Are Renewables Enough? Stanford’s Dr. Mark Jacobson Thinks So

Jul 15

Dr. Mark Jacobson is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere Energy Program at Stanford University, where he’s been one of the most vocal advocates for powering the world entirely with wind, water, and solar energy. No nuclear, no carbon capture, no fossil fuels of any kind. His research team has created 100% renewable energy roadmaps for all 50 U.S. states and 149 countries, helping shape policies like New York’s clean energy mandate.

In this episode, Dr. Jacobson shares his perspective on where we are in the renewables adoption curve and explains why he believes that technologies like nuclear power, carbon capture, and biofuels aren’t just unnecessary, they’re harmful distractions from the clean energy transition he sees as both achievable and urgent.

This conversation may be polarizing. While many will agree with Mark's take on renewables and the grid, his firm rejection of other low-carbon tech challenges mainstream climate thinking. We believe these fault lines are worth exploring, even, or especially, when they make people uncomfortable.

Episode recorded on June 30, 2025 (Published on July 15, 2025)

In this episode, we cover:

⁠⁠⁠[02:32]⁠ Why proposed tax changes threaten renewables
⁠[05:45]⁠ Fossil fuel subsidies vs. renewables support
⁠[06:29]⁠ China’s rapid clean energy deployment
⁠[10:44]⁠ Rooftop solar offsets California’s rising demand
⁠[12:20]⁠ Home and utility batteries reshaping grid usage
⁠[14:40]⁠ Texas grid inefficiencies and renewables progress
⁠[18:21]⁠ Combining wind, solar and batteries
[19:26]⁠ Land use myths about wind and solar
[22:49] Dr. Mark Jacobson’s background and research
⁠[27:23]⁠ How to phase out existing fossil infrastructure
⁠[31:36]⁠ Dr. Jacobson’s rejection of carbon capture
[36:52] His thoughts on nuclear
[42:11] Dr. Jacobson’s thoughts on geothermal
[46:19] How he sees the next decade unfolding

Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable. Our guest is Dr. Mark Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere Energy Program at Stanford University where since 2009, he's been one of the most vocal advocates for powering the world entirely with wind, water, and solar energy. No nuclear, no carbon capture, no fossil fuels of any kind. His Stanford research group has mapped out 100% renewable energy roadmaps for all 50 US states and 149 countries worldwide. Work that has directly influenced legislation including New York's clean energy mandate. I was interested to hear Mark's take on where we are in the renewables adoption curve and to understand his uncompromising position that technologies like nuclear power, carbon capture, and biofuels aren't just unnecessary but are actually harmful distractions from the clean energy future he believes is both achievable and necessary. This conversation will likely be polarizing. While many listeners will likely nod along with Mark's analysis of plummeting renewable costs and grid reliability solutions, his categorical rejection of other low carbon technologies puts 'em at odds with many climate advocates. We think these fault lines are worth exploring even when or especially when they make people uncomfortable from MCJ. I'm Cody Simms, and this is inevitable.
(01:34):
Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Dr. Jacobson, welcome to the show.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (01:56):
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Cody.
Cody Simms (01:57):
Well, we have picked an interesting day to record this. Obviously this episode will ship after today, but there is a lot happening in the federal government at the moment with respect to clean energy policy. We're recording this on Monday, June 30th in the absolute midst of the Senate motorama, which is happening right now. Let's start there quickly. What is your perspective on what's happening in terms of energy policy and how impactful might things be relative to how much inertia does the industry have already underway?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (02:32):
Well, the senate bill proposal is to not only phase out tax credits and not only there's this production tax credit and investment tax credit for solar and wind in particular, but also to tax them to some degree.
Cody Simms (02:46):
I saw that was just added at the end of last week. Hopefully that gets amended out, but I guess we'll see.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (02:51):
Well, right now it's in, but in both cases, this is really dangerous for the United States. I mean, air pollution kills up to a hundred thousand people in the United States year seven and a half million people each year worldwide, and this will just continue the death and illness. These taxes try to dissuade the replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar will slow down the replacement of these dangerous technologies, increasing death and illness rates compared to if you had no phase out of the wind and solar. And not only that, it'll continue the 50,000 new oil and gas wells drilled every year in North America alone. The fossil fuel industry already occupies 1.3% of all US land area devastating. Not only the soil and groundwater taking up land that can be used for many other purposes that are more beneficial. It creates less jobs than wind and solar, so you're reducing job output.
(03:40):
You're also creating price, volatility and higher prices. Wind and solar are proven now to reduce costs of electricity. For example, of the 11 states in the United States with the highest fraction of their electricity from clean renewable energy, that's wind, water, and solar. 10 of those 11 states have electricity prices, at least 1.90 cents a kilowatt hour lower than the national average. And starting with South Dakota where in 20 24, 120 1% of all the electricity that it consumed was met with wind, water, solar, it also had some gas and coal beyond that. So produced 137% of all its electricity from all sources, but 121% from wind, water, solar, and it has electricity prices much lower than the national average. Montana's at 94% wind water, solar as a percent of its demand, also much lower prices than the national average. In fact, 10 of the 11 states with the highest fraction of their electricity from renewables and all those states have more than 50% of their demand is met by renewables.
Cody Simms (04:39):
Interestingly, all Republican states you've named so far too,
Dr. Mark Jacobson (04:42):
Most of them are Republican states where most of 'em are dominated by wind. Seven of the 11 are dominated by wind and the other four are dominated by hydro, but with also a lot of wind as well. Iowa is in that mix. We have Oklahoma and there you have Kansas, North Dakota. So you have a lot of Republican states that they're just shooting themselves in the foot. So it's not only lower prices with renewables, so you're going to have higher prices with these fossil fuels. They're basically not only preventing more job creation and reducing air pollution, but they're increasing cost of energy for everybody and damaging the environment as well in the groundwater, the soil, it's just a horrible mess. It's just a horrible fuel. First of all, these fossil fuels, they're just nothing but pollution and death and illness and misery for the United States.
Cody Simms (05:26):
Some would argue that, hey, if solar and wind are so great, why don't they just stand on their own two feet? Why do they need subsidies? And I think the argument there overlooks the amount of subsidy that has gone into fossil fuels over not just the last few years but over decades. Is there anything you can share with that respect?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (05:45):
Yeah, well, all energy sources receive subsidies, and of course, fossil fuels have received more subsidies by far than clean renewable energy just because they cumulatively for the last a hundred plus years, there have been subsidies to fossil fuels and only subsidies recently in the last 20, 30 years to renewables. But the other thing is that it's sure solar and wind right now, if you look at the latest cost of energy, unsubsidized, solar and wind are the cheapest forms of electricity in the United States, new solar and wind. However, that only means that okay, if you have a new project, it may go to solar and wind, but you need to replace a lot of existing fossil fuels because you have so much existing fossil fuels to replace. So in order to phase that out, you really need it to be much cheaper to get rid of existing fossil fuels.
(06:29):
Otherwise it's just a really slow transition is too slow. But just to give you an idea of how fast you can transition, so China just in the last one month, so May of 2025, they put up enough solar plus wind in the nameplate capacity of that solar wind they put up is equivalent to 30% of all the nuclear power existing in the world that's been built over the last 60 years. So in one month now since January from January to May, China put up, it was around 244 gigawatts of solar and wind. That was equivalent to 62% of all the nuclear that's been put up historically up through the recent time. So what's existing in the world today? So that's just incredible growth rate because at that growth rate, China would become a hundred percent renewable for all energy purposes by around 2035 to 2040.
Cody Simms (07:18):
The growth rate there is astounding, and obviously when you talk about things like winning the AI race or whatnot, China's clearly investing for growth. I think some would argue, hey, well China doesn't have an endemic oil and gas industry, so of course they're pursuing these other technologies. They don't have a geopolitical advantage in gas like the US does. How do you square that one, I guess?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (07:39):
Well, if your only goal is to try to make money, you can invest in anything, but societies generally want to minimize their costs. So it's not only minimizing their direct energy costs but also minimize what's called the social costs, which is the health cost, the climate cost. So gas served a purpose before we had vast potential for renewables because of the much higher cost of renewables, but now renewables are lower cost and they not only reduce the cost of energy to people and create more jobs, but they also eliminate the health groundwater, soil climate damage due to gas and other fossil fuels. So sure if gas did not have all these problems associated with it, namely air pollution, death rates and illness rates, groundwater contamination, leakage, methane to the atmosphere, global climate damage due to the methane and carbon dioxide that's emitted from gas, if it did not destroy the environment and the climate and danger people's health, yeah, why not sure use gas.
(08:36):
But since we are actually smarter than we were a hundred years ago where we actually know what these impacts are and we can measure them now before we didn't measure them, so we had no idea what the impacts of these fuels were. We have to be smarter than what we were a hundred years ago and actually take action. We have an alternative that's way better. It's not only a little bit better, it's way better. I mean, it just saves so much money. If you have a home that has no gas, there's no reason to have both electricity and gas in your home. You have two contractors, you have to put pipes. Why have additional pipes? One, you can just do everything with wires already. There's nothing that gas does that electricity doesn't do better and cheaper and more efficiently and cleaner. So all new homes should be all electric, saves people money.
(09:16):
It'll save you between 15, $25,000 upfront just to have an all electric home rather than a gas home, and it'll save you over time because a gas heater in your home, it uses four times the energy as an electric heat pump heater. A gas stove uses about 60, 70% more energy than does an electric induction cooktop stove. And so just by having gas in your home, you're more inefficient costs more. It pollutes your home inside. So we have health problems inside your home as well, so there's no reason. I mean, I electrified my home in 2017, built a new home, all electric. I haven't paid an electricity bill, a gas bill, a gasoline bill because of electric cars in over eight years and it's all paid back within five years. There were subsidies without subsidies that would've paid back in eight years.
Cody Simms (10:00):
I've done rooftop solar, HVAC, and heat pump water heater. I haven't done my gas range yet, which was built into my home when I got here though it's next to my list, but I do worry a little bit that if we slow down the build out of power, electric power in particular with whatever's happening in the Senate and solar and wind projects do slow down over the next few years, that given what we see in terms of a demand gap around electricity because of data centers, because of onshoring, because of its industrial use of electrification, which is all good, that actually electricity costs for homeowners are going to go up substantially and it may make that competitiveness with gas from a residential perspective more challenged. Again, it feels like we're cutting off our nose to spider face. I don't know if that's something you worry about too.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (10:44):
I worry about it. Yeah, if we keep allowing gas in the system, then prices are going to be higher and higher because as we've seen it, we've proven in 10 of the 11 states with the most renewables as a fraction of their demand
Cody Simms (10:55):
On the generation side.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (10:57):
Well on generation side, they're all cheaper. And now in terms of future use, so I track electricity use in California a lot, and so in terms of demand, yeah, there's more demand for data centers, electric cars, cryptocurrency, so there's more electricity demand. However, there's also more growth of rooftop solar and that rooftop solar people, they put rooftop solar, they use their own electricity first, and so that reduces grid electricity demand, which has a huge benefit. In fact, in California there's less electricity used this year in 2025 than there was two years ago.
Cody Simms (11:29):
Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Interesting.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (11:31):
And that's because of the growth of rooftop solar has offset all those increases in electricity demand due to more electric cars. When you look around here, everybody's got an electric car around here, where's all the electricity coming from? Well, a lot of people are charging at their own homes where they have their rooftop solar, but even when they're using grid electricity like at a charging station, there is more grid electricity demand, but that's being reduced because more people are putting rooftop solar, and so when we disincentivize rooftop solar, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot and you have these problems you're talking about
Cody Simms (11:58):
Or charging at night. But again, I think one of the stories that you've been tracking, I've been following your LinkedIn, is just the boom in utility scale batteries. In California we talk about wind and solar, but I think the storage side sometimes gets left out of that story, but it's so important to ultimately enabling as much carbon-free energy as possible. Can you maybe share a little bit about the battery story over the last few years?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (12:20):
Yeah, and I'll point out that it's not only utility scale batteries, but home batteries there. Actually in this last year there are more home batteries. There's actually a slight reduction of rooftop solar compared to the previous year growth. I mean there was still an increase but less than the previous year, but the home battery systems purchased just skyrocketed, and that's actually helping shift that solar that is being produced during the day tonight for the homes. So on the grid, this is happening as well, but on an even larger scale, to put in perspective, well just in terms of size, California's the main grid, the kaiso grid, the average demand in 2024 was 24 gigawatts of power. Now, the peak can get up to 50 gigawatts in the summer and the afternoon, but the average over 24 hours, 365 days of 2024, it's 24 gigawatts. To put that in perspective, on that same grid, there's now a peak of 11 gigawatts of batteries, so the 11 gigawatts of batteries and their four hour battery.
(13:11):
So you can discharge 11 gigawatts for four hours, and so that meets 11 divided by 24, that percent of the average California demand and that electricity doesn't come out of nowhere. You have to charge those batteries. So they're charged during the day, often with extra wind and solar, and we also have hydro geothermal in the state, but in California so far, 81% of all the days this year we've had over a hundred percent renewables on the grid for an average of five hours a day over the entire year. So 57% of all the electricity consumed in California this year has been wind, water, solar, electricity that was produced and the rest has been either gas or imports or there's some nuclear in tiny bit of bioenergy. So that's growth. The 57% is of growth. Last year at this time was like 53 or 54%, two years ago is 48%, so it's growing each year, but the batteries have, in the last two years it's tripled and in the last five years they've gone from virtually nothing to 11 gigawatts almost. So those batteries are basically shifting the extra, the five hours a day where we have over a hundred percent renewables, it gets up to 160% renewables, but when we have that excess solar and wind, most of it's put into batteries. Some is exported out of state, but that battery electricity is then used when the sun goes down because that's when you have the gaps and that's when we're not meeting a hundred percent renewable.
Cody Simms (14:29):
I'd also love to hear your thoughts on Texas, which as I understand is sort of the 800 pound gorilla in terms of battery rollout. How has the grid makeup on Ercot and in Texas somewhat looked similar or different to California?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (14:40):
So the good news about Texas is they're growing out their wind and their solar really fast, which is good, and batteries similar to California. The difference between Texas and California is that the energy demand in Texas is actually much larger than California, but the reason for that is lower energy efficiency In Texas, when I mean lower, it's really, really inefficient. The average person in Texas uses two and a half times the electricity as the average person in California, and that's because of much weaker energy efficiency standards, much weaker appliance standards for efficiency, so more inefficient refrigerators, more inefficient light bulbs, less insulated homes. Since the seventies, California has really ramped up its energy efficiency and reducing energy use so that everything is efficient, equipment is efficient to appliances, homes that just don't use so much energy, they have really good insulation standards. So Texas actually clamped down on efficiency and reduce its energy use and a lot of its problems go away, but it needs a lot more energy even though its population is lower than California by a lot lower. Actually, California has a much higher population in Texas, yet Texas uses a lot more energy than California. So that's the first thing that should be done in Texas is it's a low hanging fruit to reduce its energy requirements. But having said that, let's say you want to meet your energy needs as they are, you've got to just build out a lot of wind and solar as they're doing, and so they're doing the right thing. Now, unfortunately with the new potential legislation in the US that could slow that down quite a bit.
Cody Simms (16:04):
I mean, it's a circular economy for electricity really if you think about it, because you're able to basically use and generate power generate at a time when there's no actual generation happening, which is pretty magical.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (16:16):
Yeah, it's convenient because that's when gas has been used historically. And gas for peaking and gas for backup is really expensive. I mean gas for normal use is not that expensive. It's more expensive than solar and wind, but just to put in numbers to perspective, the average, it's called levelized. Cost of solar and wind are on the order of somewhere between four and 5 cents a kilowatt hour. New gas is like six, 7 cents a kilowatt hour, but for backup gas is 19 20 cents a kilowatt hour. So those batteries are replacing gas. In fact, gas on California's grid is down 40, 41% in the last two years.
Cody Simms (16:49):
Oh, wow.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (16:50):
Yeah, just in two years it's gone down 40 to 41% replaced mostly by solar and batteries. The solar's up 50% in two years, batteries are up 216%. And also there's been some more imports as well, and most of the states that's importing from are now renewable, so at least 50% of the imports are renewable imports as well.
Cody Simms (17:08):
Do you feel to some extent the US in some of these states overbuilt on wind and solar before batteries were ready and it's created this narrative problem in the short term until battery storage catches up?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (17:20):
It's not really been a problem because places where you had a lot of wind, it's mostly in the Great Plains states like in South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas. Then there's also in Texas has a huge amount, and Montana has a bunch of wind in Wyoming. So they're feeding into its grid, this large scale grid, so it's just like one component into the grid. So that grid has a lot of hydro, which is already a big battery. So in Montana for example, it has mostly hydro, but it actually has almost the same amount of wind. So that wind is already balanced by hydro because you can turn hydro on and off. It's like a big battery. Hydropower is the largest storage in the world right now, and the second largest is pumped. Hydro batteries are now third, but they're growing especially in California and Texas, south Australia and many places in the world with regard to wind, I think you need batteries more with solar than you do with wind because wind, you can produce it 24 hours a day, although it varies each day and seasonally, whereas solar, it's definitely only during the day. And so you want to shift that solar tonight. So when you have just solar and batteries, that's one scenario, but then let's say you add wind, you'll still need some batteries, but you need fewer batteries than with just solar.
Cody Simms (18:21):
It feels like wind is crying for long duration energy storage to be solved more broadly so that you can navigate those larger variable cycles.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (18:29):
Well, this is why it's great to combine wind and solar because generally solar is highest in the summer, and that's when you generally have the slowest winds except for offshore. Then you have actually in California, that's when you have your fastest winds is in the summer offshore, which is coincident with the peak demand, which is nice. But on shore, yeah, you generally have higher winds in the winter and lower solar, and then you have higher solar in the summer and lower wind. So they're very complimentary in nature. So this is why you want to combine renewables. When you just look at one renewable in isolation, you get all sorts of mental thought processes going through and say, okay, is this going to work? But when you combine wind and solar and then you combine geothermal, which is based on, then you combine hydro, which fills in a lot of gaps, then all of a sudden you don't need as many batteries as you thought. It's just when you have solar alone or wind alone or those two in particular,
Cody Simms (19:14):
How much do all the land use arguments about solar, not think about battery storage, essentially increasing the production capacity of solar by a significant amount. Again, you can reuse it at different times of day.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (19:26):
Well, in terms of land, we've done studies for the entire United States, each US state, in fact, 150 countries of the world, and the land requirements in the United States, if you electrified everything provided all the electricity were just wind, water, solar, the additional land needed is less than 1% of all US land. Okay, that doesn't mean much, but if you compare it, the land used for fossil fuels in the US is 1.3%. So 1.3% of all US lands occupied by the fossil fuel industry. Another 1.24% is occupied just by the ethanol industry for growing corn for ethanol, which supplies only 4% of US transportation energy. So there's less energy needed to repower the entire US with wind, water, solar for all purposes. That's electricity, transportation, buildings and industry less than you need just to grow a corn for corn ethanol for only 4% of US transportation energy.
(20:14):
But if you add the 1.24% corn ethanol plus 1.3% fossil fuel, that's 2.54% at least of the US land is occupied by energy today or non-renewable stuff, and we can replace that with less than 1% of US land to supply everything to eliminate air pollution, eliminate global warming, eliminate energy and security associated with energy and eliminate all the groundwater pollution, air pollution, reduce costs, create more jobs. We'd also reduce energy requirements by about 50 to 60% due to the efficiency of electricity over combustion. So there's just no logical reason why we should continue any combustion fuels. It's not just fossil fuels. It's biofuels too, because whenever you're burning fuels, that's just inefficient, creates pollution, a lot of problems, you don't need it. Electricity is just so much better.
Cody Simms (20:58):
Batteries will be less impacted by potential legislation changes or not.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (21:03):
I mean, you have to see what happens in the end. I think from my understanding, yeah, the solar and wind were impacted more than storage. Storage I think was not impacted quite so much, which, okay, so that's good. And geothermal is good, especially this new technology enhanced geothermal where they dig deeper where it's hotter, and so you have more places in the United States. In fact, most of the United States, if you just dig deep enough, you can find hot enough rocks and you can run water through it and boil water to generate electricity. Whereas now there are only 13 states where you can generate conventional electricity from geothermal or electricity from conventional geothermal. Now you can pretty much do it in all 50 states. So that is being increased and hydropower is being increased. So those are two good, but unfortunately they're also increasing nuclear and fossil fuels, which are not helpful. One bit.
Yin Lu (21:48):
Hey everyone, I'm yin a partner at MCJ here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ collective membership. Globally startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable and more secure. And at MCJ, we recognize that a rapidly changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt. MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MC CJ Collective connects members with one another with M CJ's portfolio and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique talent matchmaking system and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to mcj VC and click the membership tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (22:49):
I want to come back to how you see the energy mix, but maybe let's take a minute to go backward and talk about your own background, your own research. I think one of the areas that really helped raise your profile in terms of the work you do is this study that you did maybe 2009, I think about a hundred percent wind, water, solar as the goal and what the world could work toward. And as I understand it was heavily influential in New York State's own energy policies in the 2010s. Maybe walk us through some of your work, walk us through how this became the area you decided to focus, and then we'll come back to some of your comments you made a second ago about the energy mix because there's a lot there to unpack for sure.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (23:26):
Well, my career has been based on trying to understand and solve large scale air pollution and climate problems, and the best solution I've looked at and found is clean renewable energy and electrification. But when I was 13 years old, I would travel to Los Angeles and San Diego to play tennis. The air was horrible back then, and I thought, why should people live like that? So that was my goal as a teenager when I grew up, to try to understand
Cody Simms (23:50):
I was a big tennis player too. We'll have to find our way to the court sometime, mark.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (23:54):
Well, I'm not very good anymore, but I'm not either. But that was the impetus. And so I kept on that goal when I went through my studies in college and then for graduate school I studied Los Angeles for my PhD at air pollution in Los Angeles, building computer models to simulate air pollution. But my ultimate goal was to really understand these problems before I tried to solve them. Because turns out when you have complex atmospheric problems like air pollution or climate, you have some proposed solutions that actually don't work if you have a different fuel like ethanol versus gasoline. Some people thought ethanol was better than gasoline, but when you actually look at the chemistry and the impacts on the atmosphere, you find, well, in most places it's actually worse. Some places is a little better, but in both cases they're still way worse than electric vehicles, for example.
(24:38):
So it's important I found to understand the problems before we proposed solutions. So I spent the early part of my career and middle part trying to understand them, and it was later, well, I started at Stanford on the faculty in 1994, but it was only about 2009 that I came up with a solution. Well, I first evaluated different proposed technologies for solving air pollution, global warming and energy and security at the same time because the other thing is a lot of people focus on climate but ignore entirely air pollution. And when you do that, the technologies that you end up selecting among, if you're just focusing on climate ignoring air pollution are horrible for air pollution. Some of them are horrible for air pollution, although they might be beneficial for climate. So our goal was to try to solve both problems simultaneously along with energy and security, really need solutions for all three.
(25:22):
So in 2009, they evaluated different technologies and the best ones that came out of this evaluation in terms of solving air pollution, global warming and energy and security simultaneously were what we call wind water solar technology. So onshore offshore wind, solar photovoltaics on rooftops in our power plants, concentrated solar power, geothermal electricity and heat hydroelectricity and small amounts of tidal and wave power. But what was not so good was nuclear gas, coal, even with carbon capture and bioenergy fuels for example, you have such a short time now to solve these problems where you need to solve 80% of the climate and pollution problems within five years and a hundred percent within around 10 years. So we've got to focus on technologies that are very effective. So this is why we don't want to focus on things like nuclear, which just North America takes 17 to 23 years between planning and operation of a nuclear plant. So even if it was perfect, you can't even put it up in the time needed to solve the whole problem. So it's totally useless going forward. Same with small reactors as well.
Cody Simms (26:16):
Like I said, I want to come back to all your energy mix points of view. Before I do, one of the questions I want to understand more on the a hundred percent wind, water, solar is how you think about new generation and how you think about existing infrastructure, existing generation. There's this famous chart in, I think it's in our world on data that shows the global energy mix over the last 200 years, and it basically just shows that as a society, humanity just continues to add new forms of energy. We almost have completely failed at weaning off of anything. Even biomass is relatively steady from where it was in the 1850s, for example. So I'm curious, I think you've laid out a really good case for the first 30 minutes of this conversation about how and why when the solar and batteries together win economically going forward, how do we deal with all of this infrastructure that's already built that's already got capital allocated against it that has 25 30 year time horizons to it? How do you wean off of that more quickly?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (27:23):
Well, the key is electrification. So we rely on combustion for a lot of our energy for transportation, electricity production for coal burning or gas burning to produce electricity and combustion is really inefficient. So when you electrify, so if you just use wind instead of coal, let's say when you're looking at those graphs from the past, you're usually looking at what's called primary energy, which is the energy embodied in the chemical bonds of a fuel or in the case of wind or hydropower. It's the actual electricity produced before transmission distribution losses. But when you replace coal with wind, when you have coal, only one third of the energy in coal goes to produce electricity. When you burn the coal, so what's called the end use energy, which is in the case of coal, is the electricity production after transmission distribution losses that end use energy is one third the primary energy. So simply by replacing, by electrifying, well by replacing coal with wind, you're reducing your primary energy substantially.
Cody Simms (28:20):
I believe that the question is just how do we as a society, when there's already capital deployed, there are gas pipelines that exist, there are oil well projects that have been put in the ground and are expected to produce for end number of years. Is it feasible that those will shut off early or is it a matter of just stop new projects and allow renewables to win going forward and eventually those will get phased out?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (28:43):
Well, I think any strategy involved, certainly all new technologies going forward are clean, renewable, and then as existing technologies retire, you replace those with renewables and you don't extend the life of existing and then you start aggressively phasing them out as well. Once you've done all the things I just said before, and there's a benefit because it's not like stranded assets because these assets are causing more damage than they're benefiting. So the health and climate costs of these fossil fuels existing infrastructure is so much larger that if we shut them down, we're actually saving society a huge amount of money because of enormous health and climate cost. Just to give you an idea, worldwide, all energy today costs around $11 trillion per year for all energy sectors. That's how much people pay for energy. And in 2050, that's expected to go up to around 17 trillion per year.
(29:28):
But the health cost today based on statistical cost of life and morbidity of all these fossil fuels and bioenergy fuels today is $30 trillion per year. And the 2050 climate cost is expected to be around $30 trillion per year. So add 30 plus 30, that's 60 plus 17. That's $77 trillion per year is the projected what we call social cost of fossil fuels in 2050 versus if you electrify everything and provide the electricity. With wind, water, solar, we not only eliminate the $30 trillion of health costs associated with energy, we eliminate 30 trillion of climate costs. We also reduce the energy requirements about 54% and the cost per unit energy another 15%. So instead of $17 trillion per year in energy, we have about $7 trillion per year in energy and zero health of climate costs. So instead of a total of $77 trillion per year social costs, we have $7 trillion per year social costs.
(30:17):
So we reduce the social costs by $70 trillion per year. And the capital cost of the whole wind water solar system worldwide is about $60 trillion. So divide $60 trillion by $70 trillion per year savings, and it's a less than a one year payback time for this whole system. If you don't believe in health or climate costs, fine, just look at the energy cost savings. It's instead of $17 trillion per year, you're spending 7 trillion. That's a 10 trillion per year savings, divide 60 trillion upfront by $10 trillion per year savings. That's a six year payback time in terms of energy costs. So it's such a benefit. So every year that we're keeping these fossil fuels open, we're just causing society huge costs today. So there's nothing such as a stranded asset. These assets are damaging assets. They're just causing huge amounts of costs to society every year that they stay open and they got to be shut as soon as possible.
Cody Simms (31:06):
Let's talk about your views on the overall clean energy mix. When I think of clean base load power sources, their solar and storage, there's nuclear, there's geothermal, there's natural gas with what is it greater than 95% carbon capture. I think fusion, I guess in the future would be sort of the categories that people lay out as potential forms of clean base load power. But it sounds like you have a very clear opinion that some of those should not be viewed as viable for us to continue to build.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (31:36):
Yeah, well, let's start with carbon capture. So first of all, carbon capture only increases carbon dioxide. It doesn't decrease it, and there's no such thing as a 95% capture rate. I mean, you can do it in theory, you can do it in an isolated test case, but if you look at all the carbon capture plants in the world that are in place, there's not one that has in the annual average more than an 80% capture rate, and you're as low as 10%. So the range is 10 to 80% with half of them below 50%,
Cody Simms (32:02):
And you don't believe those will catch up from a technology perspective the way battery and solar has ultimately gotten more efficient?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (32:08):
No, I mean the technology has been around for decades. Well, because the reason it's lower is not only because of the technology, because you can run the technology continuously and you can get 90% capture rate, but the problem is it's not always run continuously either because the equipment fails or because there's no demand for the carbon dioxide, so they have to shut it down or because over time it decreases, but that's actually not the reason it increases CO2 and you could even have a 95% capture rate and it'll still increase CO2, but I'm just pointing out that it's not even close to 95%. So the gas people, they'll tell you, oh, we can do it at nine five. No, that's in full load continuous laboratory case, but there's no real world case and it's not even close. In fact, the biggest carbon capture facility in the world is in Australia, and in fact their capture efficiency over five years was so low, and if you actually account for the energy used to run the capture equipment on top of that, it was actually just that alone was increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere, not decreasing it.
(33:00):
But the problem is is that the energy requirement, what's called the energy penalty is huge, and that will not change because of thermodynamics. Just to give an example, there's direct air capture where it takes CO2 out of the air and then there's carbon capture where you had equipment to existing coaler power plants, for example, and they both take a huge amount of energy, taking it out of the air takes more energy. In fact, the Iceland plant direct air capture, it was 5,000 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2 from their own CEO. And just to put in perspective, all the world CO2 emissions, the energy generated by all the world CO2 emissions is 3000 kilowatt hours per ton of CO2 emitted worldwide. So in other words, it takes more energy to take CO2 out of the air than it did the energy generator to put it in the air. And so the energy penalty for carbon capture from a plant, let's say from a coal plant, it's like a 25% energy penalty. So whatever the coal plant is producing, you need 25% more coal. You need 25% or more electricity from that coal to just run the carbon capture equipment.
Cody Simms (33:58):
So the depressing thing I'm hearing from you and your point of view on this is regardless of viewing carbon capture as a clean base load power, I'm also hearing you say if that's not feasible, sure, that's how we started this part of the conversation, but I'm also hearing you say it's not feasible to think of this as even a way to reduce existing emissions in the atmosphere. What's in the atmosphere is baked in, is what I'm hearing you say.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (34:17):
It increases, and I'll tell you the reason why in one second, lemme make one more point. So there's an energy penalty of 25% for carbon capture plants, multiply that by three for direct air capture, taking it out of the air. So the key is if you're going to take that much energy, they'll say, oh, we'll use wind to run their carbon capture equipment or solar and therefore we won't be adding to the burden of coal. But it turns out if you take that same wind and solar and just replace the coal plant in the first place, you actually reduce more CO2. So this is why I say carbon capture increases CO2 because the best case you're going to use wind or solar to run that. So there's not an infinite amount of wind or solar technology in place, and every battle of wind or solar, we need to replace a fossil plant.
(34:55):
So if you're using wind and solar to run carbon capture for a coal plant, you're preventing that wind or solar from actually replacing the coal plant. And when you replace the coal plant, you not only eliminate the CO2 from the coal plant, but you eliminate the air pollution in the mining. When you use electricity from wind or solar to run carbon capture, you're reducing CO2 a little bit, but less than if you just replace the coal plat. So therefore you're increasing CO2, but you're not reducing any air pollution or mining or infrastructure or pipelines. You always need pipelines as well for these carbon capture facilities. So it's just a boondoggle. All it is is just extending the life of the fossil fuel industry, increasing CO2, increasing air pollution, increasing fossil mining, fossil infrastructure pipelines, land use degradation. There's just no benefit whatsoever of any carbon capture. It is just a scam. The whole thing is a total, and it's just crazy that people are even proposing it as a solution. It's just a false fake solution. And anybody who says it's a solution, they have no idea what they're talking about.
Cody Simms (35:45):
I'm sure there are people who are doing it out of a belief that it is a good solution. I can't imagine everyone there is doing it as a scam artist.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (35:53):
Well, they're doing it because there are subsidies available. This is the problem. And this happened under the Biden administration as well, and under previous there's been subsidies for carbon capture. And so all these companies are motivated to do it, and they have no idea. They're not scientists, they don't study these things, so they just do it thinking, oh, this is what the government must think because they're giving us subsidies to do it. The problem is the reason that people think this is because the people running the studies early on on carbon capture were mostly from the fossil fuel industry or paid for studies by the fossil fuel industry. And all they would do is look at, okay, well if we capture the CO2, this is what happens. Then they assume like 90% capture rates without actually looking at the data. So yeah, if you just have a theoretical study that says we're going to add carbon capture and we have 90% capture rate, and then usually they even ignore the energy penalty and you can calculate, oh yeah, we get a reduction, but they're not looking at reality. What really occurs is where it's an opportunity cost. What if we did wind instead or solar instead? You'd see you'd get much more reduction than if you use wind and solar to run the carbon capture equipment. So they'd never ran those comparisons.
Cody Simms (36:52):
Alright, let's shift gears. I want to hear your perspective on nuclear. You've been a very outspoken voice saying that nuclear will not solve our problems. And so I'm curious to hear you explain more about your perspective there.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (37:06):
So nuclear, there are seven major problems with it, but it's just impractical to use for any purpose going forward. I mean there's less nuclear output today than there was in 2005 in the world, and there's a reason for that because it's impossible to build nuclear. There's never been a nuclear plant built in history that's taken less than 10 years between planning and operation. And today that's numbers 12 years and the maximum is around 23 years. In North America. In Europe it's 17 to 23 years from planning to operation.
Cody Simms (37:33):
Is China building faster?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (37:35):
No, they're in the 12 to 15 to 17 year range. And just to give you a perspective, last year China built in the whole year of 2024. It built around, I think it was around three 70 year 80 gigawatts of wind and solar. They built 3.9 gigawatts of nuclear. They finished. So they built a hundred times more wind and solar than nuclear and China's building nuclear faster than anybody. And you can see that's hardly anything. But even those reactors, there are still more reactors retiring in the world than being built. So this, it's slow albatross everywhere people think that you can just build this, they're always comparing wind and solar. Nuclear, no, you can put wind and solar up in one to five years. Rooftop solar, you can put up in six months nuclear, like the gel plant in Georgia, the only reactors built in the last 30 years, they took 17 and 18 years respectively.
(38:18):
From planting to operation, they cost 35 billion total for around 2.2 gigawatts. That was close to $16. A watt new wind or solar is $1 a watt. So it's just much higher cost takes forever to build. So who's benefiting from that? Well, it's only the people building them because they keep getting money and then they build half of it and they say they need more money and it gets delayed. This is in Europe, the same thing. The finished plant took 23 years. France Flamanville is taking at least 20 years is still not quite operating yet, at least 20 years. Hinkley is expected to be about 23 years in the uk. These plants, they just take forever. And these small modular reactors are going to be no better.
Cody Simms (38:53):
That going to be my next question. The small modular reactor, the idea there is you assemble them in a factory and then you bring them onsite and deploy them so you reduce your construction time and costs substantially.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (39:03):
Yeah, that was in theory, but in fact, there's nobody who's actually planning to build 'em in a factory anymore. That was the original theory. But we used to have small reactors before we had large reactors. But the reason we went to large reactors is economies of scale because it's much more efficient. It takes less concrete per unit energy output. So it's much more efficient to have a large reactor. So now they forgot about the past from the 1950s and sixties where they're trying these small reactors. There's no reason to think they're going to be any different. But the other problem with these things is it's not only cost and delays. You've got weapons proliferation and the meltdown risk. So one and a half percent of all reactors ever built have melted down. Several countries have developed nuclear weapons secretly under the guise of civilian nuclear energy programs.
(39:38):
And you can see right now in Iran, that's what they've been doing. That's why we just had a war over this. And that cost is part of the nuclear cost because the thing is, it's well known that nuclear energy proliferation leads to nuclear weapons proliferation. So if we want a more dangerous world have these, especially smaller reactors, whether you're shipping them on a ship anywhere in the world, it's not that the reactor itself can be used as a weapon, but what they do is it gives them a reason to import uranium from the uranium rod. You can harvest plutonium and you can also then centrifuge to uranium to higher percentages of uranium that can be used in a nuclear weapon. So weapons grade uranium. So that's what all these centrifuges are just they take time, but the dangerous part is they're harvesting plutonium from the fuel rod, so there's no need for it. I mean, why take that risk? Those aren't the only risk. I mean, nuclear is not carbon free. It's like nine to 37 times the carbon equivalent emissions as wind per unit energy
Cody Simms (40:25):
Because of the baked in concrete or why?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (40:28):
Well, there's three things. There's the construction. I mean the plants in Vogel in Georgia, they built this, as I mentioned, 17, 18 years from planning to operation construction was about 10 years. During that construction, they laid enough concrete for a sidewalk from Miami to Seattle. So they put in all this CO2 in the atmosphere before a single kilowatt hour was generated. And so that itself will take years to recoup all the CO2 that's already been admitted. So there's construction, but there's also uranium mining and refining is a continuous process that takes a lot of energy. That takes energy, and then there's emissions from the heat and water vapor. So nuclear reactors emit water vapor, they release heat and it's not a large amount, but between the two of 'em it's around five grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. And then the biggest part though is the opportunity cost while you're waiting around for the reactor, it takes 17 years, let's say, versus wind. Let's say it takes three years. That's a 14 year difference. And during that time, you're emitting the background grid, so they call that opportunity cost emissions. That's about half of all the emissions. So you count the actual direct emissions plus the opportunity cost emissions. It's nine to 37 times the CO2 equivalent that's went. And plus you got all this uranium you have to store for hundred thousand years. And when you account for that, there's a lot of energy required to store that.
Cody Simms (41:37):
Let's hear your perspective on fusion.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (41:39):
It doesn't exist at any commercial scale, so I don't really look at technologies that don't exist or aren't close to existing. I mean, it's definitely not as dangerous as fission. It doesn't have all the weapons proliferation problems and doesn't have the meltdown risks, but it's like one of those technologies that's kind of vaporware. There's a lot of talk and people try to get a lot of money for it, but unless there's actually a prototype or something that's actually producing something at a good cost,
Cody Simms (42:02):
I saw a Google entered a power purchase agreement today with Commonwealth Fusion for 200 megawatts. You think this is all just wishful thinking for the future, essentially?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (42:09):
Yeah, I think it's wishful thinking.
Cody Simms (42:11):
And then geothermal obviously, I don't know if that was in your original a hundred percent wind water solar thesis or if you've adopted it into the thesis as the technology has matured, but interested to hear your thoughts on geothermal.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (42:22):
Oh no. Geothermal is great and with enhanced geothermal where you can go deeper and it expands the area over which we can do geothermal. And it seems like right now already the cost is projected to be pretty competitive. So I think that'll be really helpful. It's actually helpful in particular for things like data centers that are off grid. There are a lot of proposed data centers that they can't get grid connections. There are a lot of queues for the grid, so they want to build a microgrid. So actually drilling deep right near the data center and you can have a nice geothermal that's a potential source of electricity that's pretty constant over time. So you don't need so much storage if your data center is providing the needs of cost of electricity. But on the large scale, we just finished a study looking at what are the benefits and costs of enhanced geothermal on a hundred percent renewables around the world. And the conclusion was, well, it all depends on the eventual cost of the enhanced geothermal. So we looked at it, well, if it's low cost, medium cost or high cost, if it's low cost, obviously it'll do better than if it's high cost. But in all cases it definitely helps. There's really a little downside to it. So I don't have objection to that. It doesn't take out much land area either.
Cody Simms (43:21):
Well, a question I have hearing, the way you've described your point of view on all of these different power sources is different pools of dollars naturally want to invest in different things. Every pool of dollar doesn't always want to invest in the most efficient thing because dollars may be raised to support a certain type of technology or dollars may be raised to support a local industry that is creating tax incentives to create some local job base or employment base or what have you. And so where is the issue in a pool of money going to nuclear as opposed to wind and solar, for example, or to r and d budgets to see if they can crack carbon capture, assuming those dollars weren't ever going to go to wind, solar and battery anyway, it's a separate pool of money. Do you see that as problematic or you just think it's creating waste and hot air in the industry? Help me understand your point of view on all of that.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (44:15):
Yeah, there's a really bad thing. We only have five years to solve the entire problem, and every dollar we're wasting on a useless technology is just not helping at all. And it squeezes money because there's nothing such as that. If you spend a dollar on nuclear, well, it wouldn't have gone to wind or solar. Well, what we're seeing is that if you're spending a dollar on nuclear, that's one less dollar in the budget available to not spend. So they're saying, well, we need to find something else to cut so they end up cutting more wind and solar because they want to support nuclear. That's exactly what's happening. I mean, nuclear is being propped up right now in this federal budget, and wind and solar are being cut because they're trying to find cuts for this propping up of nuclear. So even though they know nuclear is useless, I mean, there's no nuclear plant that's been built in the past 30 years except for vocal, and that was an albatross.
(44:55):
And so they know this is useless and there's no way this going to advance. We've had nuclear since the 1950s and nothing has advanced at all. It's gone downhill, and yet they're still wasting money on it, and they know this, so it's not helping at all. And carbon captures even worse because that increases co2 and there's nothing that's ever going to change that fact. They've got to focus on things that work. We don't have time to waste times on ridiculous, crappy technologies that we know are never going to help with climate, air pollution or energy security. So we've got to keep our eye on the ball and focus and everything else is excused. We're just paying people off because they're supporters. I would like to think that, okay, they're just not aware of how bad these technologies are, but at this point they are aware.
(45:32):
They should be aware. There's been a lot of published information on it. So I think at this point, it's just bad faith to keep investing in nuclear carbon capture. Bioenergy fuels, electro fuels because there are four technologies being produced pushed by the fossil fuel industry, and then there's a couple pushed by the bioenergy industry, and there's one by nuclear. So for fossil fuels, it's carbon capture, direct air capture, blue hydrogen and electro fuels. Those are all constructs of the fossil fuel industry, entirely useless from a climate air pollution or energy security point of view. Biofuels and biomass are being pushed by bioenergy industry and then small and large nuclear reactors by the nuclear industry. These are all completely useless waste of time technologies, and it's been shown over and over again, and they'll never help one bit. They can provide energy, sure, but they don't help with people's health. They don't help with climate, they don't help with energy security, and they're not sustainable in the long run.
Cody Simms (46:19):
What do you think the next decade looks like?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (46:21):
Well, around the world, people are just going to bypass the US so this is going to happen. We're going to a wind water solar world, whether people like it or not, and it's just a matter of time because there's no fuel cost. All these other technologies, there's a fuel cost, but with wind and solar, there's zero fuel cost. So obviously it's going to be cheaper and it's already cheaper. And we can see that in China, they're waxing everybody's butt already with just less five months, 244 gigawatts of wind and solar. So it was just incredible how fast things have gone.
Cody Simms (46:46):
Professor Jacobson, thanks for joining. You have a clearly strong point of view. I appreciate you sharing all the data that you've built over your career to help you articulate that point of view, and hopefully our listeners had some interesting ahas today along the way. Anything else you want to share before we go?
Dr. Mark Jacobson (47:01):
I think I've said quite a bit, so I think I'm good, but thanks.
Cody Simms (47:04):
Well, thanks. For your time today. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Mark Jacobson (47:07):
Alright, thanks Cody. I appreciate it.
Cody Simms (47:09):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast at MCJ. We back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us@mcj.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter@newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks and see you next episode.