When I was working from Convivio, one of my fellow co-workers was Zane Selvans, and he told me something that blew my mind: renewables are cheaper than coal and other fossil fuel powered energy. And Zane should know, because he’s been putting together data on the costs of various power plants across the US.
I was surprised, because I’d grown up believing that renewables were cleaner and more efficient, but more expensive. Or even if they could be cheaper in the long term, I thought they were more expensive at the start. Turns out I’m completely wrong – renewables are cheaper right from the get go, including their start up costs. That information isn’t widely available for the public though, and energy companies try to hide this fact.
I felt like this was so important. So many of us are worried about climate change and don’t know how we can fight it – whereas here was someone who was actively working on solutions. And Zane’s been successful – his efforts, combined with the work of many other activists, has seen the closure of a number of coal power plants in the US.
I wanted to know more, so I asked Zane to lunch, and he explained it to me in detail.
Power in the US
To understand what Zane’s doing, and why, you first need to understand how utilities work in the US.
Most electricity policy in the United States is made at the State level. That means that each State decides how the utilities are run – from things like how much they’re allowed to charge for power, and where they get that power from. So theoretically, States could force utilities to go green.
The reality is a little more complicated. Energy companies have lots of money, and lots of political power. When States legislate on utilities, the energy companies are very involved in the process. They spend a tonne on lobbying, have multiple different legal teams, and have access to the best data.
Now when climate activists or people acting in the public interest try to take on the utility companies and argue for cleaner energy, they usually focus on moral arguments – to which the utility companies just reply that ‘that won’t work for X reason’. And here’s the thing – the utility companies could (and often are) full of BS. But they’re the only ones who have access to the data about how things work and how much they cost. Even legislators usually just take the utilities’ word for it.
So you basically have a situation where the only people who have the actual data about how much things cost is the utility companies, and without sharing that information with anyone, they can just claim that something is true or untrue, and nobody else has access to that information, to be able to call them out.
And this is where Zane and his team come in.
The Catalyst Cooperative
I mentioned that information about operating costs for utilities isn’t publicly available, but that’s only half true.
It is all in the public domain, but it’s fragmented, disconnected, and messy. There’s multiple different disconnected data sets, and engaging commercial services to clean up that data costs tens of thousands of dollars – and even once it’s cleaned up, you’d still need people who know how to use, process, and analyse all that data. Most people don’t have access to the necessary resources to do that.
A few years ago, Zane and his colleagues worked on doing this for a coal powered plant in Colorado. They had to scrape PDFs for data and it took them a whole Summer’s worth of full-time work, along with a team of interns, to get the data together for just one single case. The process was prone to human error, inefficient, and unreliable.
But it worked out. They were able to prove that renewables were cheaper than continuing to run this coal plant, and that information, along with the work of a group of activists, put enough pressure on the utility company that they agreed to close down that plant – and a few others – and switch to renewables. Success!
The people who’d funded their efforts asked if they’d like to repeat the process for another 20 power plants. Rather than going through the same agonising process again for each individual power plant, Zane and his teammates – Christina Gosnell and Steve Winter – decided that it made more sense to connect all the data at once, and be able to model the costs for all the power plants across the entire United States of America.
They operate as a worker owned coop under the name Catalyst Cooperative, and pull in data from lots of different places that look at operating costs and capital structure. They’ve been using this to build bottom-up models for how much fossil fuel power plants cost, and how much cheaper it is to have renewables – and they want to make that information freely available for everyone.
It’s not easy. For example, in the US there are 13000 locations where electricity is priced and the prices are adjusted every 5 minutes. There’s a database of every transaction that takes place between utilities – selling power conditioning, capacity, and energy. And this data isn’t integrated with other data sets, such as those that record what the prices were, and when. So while you can see that these transactions took place, you can’t actually see who did what, and at what price, until all that information is cross referenced to link different records and knit everything together.
The difficult process of change
There’s a lot of reasons why this information is important.
First of all, in many States in the US, utilities run as a monopoly. There is no competition. Even when there is competition, the lack of transparency often leads to large scale market manipulation and cheating by the power companies – a fact that’s been well documented by another data scientist, Joseph Daniel.
Ideally state legislators should have this information and be able to use it to figure out where the markets are broken. They should be able to use that data to inform policy, and to be able to create a model of cleaner, more efficient, and cheaper electricity markets.
As it is, especially when there are monopolies, it can be dangerous for regulators to go against the utility companies – and almost impossible for activists to do so. By proving that renewables are cheaper, Zane and his teammates give regulators a reason (and an excuse) to question the power companies, as well as giving activists the ammo to refute power companies’ claims.
And this is important, because just proving that it’s cheaper is not enough to change things. Power companies do not like changing. Even after Catalyst have proven that it’s cheaper to build brand new renewables than it is to continue running an existing coal power plant, power companies are risk averse and don’t want to put in the actual work of building new renewables plants (or closing existing coal plants). Plus, that transition from coal to renewables, even if it makes things cheaper, still costs money.
To get the power companies to change, someone has to go in and make the case for it, and fight the utility companies.
One of the ways to sweeten the deal for utility companies is a mechanism called securitization. Basically, they issue securitization bonds, which let them collect lots of capital (ie. money). They use that money to close down the fossil fuel plant and build renewables. Once the renewables are built, they can keep charging the same amount for energy, even though it costs a lot less, resulting in increased profits – which can then be used to pay out those bonds.
Everyone wins with securitization. Customers don’t have to pay extra to build renewables, and the utility companies don’t have to bear any risk or suffer a loss of profits (since the debt is paid back out of the cost savings gained from renewables). And of course whoever buys those bonds gets a nice return on their investment, as well as the satisfaction of knowing they’re helping bring about a move to cleaner energy.
How to help
Zane is currently one of 3 people working on this project, and they need help. They’re not a for-profit organisation, and they’re relying on grants – but they don’t have any experience writing grant applications. They’re short staffed and short resourced, and are working insanely hard for something that’s in the public interest.
Funding
Does your company offer grants or funding? Can you get them to donate or to offer grant funding to Catalyst?
I know a lot of tech companies do offer grants, and that a lot of my friends work for those tech companies. If you’re reading this, and that’s the case at your company, please ask around and see if there are any grants or funding opportunities you can set Catalyst Cooperative up with.
Grant writing
If you have experience grant writing, there’s a lot of government and private grants that Catalyst could qualify and apply for, but that takes a lot of time, and they don’t have much time, or much experience writing grants. Your assistance here would be super useful.
Volunteering
I know a lot of companies give their employees volunteer time, and Catalyst could definitely make good use of it. Here’s some of what they need:
- Advice on machine learning, especially for connecting the data sets together
- Help designing for large data pipelines
- Data expertise
Technical resources
Right now, everything is being run from the team’s laptops, but they’re running out of space, and they need to move all that data to the Cloud. Do you work for Google or Amazon or another Cloud storage company, and could you offer them some resources?
Ideally we’d like to be able to run automatic nightly builds of the ETL pipeline with the most recent version of our repository and the raw input data, and also provide access to the processed data and some computational resources remotely. But to do all that we need storage & compute credits that will allow us to store ~1TB of data, run a Google BigQuery instance, and spin up small-ish Kubernetes clusters as needed.
The technical details, courtesy of Zane
Spread the news
Change like this happens at the grassroots level.
- The more activists that know about this, the more likely they can use this data to put pressure on state regulators to question power plants and convince them to switch to renewables.
- The more that news of this spreads in general, the more likely that people start to realise that continuing to use fossil fuels means that they’re getting charged more, and that they’ll put pressure on regulators and power companies to switch to renewables.
Want to know more?
You can read more about the Catalyst Cooperative on their website.
If you’re interested in understanding more about how utilities in the US work, have a read of Utilities for Dummies.
You can also peruse a series of white papers on the general set of financial tools that enable the re-financing and retirement of coal plants early, to be replaced with renewables. Catalyst Cooperative’s data supported the creation of these financial models, which are used in state-level advocacy at utility commission and in getting enabling legislation passed.
And if you’re interested in knowing more about Zane, you can find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and on Google Scholar. Zane used to work for Nasa and dreamt about terraforming Mars – until he realised that we were xenoforming Earth. I’m so impressed and inspired by the way that he realized the world was getting destroyed and dropped what he was doing to devote himself to saving it.
The Way of the Potato 