. And that's the reason why we should be hopeful. That uh so already, um, you know, the two degrees C target. Uh so two degrees is what we're shooting for, right? At that at the international level, all the climate treaties are aiming at that, at that number. Um, but the range of possible outcomes went all the way up to eight degrees Celsius, uh, and and which is like a really scary world when you look at what the models say of what eight degrees of Celsius of warming would would do to the globe. Already, we're looking at a when you look at the climate projections, they're saying that the the business as usual projection is 2.7 degrees Celsius, right? We're we're already on a trajectory that we're almost hitting that two degree target. And I think that's a story that people just haven't heard the heard heard enough.

Dan Egan

I've heard that uh New Hampshire could have a climate like North South Carolina.

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, and here's where so so I'm a skier, right? I raced cross-country skiing all through college. Uh and and I spent this is actually probably what got me into climate work, is I would sit there because I was okay, so here's here's my like athletic story. I was a diesel. Like I was like cardiovascularly a very fit dude and could just like churn my way uphills. That's what made me good at cross-country skiing. But I was very bad technically. Like I got into skiing pretty late, and so I would like crash on the downhills, and if it was icy, I like didn't know what to do. And so, so I was constantly like crashing out of races and really frustrated. And so I was always looking for those just like perfect bluebird, soft, snowy days. That was when I was gonna do well. And of course, I lived in New England, so it's just like it was like a nightmare where I would just look at the weather forecast and just be like, oh no, it's gonna rain and freeze again, and it's gonna be an icy, scary ski course, uh, and it would just like fill me with anxiety. Uh, and so, and so I spent just this huge amount of time in college as a ski racer watching the weather and and learning about weather patterns. Um, and I think the the thing that that many of us are gonna have to grapple with is that even if we effectively combat climate change to the point where it's no longer something that we have to worry about, you know, the end of civilization as we know it, we are going to lose things. And that's gonna be something that we're gonna have to mourn. And I think that one of those is gonna be something like backcountry skiing in the trees in New Hampshire.

Dan Egan

Yeah, we're gonna have to mourn it. Yeah. And uh I think a lot of people maybe already are. Yeah. Of course, I think the big elephant in the room is how do you get the uh fuel companies, Exxon, Mobil, you know, go list goes on and on. How do you get them on board?

Sam Evans-Brown

Yeah, I mean, and that that's that's so so when I did my my offshore wind uh uh series, it was actually one of the things I was most excited about because when you looked at the companies that were investing, they were companies um like Orsted. So Orsted used to be known as Dong, Danish Oil and Natural Gas, uh, and Total, which is a which is a fossil fuel company. And the reason they were investing in offshore wind is because they knew how to build offshore, offshore stuff. They knew how to build offshore drilling platforms, and that that expertise translated directly into building offshore wind. Um, a bunch of those companies have now sold their shares in the companies in in the projects that they're working on, which has made me a little pessimistic. But you're seeing other instances where it's like, oh hey, like, hey, this might work, where, for instance, um uh there's there's so there's geothermal electricity, right? So there's geothermal heat where you just like drill a well hole and you pull and you do a heat exchange and you heat your house. That's just for heat. Geothermal electricity historically has needed much hotter rocks. So Iceland has famously geothermal because they're like Iceland's right on the fault where the continents are dividing and there's lava bubbling up underneath, and you don't have to go very deep to get enough heat to run a turbine and generate electricity. Similarly, like Yellowstone out west, there's some geothermal power plants. There's now something called enhanced geothermal, though, where you have uh entrepreneurs who are who are taking the technology that was developed for fracking oil and natural gas. They are drilling a well, they're they're using fracking to create a field, you know, a bunch of fissures and cracks on the ground, and they're pumping water down into that, and they're using that that artificial geothermal field to generate electricity. And theoretically, that could mean that you could have geothermal almost anywhere. Um, and but the expertise needed for that to happen is coming from the oil and gas industry. And so they're pulling talent away from fossil fuel companies into their into their new company. So that's where I start to get excited, is is hey, how do we how do we take folks that that don't see themselves in the future and say, like, hey, here's where you could be.

Dan Egan

Yeah, well, where they want to be is where the money is, right?

Sam Evans-Brown

Right. Right. So that's so we gotta show them how to make how we make money on this. And that's that's I think one of the things that I I where like the traditional environmental movement and I sometimes struggle because uh there's been this long-standing narrative that, like, hey, the solution to this is we all just gotta put on our hair shirt and and fly less and not eat beef, and and I think that's that's just not gonna be the the solution that gets us there. I think we need to we need to meet people where they're at.

Dan Egan

Sam Evans Brown, right here on the 603 Podcast, Executive Director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a hopeful guy.

Sam Evans-Brown

Hey, that's me. Thanks so much, man. Nice to have you.

Head Shot

Dan Egan

Host