A Renewable Energy Dialogue at the BERC Energy Summit

A survey conducted by the Yale Program for Climate Change Communication in 2019 discovered that almost 7 in 10 registered American voters believe in global warming, and it is safe to assume that number is higher in a liberal, college-educated location such as UC Berkeley. Like many Cal students, I worry about the implications climate change has for our future, and want to learn what we can do as individuals and a society to mitigate and adapt to its effects. 

From February 6-7, I attended the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC) Energy Summit along with undergraduates, graduates, professors and leaders in energy and resources. This event occurs yearly, and this year was called “The Race Against 2°C,” as an homage to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warn that an average global warming of two degrees is “the maximum temperature threshold the global community can achieve while averting the worst of climate change,” as it says on their website. While the IPCC 2015 Special Report does warn that global temperature levels should not exceed two degrees of warming, it also advocates keeping warming levels at 1.5°C due to increased risk in that half degree margin. Naming the event after a less-than-favorable climate scenario, then, leaves a chilling implication that one of the best schools to study environmental sciences does not believe we can make the preferred 1.5-degree cutoff. 

Nevertheless, the summit attracted a lot of bright minds and included lots of events, including a Career Forum for UC Berkeley students, an Innovation Expo displaying research posters in energy topics, and various speaking events with topics ranging from discussing how to keep the world at 2°C, electricity in California with increased risk of wildfires, renewable energy projects and more. While I was not able to attend every event, the ones I did go to were informative and engaging. 

At one speaking event, “Decarbonizing Transporation - Fast Pitches,” representatives from Bird, Proterra, EVgo, and Toyota each discussed how their company was working to decarbonize the transportation industry. James Kast from Toyota explained how the car company’s hybrid platforms, and Hydrogen fuel cell technology were leading them in the direction of decarbonization. Their newest model, the Mirai, is, according to the company, drives with zero CO2 emissions and takes just five minutes to fuel. 

From Bird, Katie DeWitt shared the three revolutions in urban transportation: electrification, autonomy, and sharing. In other words, first transportation needs to be sustainable and electric, then it should become self-driving, and finally, needs to be shared efficiently among an urban public to reduce the number of vehicles needed. She and Bird want clean energy vehicles to be accessible to all and convenient for lifestyle (we can see both in Bird’s electric scooters common at college campuses). After working with Tesla and now Bird, Katie believes that the technology required to make urban transportation meet these three revolutions is here, and all that is left to do is partner with big cities to make it all happen. “The tech is here today,” she advocated. “It just needs implementation.”

Proterra, represented by Arun Vinayak, is a company based in Burlingame, California with the goal to provide clean vehicles for all. Arun brought up the point that the market penetration potential for electric vehicles is highest for buses, and Proterra’s vehicles have distributed over 800 vehicles and avoided over 50 million pounds of CO2 emissions. Last, Jonah Eidus presented EVgo, a company dealing with fast-charging vehicles. One of their goals is electric vehicle equity. When someone has an electric car, there are two ways to charge it. There is fast charging, and there is “level 2 charging,” which has a lower amperage and is designed for slower charging, usually overnight in someone’s home. Since not everyone has a parking space, it is important for companies such as EVgo that deal with charging stations to keep this in mind for urban areas. EVgo has been implementing fast-charging stations around Berkeley, and hope to include more in the future. However, Jonah also noted that it is important to recognize that EV equity is also difficult in places like Berkeley, where parking spaces are already limited and the public needs infrastructure to be as small as possible; the fast-charging stations, while more effective, are very large to accommodate for the number of kilowatts. 

Another event I went to was “The Best Deal for us: Comparing the Green New Deal and a Carbon Tax.” The event moderator was Ken Alex, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Governor Jerry Brown and current director of Project Climate at UC Berkeley. Here, Leah Stokes, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and Tasha Reddy, a coordinator for Citizens’ Climate Lobby and lecturer at San Jose State University, argue for the benefits of the Green New Deal and a carbon tax, respectively. The Green New Deal is an industrial policy that focuses on changes in the government, while a carbon price is pushed by NGOs and works to internalize externalities associated with using fossil fuels. The debate centered around the core idea of what would be more effective in politics: working from the left with the Green New Deal or a more likely chance at bipartisanship with carbon taxation.

Although I wished I could have stayed for longer, I had to leave the summit to attend my Intro to Culture and Natural Resource Management class, where the lecture was coincidentally about climate science. As I listened to Professor Kenneth Worthy eloquently explain concepts like the greenhouse gas effect and emissions from fossil fuels, everything I had learned about renewable energy projects and policies mulled over in my mind. If the world really wants to succeed in this race against climate change, I wondered if these would be enough. Nevertheless, I feel some sense of hope in events such as the BERC Energy Summit, that bring together students, professionals, and professors and create a productive discussion about the looming threat of climate change and potential solutions.