Solar Energy Movement Disrupts Global Energy Industry. Bill Nussey

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My guest today says that the transition to clean energy is moving far too slowly.

And, you know, I absolutely absolutely agree.

Bill Nussey founded the Freeing Energy Project, which is a mobilization plan to move the talents and energies of entrepreneurs worldwide, as well as global policy makers

But what is awesome about his positive imprint is that his project is 'power by the people for the people.' That means it's up to you and me collectively.

And that's key.

Collectively.

The electricity industry is being reinvented

My favorite line from his book is 'in search of energy, freedom.' Well, it is clear that bill authored a book, but it's not just about clean energy or how to invest in it.

Here is the man himself, Bill Nussey, welcome to your positive imprint.

Thank you very much, Catherine.

That's an incredibly flattering, uh, introduction.

Uh, and I'm just thrilled that some of the parts of the book spoke to you that makes, makes my day.

Thank you.

part two with Bill Nussey, using local scale solar and batteries to disrupt the global energy industry from the outside in so exciting, great information.

I was born at the right time.

Exactly the right time at the beginning of the computer revolution.

Born out of my weaknesses, stumbling into my strengths, I fell in love with technology and, uh, I love it.

I love what technology can do to business and to society.

I also lament the problems it can create too.

I think what'll be the largest technology revolution in the history of technology is the transition to clean energy.

So all that kind of played together is a single theme that, uh, was born out of, um, searching to do something that really I could truly be passionate about.

And I feel very lucky that I've been doing that for a couple decades now.

Why the title freeing energy.

what I'm trying to say is that energy is locked into, uh, monopoly and public utility commissioner and legislation.

It's, it's this incredibly innovative opportunity.

That's just stuck.

It's stuck in a system.

Uh, that's dominated by incumbents, like the utilities that don't want it to change and the book is entirely about how do we free that energy, the

So wouldn't it be great if you and I were getting the profits from solar, rather than your utility, getting the profits by building a giant solar plant, someone's gonna get the profits.

Uh, it'd be better if it was you and me and, and, and particularly families that, uh, that are struggling to meet their bills.

Wouldn't it be great if they got the profits from cheaper solar rather than their utility.

And so freeing energy touches all that, uh, by freeing it from a system that's outta date, uh, overdue for big changes.

The thing I love so much about this business and this journey I'm on is that you can do well by doing good.

Uh, I didn't get into this because I wanted to make money.

I got into this because it needed to be done.

And people with solid business backgrounds were shying away from it.

And I wanted to create a perspective for policy makers, for individual families, for entrepreneurs, for scientists to say this isn't just about, , saving the environment.

This isn't something we have to sacrifice to make happen.

This is something that if we embrace it, Simple economics mean that everybody wins and we actually save money, whether we're in Africa, uh, growing crops who couldn't grow before, or

I mean, the opportunities to embrace this next generation is truly global.

I hope it does make, , a positive imprint.

, certainly that's been my goal when I, , started off on this.

The subtitle how innovators are using local scale solar and batteries to disrupt the global energy industry from the outside in.

We have our solar panels and my husband just bought some for the ground.

Yeah.

We have some on the roof and he bought some on the ground., , he's connecting it so we can actually, yeah.

And you're gonna want batteries.

They're more expensive today.

If you wait a few years they're gonna be so much cheaper, uh, but uh, batteries give you the resiliency, particularly in New Mexico, where it's created outages because of the heat and the fires.

And that's gonna become increasingly widespread.

Texas is very conflicted over what they think about clean energy, but most Texans agree that it's the grid.

Outages are a very real issue.

And as communities and families, those that have the means are putting batteries in as fast as they can.

And I'm very fortunate . So if I have a grid outage in my neighborhood, which generally doesn't happen, Georgia power generally does a good job.

Uh, then, uh, my house will remain operational and I can still watch my TV and charge my phone and do, , podcast interviews like this, uh, because I am essentially off grid when I need to be.

But the reason this is, this is such a big deal because the power, the electricity industry, the power industry for a century has been entirely predicated on fuels.

So it was coal in the early days, natural gas, after that, then nuclear came along and that was supposed to be the big change.

And it didn't turn out to be, but all these cases you need fuels.

And so there, the largest portion of the costs goes into fuels.

So as we see natural gas prices rising around the world, largely because of the war in Ukraine, the, uh, price of electricity is going to slowly start rising.

It takes a little while for all the contracts to change, but we're gonna see electricity prices go up because of the rise of natural gas prices and natural gas is the largest source of electricity in the United States.

But the thing that is, uh, so challenging and flabbergasting to the electric industry is

that solar and batteries are technologies.

They're not fuels.

And so for a century, the utilities have been focused on how do you manage fuel costs?

How do you hedge it?

How do you acquire supply chains?

Now they're dealing with this absolutely disruptive thing called a technology, solar and batteries, and the price of solar over the last 45 years has dropped 400 times.

The very first solar cells were on, on satellites that allowed satellites to stay operational in orbit people remember Sputnik.

The Russian Sputnik only lasted for a few weeks, cuz the battery ran out and NASA changed the satellite race by putting solar on satellites and they could run for years.

This was the beginning of it.

And back then solar costs about $70 a WATT and today solar costs about 20 cents a WATT.

And if you look at anybody's predictions the, the even fossil fuel companies like, uh, uh, BP, uh, are looking at the price of solar in the future.

And it's gonna go down to about 10, 5, 10, 15 cents a wat and batteries are falling the same curve, especially now that we're ramping up battery manufacturing around the world, to make electric cars as fast as we can get

'em.

Electric cars are hitting the tipping point today.

So we're making batteries as a planet at a rate that is unprecedented.

, for folks that listen in that, that don't have a background in business, uh, mass production of anything lowers its cost.

And it's a standard rule.

They teach you in business school.

The first year of business school, the more factories you make, the cheaper something gets.

That's why we we've come to expect it.

Every new generation of our iPhone, it'll be faster.

It'll have more memory.

It'll have a better camera.

We just expect that.

Uh, but that's miraculous.

No time in history has such feature capability grown so quickly.

Well that same kind of mass production of electronics is exactly what's driving this disruption in energy.

That's why solar and batteries not wind, not geothermal.

Those are all great, but they're not technologies.

You can't make them by the billions in factories.

Like we do iPhones like we do, uh, flat screen televisions.

Like we do solar panels and electric cars.

So this is why these prices are gonna continue to decline.

So today you and your husband and your neighbors might say, well, I'm gonna save 10 or 20%, maybe 30% if I put up the solar panels and then I'll have them paid off in seven to 10 years.

And all my electricity from the panels is free after that.

And, and, and maybe you're motivated cuz you want to, uh, make sure that as much of your electricity as possible is generated without fossil fuel combustion would go, you know, go for that.

That's awesome.

But in, in 10 years, even skeptics are gonna say, well, if I put solar today, it's gonna cut my bills by half, not by a 10 or 20%, but by half and in 30 or 40 years, it's gonna cut their bills by three quarters.

And as I tell people, I do a lot of interviews over with people in Europe.

And I said, one thing you can say about Americans, there's a lot of things you say about Americans, but you can, whether we're red or, or blue.

To something you, you will never be able to go to Americans and say, uh, we would like to charge you quadruple what you should have to pay, because we wanna make

No American is gonna put up with that.

None.

And that's what the utilities are facing.

And that's why it's gonna be a disruption.

Oh, I love that word disruption and, and it has been happening.

Going back.

, when I was lobbying, I, I lobbied.

Uh,

Wow.

uh when it had to do with the Arctic drilling.

I know when it had to do with the Arctic drilling.

Yep.

So I had to do a lot of research on energy that we don't need the fossil fuels that's up in the Arctic.

Right.

Uh, because we need to start moving and if we don't move, we're gonna be in an urgent situation, which I feel I'm sorry.

I feel that we're already in an yeah.

And

2022 is the year that even the skeptics can't ignore that the earth is warming.

Uh, well, there's a lot of money thrown around and I've got a lot of those numbers in freeing energy and also on my site, But the, the solar tax credit, which is, uh,

But yeah, this is the one thing that's really interesting about these small scale system is they don't get as politicized as the very large scale systems.

And, and even though I think most of the criticism of the large scale systems is political in nature and, and undeserved..

But, uh, everybody loves the small scale systems.

You know, the great story was out of Florida where all the Republican legislators voted for a bill to essentially make local solar unaffordable.

Uh, and, uh, the investigative journalists, if I recall the story correctly, unearthed the email thread through a freedom of information act that showed that the word for

And of course, everybody expected the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis to rubber stamp it as well.

But he was inundated because people like you and me, Catherine really care about this.

They showed up in his doorstep and study after study, including, uh, done by Republican groups showed that 85% of Floridians wanted rooftop solar.

So he, he was the shot heard around the world when Ron DeSantis vetoed the Bill and made, uh, solar continue to be affordable in the state of Florida.

And, uh, so there's some real hope that the activism works.

The work you did up in, uh, with fossil fuels in Alaska, but the amount of money that's spent on lobbying and maintaining the incumbency is extraordinary.

But in the end, if enough people care and they say it only takes five or 6% of the population to start a movement.

So if anybody in this, um, listens in on this wants to be part of the movement, you know, there's a lot of things you can do, including read the book and get some of your own ideas, find the

if you wanna make solar available for everybody, uh, that you can get involved with in your community.

This, we call it the local energy revolution.

I have mugs that say 'local energy revolution.' I'll send you one, if you want Catherine.

This is a, a very large movement that, uh, people are realizing it's not just about saving the earth.

In fact, you don't have to care about the earth.

You could be a complete climate denier and say, I think this is just cycles and moon or whatever it is that you're you, you read about.

Uh, but guess what, you're gonna save money and guess what, uh, as the grid, whatever you, as a climate skeptic, think the grid issues are getting larger.

Whatever the reason might be, um, guess what they are happening.

It's a fact.

And with solar and battery, uh, even the biggest climate skeptic can have comfort that he or she and their family will be safe during outages because of this local energy movement.

So this is not political at all.

This is a universal movement or across the planet, uh, to create resiliency and to save money.

I oh, by the way, if you are as concerned about climate, as it sounds like you are an, I am, you might just save the planet too.

Yeah.

well, I've been working on that with other people for so long and it just, it gets frustrating after a while, and as an educator, we were at the mayor's office.

We had,

I love it.

we had so many activities, but that was, in the nineties and in the mid two thousands.

Well, the mid

And you know, back then the, what you, everything you were promoting was gonna cost money.

Everything.

It ha required tax, not just tax investments, but actual tax spending that had to go against things like schools and lowering taxes, so that what's changed in the last two or three years.

And that's why I decided now was the time for me to get into this industry was for the first time solar battery wind.

These are actually cheaper.

So no longer is this an environmental movement.

This is a business movement.

And for all the folks like you, my deepest respects my deepest admiration for the work when you did, when you were trying to get people to pay a higher

You don't have to make that trade off anymore.

That's, what's so exciting.

There's a great cartoon that's famous in the climate world.

You may have seen it.

And it's, , two people at a conference, uh, skeptics conference, climate skeptics conference, , and one says to the other, , what if this whole climate thing is a complete hoax?

, we, we saved all this money and removed all this pollution and created all these jobs for nothing.

It's like the, the joke is that we're doing so much good regardless of the climate,

One of the things I love to point out to people is that if you build small scale solar, like on, on a mall or a school or a church or a mosque or your house, uh, versus you put a giant

So if you're concerned about jobs, which every politician's concerned about, uh, every decision maker, every community cares about jobs, um, it, it's an amazing story.

And the last story I would love if you're not familiar with it, um, and I should have, uh, should have brought this out from the very beginning.

My favorite story about local energy, uh, is New Mexican story.

This is actually the number one story I was gonna tell in my book, but for a variety of reasons, it, it didn't fit in the final versions.

And I'll just give it to you very briefly.

But for all of your listeners, especially if there's a lot in, in where you live, they should be inspired by this story.

So, uh, Kit Carson is a small utility.

I think I'll say 30 to 60,000 customers.

A lot of utilities are very small

So the story is amazing.

So they decided that they wanted you, the kit Carson was served probably where you are served by a very large utility called Tristate, which is historically, uh, one of

Some of them decided wouldn't it be great if we could have clean energy, solar and wind.

So they went to tri-state and said, could we please buy clean energy instead?

And I get the numbers wrong, but roughly they were paying about 14 cents a kilowatt hour, which is a little above average, but not crazy.

tri-state came back as I understand it and said, pound sand.

And they're like, no, no, we will pay more.

We really wanna have it as an offering.

And tri-state said, Nope, not interested.

So Kit Carson did something that no small utility in the history the United States ever did.

, they went to their giant feeder utility and said, well, we're gonna break off and get electricity ourselves.

And tri-state said, sure, sure.

They patted him on the head and sent 'em out.

Kit Carson said, no, really we want do it.

And so, uh, what, what would it cost to break our contract?

And there's, there's a hundred, there's a three, I think there's a thousand of these in the United States where these, uh, they're called EMCs they're cooperatives run by

And Tri-state's the big one where you live.

And, uh, Tri-state came back and said, it's gonna be, uh, a hundred million dollars.

And I, I don't remember Kit Carson's revenues, but they're, you know, nine, 10, 15 million.

And, and so they thought that was the end of it.

So this is what's really cool.

The leaders of, of Taos got together, they talked to their citizens, they put out an RFP, they said we want someone to, to, to help us with this.

And they had everyone in the country came to them, but they ended up picking a company out of Florida called Guzman, uh, which is a brilliant small, , expert in this area.

And they put together a deal and they negotiated it down.

And so they bought out, uh, the Tri-state contract, , for like $35 million.

And this is where it gets really cool.

So that's a lot of money and it kind of puts 'em underwater, but because there's wholesale markets for electricity, not these sort of long term contracts, which Tri-state loved monopoly, utility loved.

Uh, they just went out and bought electricity on the market.

And overnight, the next day, the electricity they were buying in the market was so much cheaper than the contract they'd been locked in to for 40 years, that they were able to lower the electricity rates.

And again, I'll get the numbers wrong, but like from 14 cents to 12 cents immediately, but, and it's, they were buying it all, almost all the clean, they were buying

The best part of the story was they, the people of Taos said, listen, we really want to, um, lower our price even more and want to be even cleaner.

So then Guzman and kit Carson got together and they built, I think it was, uh, last count was seven.

They went to each of the small communities in Taos and , they trained people in the community to be solar installers.

They hired them to install like one megawatt size plants in the communities.

Uh, and then they turned those things on.

And I just saw something the other day that those small systems on sunny days are generating a hundred percent of the power and they own these systems.

This is like farm to table uh, dream come true.

And so they're generating and some days a hundred percent of their own electricity built by people who live in the community managed by people who live in the community.

They own the system.

So once they finish paying off the, the loan to build it in typically 3, 5, 7 years, the electricity will be free.

Uh, and they're buying less and less electricity on the open market.

And they can just continue to use all these savings to invest in more resiliency, more robust systems to create more jobs.

This is the future of electricity and it, and I can't believe, I didn't think of this when you told me you lived in New Mexico, but the folks in Taos, the Kit Carson leaderships,

And the whole world knows about them by the way.

Uh, The entire world looks at and pays attention and has deep respects for the folks in Taos, New Mexico, the Northern part of the state that have done something that now dozens of other communities are trying to copy.

Uh, Europe has passed laws.

Imagine that they actually pass laws to make this doable and easy in Europe.

Uh, the United States will eventually be shamed into copying those laws, but they'll fight it because, um, the Tri-states of the world really, really, really don't want this

This is the better product a better price.

And you cannot stop this.

This is a, uh, uh, juggernaut.

It may take a few years, but it's going to happen.

Uh it's and we, I think a lot of people will say it started in New Mexico.

That is awesome.

Bill Nussey.

I hope your words of it will happen will hold true, because I'm, I'm really hoping.

The person, that's the face of this is Louis Reyes, uh, uh, Louis Reyes.

Who's the head of Kit Carson and he's travels around the world now talking to governments and to DC explaining this amazing story.

And he was actually, he was, I have my own podcast, which people who loved this local energy would love for them to listen in.

It's available everywhere.

It's called freeing energy, easy to remember.

And, uh, my first two interviews were the CEO of Guzman and the second one was Louis Reyes of Kit Carson.

So freeing energy started in New Mexico.

all freeing energy started in New Mexico.

all right.

Well, with, with that, do you have anything else you wanted to share about fossil fuels or anything else that we've missed?

There's so much to cover.

And that's why my book's a little long.

I apologize for that.

Uh, but it's, uh, if you're interested in this stuff, I think there's a lot of great resources, including freeing energy, but, I think that this is coming and

This is, this is truly the local energy revolution.

And it's starting now.

And people will look back on this podcast and all the things you're talking about to realize that, um, they'll just wonder how do we ever live without it?

How do we, how do we even imagine a world of just giant monopolies and giant power plants?

Why did we even stay doing that so long?

Um, it is gonna happen.

I am absolutely positive and I really appreciate you sharing my, uh, my story and my enthusiasm for this, with your listeners.

It's been a real real honor to be here today, and I hope that, uh, we can get a few more people to join the local energy revolution.

Oh, well, thank you for that bill Nesti.

And I wanna say that your book, you were talking about how, um, Investigative journalism is kind of going along the wayside.

Well, books are still there and your book definitely is investigative journalism.

So it, it definite yes, it's very good.

And it presents, different, perspectives and the different points and statistics and so on and so

Well, one thing I tried to do that probably added a year to the process was that if you read most books about this space, including books, like

So if you are interested or you're, you're skeptical, uh, or you are interested in doing more research, uh, you're kind of stuck.

Uh, and what I, I have over 400 citations in this book, which is a big part of it.

And many of those citations take you to my website, where I have spreadsheets lives, interactive spreadsheets, and you can see my source data and you can put in your

I have tremendous respect for environmental groups, , and they are saving the world.

Many people who are skeptical of this think they have an agenda.

So what, like 99% of the data in the book is rock solid undisputed, government scientific sourced data.

I don't cite environmentalists.

Uh, I wanted to, but I wanted to make sure that someone was skeptical reading this.

And they're gonna say, baloney, he's just cherry picking data.

I wanted to have the most conservative objective, reliable sources of data throughout it.

That's probably tripled the time to come up with the citations, but that's another part of the book that people that really wanted do their own research to kind of a dangerous term these days.

But if you wanna really dive in and look at the sources and, and provide full skepticism, I hope that they, uh, are satisfied that I've produced a lot of supporting data and graphs that are very verifiable sources.

Well, I thank you for your hard work.

So I end with your last inspiring words, which of course you are inspiring.

The book is great, but what are your last inspiring words for the listeners?

I'm going to read my favorite quote from the book.

Okay.

When I think about the challenges and more the opportunities that we're facing, I think it comes together in a single quote by Robert F.

Kennedy.

And he said, "few will have the greatness to bend itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events.

And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."

Bill Nussey,.

You're doing a great job with getting that word out and revolutionizing freeing energy.

I thank you so much for being here on the show.

Thank you, Catherine.

It's been an honor and a lot of fun.

Thank you.

Learn more about Bill and of course his book, Freeing Energy, go to freeingenergy.com.

You can also learn more about him and his work by searching Bill Nussey, B I L L N U S S E Y.

And of course, part one episode, 186 with Bill, is available here at your positive imprint or your favorite podcast platform?

This is a free podcast, but if you would like to buy me a salad or contribute to the financial production of this podcast I would certainly appreciate your support in any amount.

At this time, I can accept donations using PayPal.

My support link is paypal.com/PayPalme/your positive imprint.

And you can find this link on my website.

Thank you.

Well, I need to make changes to the launch schedule to twice a month.

October will be guest, Sayaka and reclaiming creations along with more information in October on plastics and our seas coming up October 10th.

To hear more about what people are doing around the world.

Go to yourpositiveimprint.com or of course follow or subscribe from your favorite podcast platform.

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