 There's a lot of romanticism around being self-sufficient and I can manage my energy system in my own house. And yes, that's awesome. And it can also have environmental benefits. But at the same time, you might, the external implications on the rest of your community, the rest of your region and people sort of sharing the electricity grid, the infrastructure might not be positive. So it's important to think of how do we manage this? Dr. Ola Olson is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Ola is a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute where his work is focused on social technical transitions primarily in the fields of energy and climate change mitigation. His research looks at the interplay between technology, business models and public policy and how different factors across these areas need to align to make something a viable solution. One of his key interests at the moment is trying to understand the role of different forms of scale economies and technological transition. Ola, welcome to the podcast. It's so great to have you. Good to be here. Good to be with you. You are mainly focused in just energy or is it just in general energies? Well, it's an interesting question because my background is really multifaceted. I started out as some sort of engineer. Then I have a PhD in Forest Resource Management, but dissertation was mainly based on economics. Since starting at the SCI, I guess my core area was looking at the energy, but I've also been doing a lot to work on climate change adaptation and working with land use issues, agriculture and forestry, but now increasingly drifting back to my key fields of interest, which is climate change mitigation and energy issues and also to a certain extent heavy industry. So it's a very big area, very broad topic as well, but it's so desperately needs to be addressed. You have, I don't know, recent is probably not the right word, but you started this perspective series of articles and research papers that you present on Stockholm Environment Institute website and an impossible tangle of things we can't understand, the bigger the better, defection and death spirals, defecation and death spirals, sorry. And basically, you've written tons of others, so you've done articles and research papers on Sub-Saharan Africa and on wash issues, as well as you've had some different type of studies clear of dating back to 2016. You've been doing this for a while, you obviously academic, you've studied these areas, you've got the experience. And so whether it's preaching to the choir or not, you've kind of been saying, okay, here's the situation, here's the research I've done, let's put some of this in practice, we've seen some of these models work, we need to think of these upcoming factors. And then bam, we were hit with 12 months of the craziest time ever, pandemic, the COVID, Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, the inauguration, lockdowns, Brexit, on and on, I could go with all the world problems that we have. But what I'm asking is how have you weathered all this craziness and were any of those models, those things, the work that you did, the talks that you gave, the papers that you wrote, anything that helped you weather this crazy time a little bit better than usual? And maybe what bubbled to the surface that you say, wow, there's some amazing learning lessons that I got out of this period. You know, moving into 2020, I think I had like a New Year's resolution that I would travel less in 2020. So that worked out pretty well. So I think that's, from that perspective, I think thinking back on this last year from a personal perspective, I think may have been net positive because my life has sort of slowed down in a positive way, a lot less moving around the world. I was doing a one hour and a half commute every day, you made one direction. So three hours of commuting every day. Obviously don't do that now. So just the realization for me that behavioral change can go really quickly. You know, there's always this tension in environmentalism and environmental research around sort of, are you a techno fixer or a techno optimist or sort of optimist in terms of how people can change? And I was certainly more on the techno optimist. I wasn't that optimistic about behavioral change before, but if you have the right incentives and you have a pandemic, obviously you can see behavioral change going really quickly as well. So I think it's really impressive to show or impressive to see how all these digital tools that were the basic infrastructure and everything was there two years ago as well. But people were still flying around the world. I had a very clear example. I think in April last year, I was supposed to go to Sao Paulo for like a six day meeting. And then it turns out we could do that meeting in like two times two hours of Zoom meetings. So in terms of my point of view, not having to do that trip, I'm not, you know, I would love to go to Sao Paulo, but for me, the whole logistics of getting away from my family, I was getting pretty sick of that. So to me, that was like a pretty good way of doing things. And so are you telling me you feel that there is a better operating system, a better model for some of the inefficiencies of how we've done work in the past? And were there any specific applications of things that you've taught or spoke about? Because you talk a lot about off grid energy, you talk a lot about these different perspectives on how we see some of our world's problems. Obviously you're living in Sweden, so you've probably got it pretty darn good on infrastructure and things there. But are there some applications that can help even those in Sweden, whether a pandemic or crazy times like this, a lot better and emerge different? I mean, I'll just give an example. For me, I've been speaking about climate environment and food for many decades. And my phone was off the hook. My emails were blowing up. People were like, we didn't listen to you all these years, help us. We need to speak to you. We need some help. What can we do? We need to change our system. We need to find a better system that gives us a little resilience and works through other times. Did you see anything that's similar to that? I think resilience is a really key word. We did some research a couple of years back looking into how Swedish export companies dealt with their supply chains and how exposed they were to disruptions, basically. So we obviously focused on if you have climate change increasing risks and severity of extreme weather events. So how does that, how exposed are Swedish export industries to that and how to what extent are they thinking about that? And when we did a couple of maybe 15 or 20 interviews and most of them aren't sort of at that time, this was five years back so weren't thinking that much about this, to be honest. Even though they had experienced these kinds of disturbances before, with the Fukushima had a really important, really strong education, a lot of global supply chains. There was a really large flood in Bangkok 10 or 15 years back that sort of took out a large chunk of the world's production of hard drives which had also a lot of spillover all over the world. But even though they didn't really have that much of risk management systems and maybe not as good understanding of how complicated their supply chains were. So I think that's something that's come up on the engine a lot in the last year, nothing else. And I think there's a lot of the thought process around how do you structure an economy, a global economy that's as complex as this. I think that whole thought process has been accelerated in the last year to a really significant extent. I think that's super valuable. We could dive into a lot more deeper subjects when of some of the things that you've brought up just in that kind of weathering the pandemic and what you've seen of these supply chains and things around the world. Specifically, what's for me, I live in Hamburg, Germany. I'm from the United States, but I've seen a lot of bubbling up where there's been some extreme reliance on Asia and the products that Asia does that we're no longer flowing quite as they used to, but also that even with Brexit around food, there is now the lockdowns and no migrant workers to harvest food and other major issues that we've seen around the world that there are some pretty big holds and not just our supply chain, but overall our operating system, our global operations worldwide. And I think it's brought a lot to light and bubble to the surface that we've been able to see. You come from a country of noble laureates, Stockholm Resilience Center, obviously the Stockholm Environmental Institute is just up there and wonderful. And I really deal with you guys on other programs with MIT and other of your colleagues and the standard of what you guys do around the world for sustainability and awareness is par none. There is this big question that we've really been faced with in lockdown and during the pandemic. And that is this view of globalization or global citizenry, a world without borders, nations, division, humanity, one from another, but also the way we look at our supply chains, the globalization of it all and whether we've already had it for decades or if it's something that we need to really improve and look at it from different angles. What are your thoughts or feelings? Not just as a researcher from SEI, but also just in general on your views and travelings around the world and your research about global citizenry, about globalization and the divisions and nations, humanity of one from another. Yeah, that's a good question. I've been doing a lot of thinking about globalization because it's sort of a natural conclusion of a market economy that you tie things together and you have more and more participants and actors as the global economy grows and you can have a specialization in specific regions and so on. And there's benefits to that in terms of efficiencies and cost reductions and stuff like that, but there's also the more efficient efficiency in a supply chain or a economic system often tends to be connected with a sort of, you know, you want to reduce slack, right? So you make a system more efficient by reducing slack, but that slack can be pretty valuable. For example, if there's a pandemic or, and you see that in how you organized is an interesting discussion in Sweden as well around healthcare. So you have a healthcare system that's very, very efficient and it works very good. If nothing happens, that's out of the ordinary. But of course, in healthcare, everything, you know, things happen out of the ordinary all the time. So then the system is not that resilient to unexpected changes. And so I think that's something that really needs to be considered. When you think of it, the global economy as well, yeah, well, there are efficiencies and there are cost benefits to have, but also how do we, can we sort of have that cake and eat the sort of resilient cake at the same time? And I'm thinking of that as a, you know, as a person as well. Obviously you're part of a lot of different contexts. You know, I guess my family is the sort of the one that I'm most centered in, but then of course in sort of expanding circles and the global economy and the, you know, the rest of the seven billion or whatever we are, obviously also I'm part of that clique, be it quite a large clique as well. Absolutely. And you bring up a couple of topics that come up quite a bit with that globalization. And that is systems, systems thinking and resilience. And those two, I don't think they can be separated from each other because I think without systems or dynamic systems, dynamics, you really can't have that real resilience. You're only focusing in on one or two silos or certain facets of a complex system. And then that, that deters you from having true resilience. And as Carl Sagan said at once, a couple of times actually that there's this new consciousness arising that sees the world as a single organism and an organism divided amongst itself or in conflict or fighting amongst itself is doomed. And that, even though we're, you know, we hear that the Amazon is the lungs of our planet and which can be misconstrued because it's that oxygen that's really created there remains there, doesn't get all over, but in some specs there's so much that ties to the bigger ecosystem and biodiversity of our planet that ties that systems together. In 2018, all international organizations switched from this linear siloed approach to solving human suffering and our global grand challenges to really this strong push towards systems dynamic thinking, systems view of life thinking, these complexity, embracing complexity in systems modeling. How has you as SEI your organization seen this switch or transition occur? I personally in the United Nations saw all sorts of dynamic models, systems models pop up, not just with the SDGs with other like fishing industries, farming industries where they put them into a dynamic model. And then the World Economic Forum came up with transformational maps on their website, which are basically systems modeling of how everything ties together. How has you as SEI and how have you seen that in Sweden that that's been embraced or pushed forward as well the systems way of thinking of the world? Yeah, well to me that's just sort of, it feels like, oh finally everyone's getting right because I've been a systems person all my life basically. I've been sort of everything, I've been sort of coming to point if I would find a topic and I sort of, I dig a little bit into it, but then I get to a point where it's, now it's, now I'm digging too deep and then I try, oh interesting now is how does this connect to this and this and this and then I'll jump to something else and try to dig into that and at a certain point to sort of have a sort of decent view of how everything fits together, not everything obviously, but more and more things fit together. And I think these are the, you're not going to be able to solve any grand challenges with having this perspective at the same time, you're not going to be able to solve all challenges in the same way, or you can optimize on having everything in its sort of highest possible properties in terms of quality of life or climate change mitigation or anything because there's always going to be this kind of conflicts and I had an interesting discussion earlier this morning about forestry and I think how, and climate, so because that's one sector where there might, this there's just, I think inherently an assumption that what's good for the climate is good for biodiversity, is good for water and so on, but that's not really, if you try, if you really want to understand that's not really always, they don't always go in sync. So something that's very important for climate might not be beneficial for biodiversity. I know there's, there are like some emerging conflicts, for example, in California right now where they are wanting to site these really large solar parks in the desert, which is obviously going to be very beneficial for in terms of increasing the proportion of renewable energy on the grid, but at the same time, you know, there are these desert tortoises there, there are really endangered species and you have these sensitive regions in terms of biodiversity and those are not going to like being covered by a couple of hectares of solar panels. So you're going to have these kinds of conflicts and I think it's important to realize that it's not going to be smooth sailing all the time. So you're going to have to manage these sort of trade-offs in a lot of different contexts and just sort of be aware of that and that's just two of them and if you just look across the 17 SDGs, the system of development goals, you know, you're going to have to combine all those, you're going to have a lot of instances where you see, right, well, this is a real conflict here. You know, we can't have both of these at the same time or at least we have to rethink a lot of our systems to get to that point. I like how you put that into perspective. It's really almost a balancing act. So I like to talk a lot about quantum computing and, you know, when they try to describe quantum computing, they're like saying it's both on and off at the same time, zeroes and ones at the same time, you know, both states. And a lot of the things that we do for environment and ecology, trying to solve these global grand challenges, there's always two sides of the coin and, you know, there's one way to use the exponential function in horrific ways. And there's another way that's how you solve it is by using it in a very positive way with the right solutions and innovations. And this really brings me so nicely to your series on perspectives because you, a lot of it has to do with like these electrification and one of your papers, you really kind of give us this example. And I've been to many events and you have as well. And that's how you wrote about it, where people will show you the image or satellite image of the Earth that they've done and show you the lights that might, you know, on the map type of a thing and say, okay, well, this is the electrification or this is the lights that we have around the world and major cities and so on. And it can really sometimes be a misleading picture on how infrastructure electrification and things are and maybe not give us the right image. And so I would like you to more specifically tell us how we should look at that and go into your article a little bit about how we drill down and get the facts of it. And then I want to go into some of your solutions and your ideas of what's emerging. And I've seen this as well as I work with a FAO and World Food Program and the refugee crisis and how they just do camps, you know, get basic needs to camps as well as rural areas in India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, whatever. So I'd appreciate that. Yeah. So when we talk about the sustainability development goals, as I said, I'm the, I have like, I consider myself an energy person if I'm going to classify myself as something. So I really think the one that's SDG number seven is called sustainable energy for all. I think that's, to me, it's like solve that one and everything else is going to be a lot easier. And also from a pure use in quantum computing, if you think from a purely physical perspective, from a pure physics perspective, you know, nothing, you know, energy is and everything. So I think, and what's been emerging over the last five years probably is this idea that if you want to resolve climate change issues and, you know, a lot of the other problems around energy, you know, pollution and whatnot, the sort of the slogan electrify everything has been really taking on. Yeah, no, no. And as always, you should qualify things, but I think electrify most things. I think that's a good way of getting to a better world in terms of energy. So how do we do that then? And I think here's what's been really, well, first of all, one reason why we have this electrify everything idea is that you have seen these sort of super rapid cost reductions in solar and in wind and in batteries over the last 10 years. You know, obviously those technologies were available 25 years or 30 years as well, but you, you know, you didn't really get to the scale where you could sort of have these proper cost reductions until primary recently. So it's become more and more clear that, you know, these are some really, this really good stuff happening here. And we can sort of, if we want to get to a sort of, you know, have a chance of meeting our climate change mitigation emissions, you know, this building on this positive trend now is probably going to be the way to do it. And what I've found interesting is that we started looking at this, I guess, four or five years ago, well, I started looking at, plenty of people have looked at it before me, but trying to understand, okay, so well, we see these kinds of cost reductions in some of these energy technologies, but we also see a lot of energy technology where you don't see any cost reductions at all. So if you look at hydropower, you know, people say, well, renewable energy has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 10 years. Well, that's not true. If you look at hydro, that hasn't gotten any cheaper in the last 10 years. If you look at biomass, base power, that hasn't gotten any cheaper. So there seems to be some specific kinds of technologies that have become cheaper. So then we try to think about, okay, what are their characteristics? And one characteristic that we sort of, what I've sort of thought about them is that, you know, you don't deploy these in really large individual chunks. You build lots of them and you sort of deploy them in large numbers. And I thought, well, that's interesting because that's not, it's not just, it's not renewable versus fossil. It just seems to be a completely different way of setting things up. And that's what we've been sort of doing a lot of digging in the last couple of years, just trying to understand, okay, what does this mean and what happens, how do you set up a system that has these kinds of properties where you deploy in large numbers rather than building sort of a large individual units? And how does that, when you try to integrate these two systems where one is based on, you know, the existing system in terms of electricity is based on you have a large production units to be at a nuclear power station, be at the coal power station under, and then you have like power lines going all over the world or at least within countries. But if you have a system where you sort of solar, for example, a solar panel, you know, if you, I think an interesting example is if you're going to build, say, a one gigawatt power station, that's a big power station. And if you use nuclear technology, you maybe have one or two reactors. It can be one reactor. But if you're going to build a one gigawatt solar power station from solar, then you'll put in, you know, a couple of hundred thousand individual panels. And then we start thinking, so why would you not put in if you're going to build a nuclear power station? Why don't you build one? Why is it just one reactor? Why isn't it 400,000 small reactors? Or if you're going to build a power station, why did you make it one big boiler, one big chimney? Why didn't you build it 400,000 smaller? So try to understand that dynamic and what are the, if there seems to be a fairly different logic between, you know, solar on the one hand and then this other sort of traditional energy can also be on the other hand. And if you think about how electricity systems are based around one kind of technology that you build in concentrated large units and then you, you know, you have wires going all over compared to one where you, it doesn't seem to be that much value in putting a lot of sort of production at the same point. So what we've been trying to understand now is basically there are clear benefits in terms of, you know, again, seeing electrification and energy as a key enabler of sustainable development. You know, this opens up a lot of possibilities for countries and regions that aren't electrified yet because obviously you don't need to wait until someone builds a large power station in the middle of the country and you build the transmission cables and the whole distribution network and that, you know, that takes forever. And it's super complicated. It's super complicated in a well-functioning democracy with, you know, solid institutions. It's like, you know, a lot of troubles building power lines in Sweden. But, you know, imagine doing it in a country that has fragile institutions, maybe no poorly functioning legal system. It's going to be super complicated and it might not happen in a lifetime. So having this alternative way of setting up electricity system, I think it can be hugely beneficial in terms of development and all the sort of spilloers that you can get from that. In your research, did you see there's over the past few years there's been just enormous data and information coming out. How many solar panels are going up every minute in India and Bangladesh and on and on around the world. And in a lot of cases, those are just these, you know, like one single small solar panel up on a hut. That's how they're getting the numbers up. It's not the kind of solar panels that we see from the western world where we're thinking, you know, this big rooftop panel. It's usually something else. In your data, are you seeing that that is really overtaking taking these large scale operations where the smaller micro grid off grid solar panels are much more incoming as well as other renewable off grid type of technologies for developing countries for refugee camps for places struggling. Yeah, well, I think the first thing to realize is that the panels themselves aren't that different. So you probably have the same kind of basic design even if you have one individual panel or if you put 50 of them on the roof like I have in my home or if you put four million in a huge park in the desert somewhere. And I think that's part of the success. So you have one standardized design that's modular and you can just chunk them out in huge numbers which gives you super understanding. So it's super easy in terms of design and just sort of increase numbers. So I think that's an important aspect to be aware of but in terms of how they are deployed, you know, there's that's another interesting question actually. So when you talk about electrification and that's not a sort of a binary measure. So, you know, there are plenty of places in the world where you do have electricity at certain points at day, but then, you know, we have regular blackouts or you have brownouts and you have you might have, you know, at certain points of times in the evening, you know, the light goes out and then it'll be one and a half minutes of darkness and then someone turns on a diesel generator and the light comes back on. So, you know, that's obviously a poor quality of electricity access. So, and the same goes for if you look at what solar can do in terms of providing electricity, there's also what's been very widespread in the last decade probably is these kinds of solar home systems where you have a solar panel and then you have associated that you might have a couple of lanterns maybe and a phone charger something like that. So that's incredibly beneficial. It takes away a lot of the need to burn or other fuels that might burn pretty dirty. It takes away the need to do that. But that's just sort of the first step. If you want to take it to the next level and you want to have something like a refrigerator or even if you want to go to electric cooking, for example, that requires sort of a, it's a quite big step change in terms of the demand for the power that you need and it goes to show that you can get pretty far in terms of providing basic services from a solar-based system just to have the lighting in the phone charger but if you want to get all the kinds of energy services that we have in the sort of industrialized and sort of rich part of the world it's not going to be easy but it's still super interesting and super important to understand how the route to get to a proper level of decent electrification how do we do that building on this model where you sort of might add one solar panel first and then you get a little bit of electricity and then you can build it again modularly from that. And it's something that we have to sort of rethink how electricity systems are set up because the inherent logic is quite different. But at the same time it's also forced you to be aware of some of the vast differences in terms of energy is such an enabler of development and economic activity and so on and the vast differences in terms of energy access I think one really clear example that as we were looking at occasion I think they were setting up a mini grid in some pretty small village in Tanzania I think and I think there were the mini grid total output of the mini grid was six kilowatts and I think they were maybe a thousand people living in the village and six kilowatts and I have 15 kilowatts on my roof No, so Crazy 15 kilowatts on my roof for people living here and six kilowatts for a mini grid it was supposed to cover the whole but there's so much left to do there I have a lot of friends who do different expeditions around the world one of them is a Himalayan expedition where they actually lug solar panels up to up the mountains to different villages to get them some form of electricity and lighting so that they can work and function better, study, learn do all sorts of things differently one of the points that you mentioned in your different papers and part of this whole series that you do on perspectives is really that this western world this weird society of developed countries who have the grids, who have the infrastructure who most of them have put a lot of the cabling and infrastructure undergrounds there's still some that are above grounds but that is a much different view than in other parts of the world and even in developing parts just for example, I live in Germany Germany has a law that any kind of renewable energy whether it's wind or solar has to be connected to the grid, it can't be you always have to be connected to the grid if you produce more than you use that it goes back to the grid that it's all kind of controlled and regulated and other countries don't have that you could have a cabin or a garden house or whatever else and that requirement probably different in certain parts of the world and in developing countries whether we're talking like Tanzania and Africa, different places in Africa India, certain places in Asia that really the fact is they don't even have the infrastructure there is no grid there's not even the micro grid in some cases there and it's usually these entangled wires like crazy Bangkok the wire spaghetti if they have something is you'd have to be an Italian electrical chef to understand their electrification electrification of their grid is just crazy but that there are so many emerging technologies so many new organizations coming out with actually even old technologies of solar panels wind energies these pup wind things for roof that are just popping up all over for small micro grids small micro solutions for different areas there's a company out of Germany is called Solar Con stands for solar container they provide solar panels inside a container that's like a total off the grid I think it's more than 30,000 kilowatt hours a year that it can provide which in the US I think it's something like four to five families or maybe even less than the US uses a little bit more than the global average but there are some solutions and the biggest one that I've seen to date is IKEA and India and their Asian operations are really started selling solar panels like crazy enabling those do-it-yourselfers to take those home to whatever situation their home their garden to start to get lighting and change that and take control of those basic needs or put the control of basic needs back into that because there aren't any matching infrastructural grids policies in place for people what do you do now okay is that allowed is that not allowed how do they connect to the grid and people are getting very creative to use those in different ways and in your in your perspective this impossible tangle of things that we can't understand and that there's it goes a little bit deeper into some of those off the grid areas as well that I that I really liked and I thought that are important for us to kind of get into another mode of thinking how do we because it's a different form of systems thinking it's a different form of resilience which we touched upon in the beginning how do we get into that mode no matter where we live that we start to think hey the only one responsible for my basic needs and I meet my basic needs is me that we start need to start thinking how can we ensure that no matter what time or whenever that in the future we're not just have those basic needs Matt but that we're thinking sustainably resiliently that it'll be there not damage human health in our planet can you go in any more about what your topic says about those solutions no I think that's I think you raised some really interesting questions there so it's there are positives and negatives here so what what it does yes it does allow you to for example put solar on your rooftop if you have a house and you and you have the financial means meaning you can you know you need to buy less and less power from the grid at the same time that in itself sort of might strengthen already existing inequity aspect so again I think I think if bring out California again because I think it's a very interesting for for for lots of different reasons but the situation there that you have with with the wildfires in the last couple of years and how they've been really strongly connected to the power transmission grid which has been sort of responsible for a lot of the fires so they what they're doing now is that you know first of all you can get power outages from the fires themselves but also the they've started sort of doing this public safety shutouts where you basically in advance turned off the shutdown the power so that the power doesn't cause a wildfire they have rolling blackouts but they also have these shutdowns because of fires exactly so a lot of people are and of course California is a really sunny place so with a large solar system and a if you add some battery storage to that it's it's feasible it's not going to be cheap but it's feasible to be completely off grid and a lot of people are really starting to to investigate that route more seriously and that's something that's clearly viable if you have the financial means as I said you know but if you and so you can sort of and next time there's a public safety shutouts and well then you know I've got my solar and I got my battery and I know I'm doing fine whereas your neighbor down the street you might not know be as well off or might not have sort of the economic possibilities that is not going to it's going to have a power outage that in itself sort of creates a new kind of inequity that we haven't really seen to the same extent in electricity markets before because or in electricity systems because it's you know it tends to be like the power goes out and you know it goes out for everyone you know it's very you know some people obviously have like these diesel generators in your backyard but that's not that's you know you don't want to avoid that but so what happens then if the this leads to something that we that's called the utility death spiral so if you have poor quality on the grid and some people who have the financial means choose to go completely off grid and then you have one less customer paying paying the sort of upkeep of the electricity grid which means you have less money going into the grid so you might need to raise your tariffs meaning that it makes even more sense for the next person to go off the grid and then then that person goes off the grid and you have to increase your tariffs again be into another another another this sort of death spiral for the utilities and in you know whether this is going to happen I think there's a risk in some places where you have really good solar resources and a grid that's really struggling like in California but when you're on this route you have also these risk of creating these inequities where where you see that well some people have this sort of financial means to go off grid and some people don't and who what's going to happen to those and how do we resolve this so in that way I think it's important to see that yes there are important opportunities being created by this new technology becoming cheaper and cheaper and then you know at the same time as this the cost of these upkeep of the power transmission and distribution system that sort of goes up and maybe jumps a little bit as you invest in wildfire protection whatever at the same time you see the cost of solar just continuing down cost of batteries continuing down so at some point when these meets you know there's going to be clear tensions rising in terms of how you manage our electricity systems especially in these kinds of locations we have the right geographic conditions. What are your thoughts on the problems that you see could be arising what are you trying to tell us by that are you telling us there's going to be a shift there's got to be a change or what are we not prepared for what what's kind of the message I don't know it's it's super complicated I think it's just important to start thinking about this because there's a lot of romanticism around being self-sufficient and you know I can manage my my energy system in my in my own house and and yes that's that's awesome and it can also have environmental benefits but at the same time you're you might the external implications on the rest of your community rest of your region and people sort of sharing the electricity grid the infrastructure is might not be positive so it's important to think of how do we manage this because I'm certain that you can you can manage it in a way that's that's that it's comes out beneficial for everyone but you have to think this through and it's not that these especially you know you seen the where we are now in terms of costs of solar and batteries but that's not going to stop you know these they're going to continue to get less expensive whereas there is highly likely my point in my viewpoint as well at least that sort of the whole the whole large grid based system is going to sort of have a slightly upward trending cost curve so these tensions will will arise in more and more locations as we go along I absolutely agree with you a lot of people didn't really understand especially the reporters who were reporting Elon Musk battery day kind of announcement they thought okay we're waiting for this new battery and really and there wasn't a new battery what he says is we're improving the way the giga factory works and it's not no longer a giga factory it's going to be a terror factory so we've increased the amount of batteries that are efficiency how we produce and so instead of just producing a gig a gig a lot of energy of batteries we can do a terawatt and and that is a true game changer and that's why I absolutely know that curve is is going to come sooner than later there was another pinnacle book that came out I believe it was the end of last year during the pandemic from Mark C Jacobson I don't know if you're familiar with him he's the big energy guru in the United States I believe it's a Stanford University but he's spoken everywhere he's kind of I think he's on one of the energy boards for the government as well and then there's another one it's called revolutionary power from Shalana Baker she just became the department of deputy director of the department of energy for the for the United States under Biden Harris administration and she was actually on the podcast and she's talking about a lot of the inequities even from renewable energy how some of the inequities on indigenous people on people locally how it's a wonderful beautiful thing but there's a lot of encroachments and a lot of issues that can arise out of that and that we're I think globally and though we're suffering a very high Niveau here in the developed world for sure but in the in the developing countries they really have the crappiest politics of crappiest infrastructures they're just not prepared they're you know we're talking about how do we get a renewable energy and electrification how do we get them to another form of development and there's all sorts of factors and issues that come in that they're just hampering them to make that switch or hampering them to help them on this transition I I see and this is what I read out and I'd like to find out from you what and obviously you don't have all the answers but kind of what your thoughts and feelings are I believe this transition to self empowerment of kind of an off-grid mentality because there is a cost for kerosene there is a cost for using fossil fuels even in a bad infrastructure in a developed world and if they they start to make this realization as the rest of the world does that some of the off-grid solutions that are renewable whether it's ambient water harvesting or solar water harvesting or solar energy or even these wind donkeys that you know pretty small scale that are generating a substantial amount of energy that are really popping up in different areas to apply those the law even the short-hand long-term benefit of that transition may be an initial hit slightly but it's actually a better better model long-term with a lot more resilience for them to to kind of be a people shift and how infrastructures work because those infrastructures are getting tell me if I'm wrong that's in the past we've been looking for our government our institutions to deliver those infrastructures and a lot of places are disappointed they're just not coming they're not up to speed with our exponentially growing world and so I see that shift of places like IKEA offering solar panels just they've just put into their mix these on a small scale these in-home vertical farms that you can do some sprouting and farming but now they've done it to even bigger scale so that small communities can growth food off the grid with renewable energy on their own you know so they're taking care of the basic needs you know yeah well I think I think it's a matter of us not fully realizing how you know so I think that international energy agency said a couple of maybe probably last year that sort of solar is the new king of energy markets and if we sort of assume that that's going to be continuing in the future so we're going to have a global electricity system that's increasingly dominated by solar and I think that that's we're certainly going towards that and in a large extent then we also have to rethink how the logic of solar as a dominant electricity generation resource how that logic can sort of spill over into other kinds of technologies and other kinds of how we set up our economies and set up our supply chains because it doesn't make as much it might not make as much sense to concentrate stuff in one location and then transport it all over the world as I read some interesting research a couple of weeks ago on fertilizer production for example so fertilizer is now produced nitrogen fertilizer produced via natural gas and you have this large petrochemical facilities where you produce natural gas but you can also produce what you need for natural gas or for fertilized production is hydrogen and of course you can produce hydrogen from just electricity and water so if you can do that and you have the but you haven't been doing that because the electricity has been too expensive to do it that way but if you have decentralized if you have an electricity resource that lends itself nicely to decentralization and distributed generation like solar does and interestingly electrolyzer which is what you use to produce the equipment that sort of splits water into hydrogen and oxygen those seem also to be the have that same characteristic that they are you know they could make a lot of sense to have them distributed so that means that you in the future you could have a setup where you don't do fertilizer production in centralized facilities like and then you shift around well then you could have decentralized general production of fertilizer and I thought that the paper I was reading was about the U.S. and I would say well now most of it is produced close to these like you know large petrochemical regions whereas it would make and then shipped to the Midwest where they have a large crop grown region so it would make more sense to maybe then make use of the excellent wind resources that you might have in Iowa or in those parts of the country and combine that with and just produce the fertilizer closer to what's going to be used and that might be a more cost efficient systems in the end so and that's something that sort of oh wow that sort of shifts you know turns all the logic thinking about supply chains and how those are set up on its head basically I think these are the kinds of things we will need to consider even more if we're going to sort of base our you know first of all our electricity system but again I was saying before if we're going to electrify everything then that means that whatever is happening in the electricity system is going to have a larger and larger influence on the global economy and industries and production systems so on so I think there's something here that we need to start thinking more seriously about how this affects the way the economy is set up in terms of how we can understand there's this there's a ripple effect and I mean we've talked about it before and at the climate conferences and in different circles whether it's Stockholm Resilience Institute or SEI that there's you know the rising billions who have smartphones in their hands and have access to you know now with Starlink and from Elon and other emerging global networks that they're going to have a broadband internet in their hands and access to all sorts of these things there was at the 2018 I believe it was it was the COP 24 in Katowice, Poland I hosted a guide code when the GDI Global Energy Interconnectedness it's an Asian-based project but it guide code stands for the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization and it's basically the renewable energy grid for the world and it's decentralized it's not owned by anybody it's for everyone it's basically when we have that renewable energy whether it's solar or wind there's this big huge issue of how do we distribute it how do we phase it down how do we get it into the right grid to distribute it around and even here in Germany we really kind of started the movement of wind power and really pushed wind power and renewable energy forward in many ways but then we didn't have a grid to distribute it and it fell flat on its face and it's starting to recover a bit but we're still way behind but the rest of the world's looking even worse that we don't have a grid to distribute it all evenly and get it to everybody where it's needed which is a form of a global it's not only a global energy inter-connection which is bringing everybody on board just like the Paris Agreement or whatever agreements whether it's a trade agreement or cooperation agreement to make sure that that's an inevitable universal right to distribute it and I believe that's the only big one that I know about but I believe that there's a couple smaller projects from energy and from a couple others that are moving forward on some pretty big projects which will electrify or provide grids for a lot of people around the world and the moment that occurs the switch, there's this change there's this emergent shift in humanity to see the world act upon the world in a much different way than usual and that leads me to a few questions on in your research and your thinking humanity has really had this thing and I call it the human condition where we have problems cooperating with each other where all distant cousins, homo sapiens and we're all in this spaceship Earth but even in the united nations or the world economic form it's like this person shouting their message here and this person shouting their message and they're both great messages but they're not collaborating and working together and they're kind of this human condition as I'll do it myself or do it my own way in some respects I see that something that you kind of mentioned with us off grid and let's just take care of our own basic needs of electrification of renewable energy solar panels wind donkeys or whatever but do you think that humanity will ever kind of overcome this human condition and come together and quit fighting north and south Korea with China putting the blame on someone else that will figure out that we're all on this all, not passengers but all crew members on the spaceship Earth I tend to think that you know you shouldn't you shouldn't be too optimistic about the future but you shouldn't be too pessimistic either I have like I really struggle when people sort of say well you know the world is such an awful price right now and it's going you know at which point in time was it a good place you know how is today can you say that today is better or worse than 10 or 15 years ago and you can choose any year in history and say well is 2021 worse or better than this one and I think you're going to struggle to come up with a good solution because everything's been good or bad in different ways history so I think the key thing is to find a setup where sort of all the human idiosyncrasies and how our quirks and how we bicker about things don't have really large planet destroying implications I was just about probably three years at the time I don't remember but you know the world could very well have ended pretty much in 1982 when there was this Soviet Colonel who didn't press the button to sort of launch full response in terms of nuclear attack because there was a signal coming in that the US had launched their entire missile fleet coming into the over Soviet territory but it turns out it was just a sort of technical fluke but if he had followed his instructions and pressed that button like he should have then you know it would have been a pretty different world right now so would you say that 1982 was a better year to be alive in 2021 you know that getting that close to sort of global annihilation I don't think so so pretty good if we sort of can it goes back to the thing we talked about resilience if you have a system that is not as you know sensitive to disturbances so if you can take disturbances and you don't have things I'm not sure but in logistics they talk about like hot systems that are really sensitive to disturbances and I think that's something you really want to avoid and one thing where I see opportunities in sort of facing out fossil fuels is that you don't you will hopefully not be or you won't be as reliant on these continuous flows of energy which we are now so hugely reliant on these pipelines flowing gas or oil that can be used as weapons or turn it off or turn it on ships getting back in the Suez Canal turn it off and turn it on had huge implications so sort of just if you get to a point where and people say well lithium is the new oil or batteries is the new oil that's not the case if you know if you have a embargo on batteries or an embargo on solar that doesn't mean my solar roof stops working it's still perfectly fine and the things that's in place is going to be perfectly fine so you hopefully that would mean to reduce some of the sort of the highly tensed system that we have at the moment but I'm not sure how that spills over into global geopolitics because I'm sure we'll find something else to argue about but hopefully you know take it down a couple of notches in terms of of the the sort of really having this really tensed system for these key resources that we realize so heavily and your academic circles so in doing research and especially in Sweden is there a lot of discussion going on behind the scenes of something that we kind of need to know is going on or that kind of where the world is going I know with planetary boundaries there's Kate real worse with the donut economics and we're kind of all feeling that the civilization models that we see around the world are not working for us anymore and we're starting to hear the emergence of the Green New Deal planetary boundaries donut economics we're talking about regenerative economics many different models and the world economic form has come out and said you know we don't want to go back to normal back to business as usual this is the great reset and some different models that are out there being discussed what are you seeing from your research from your discussion from those other PhDs those other doctors who are doing the research who are trying to kind of not predict the future but you know say how what are the models of the future and how do we get there what are you hearing what's your emerging direction you see what's going on yeah well my experience of the last 10 years is that things have really been picking up speed and I listen to the discussions you have with the around we don't have time and you know so they are going too slow but my view is also that they're going a lot you know faster than they have done in the if you compared to 10 years ago or even 15 when you around the time with the Copenhagen climate change meeting was the largest in the fiasco and you know the the discussion around climate change and the discussion around global sustainability has to me I find it super rewarding to work in this space because it seems like finally things are happening finally things are going faster than I thought things that I would have thought about 5 years ago as science fiction are being deployed right now so one thing that we've been working a lot about a lot on is steel production from using hydrogen which has been the process has been known for a while but actually implementing it and we started working on this project 3 or 4 years ago and even at that time it was something going to be around in maybe 2040 and now they're going to build it in 2026 or 2024 so now it's going to happen and those are the kinds that you don't see and if you just look at like the international global climate change when IPCC when they do this prognosis you know they have they go back maybe 5 or 10 years and they don't even have this prospect of having this kind of hydrogen based steel making is sort of something that's going to be some way in the future but it's now going to happen a lot sooner than anyone thought I think it is and the same goes if you look at electric vehicles and electric trucks which we've also done research on that seems also perfectly viable so just I think we're in a stage now where a lot of the action on the ground is moving faster than research moving faster than policy policy processes you know for example we look at electrification of transport 5 years ago we had this sort of investigative process in Sweden around this and you start with your sort of priors in terms of what the costs are from different technologies and then 5 years later the cost of batteries have maybe gone down 50% or something like that and that completely shifts the way the calculation works out and you have to sort of so now we took decisions based on what happened 5 years ago alright what happened here so I think that to me is a really positive sign that things are moving faster than I thought because that seems to me we're going in the right direction obviously you know there's going to be things that move fast in the wrong direction as well I'm very conflicted about bitcoin mining and stuff like that so which might be seen as sort of another I don't know an evil twin of the developments in some of the batteries and so yeah I mean I believe there's always two sides to the coin two sides to everything there's that balance and the thing that I also see and I have to agree with you is that this exponential function so I've been doing this for a long time too and I'm just like boy this is not seeing any change and today's Earth Day although the show will air much later than Earth Day well I think we'll be launching it sometime in June but I was watching the old Earth Day video so the very verse Earth Day Summit and Outdoor and Park and everybody was kind of listening to the talks and some of the things that they were saying back then are some of the same things that we've heard Greta Thunberg and Ingmar Reynolds from We Don't Have Time talking about and Fridays for Future and shouting and being very active and saying how serious this situation is and look at that you say well not a lot of change but I've also seen this exponential growth and a matter of fact Johan Rockstrom and Christiana Figueras and Patricia Espinosa also started this exponential roadmap to reach the Paris agreement and the sustainable development goals and I really love how you know you in the beginning were saying you know for energy and what your papers were on really SDG 7 affordable and clean energy and that we really move in this different direction that the sustainable development goals are our first ever global moonshot there are our first roadmap and plan of action that we've had for a long time that are giving us a brand new operating system a new civilization framework for all humanity and if we can start implementing it and those who have started to implement it in their business models and their lives and say let's even do one or two goals they've come all out with this thing that we've touched upon several times resilience they've said this is a better system and it's fast it has the components of the exponential function we apply it and boy it just is taking off and I have definitely seen that exponential growth in many ways I have to be honest during the Trump administration I thought we're going exponentially in the wrong direction but in some directions it was a great wake-up call for many and now that today is also the Biden-Harris climate day and Earth Day and many events this you said you had another event today and I've had a few others as well that people are doubling down they're making the commitment they're talking they're starting to put these plans into action and I really love to see it and that's why I really I thoroughly enjoyed I read several of your papers not all of the entire series of perspective that you have but at least six of them six not all of them were in perspective form perspective and then some were featured stories that you had were in the wash area that you do and I just love what SCI is doing what you guys are bringing out with these because it gives me more insight in different perspectives and research and views on what's occurring and the bigger perspective of our environment and where we're going with energy transitions what we hear is we need especially from Al Gore we need this renewable energy transition and these big grids and we hear what Elon Musk does in Solar City and these big projects and kind of those little things that are happening in developing countries like the Ikea example like some others get washed under the bridge we don't understand how they fit into that converging intersection that you spoke about and so I'm glad you're bringing those stories out and those perspectives I need to ask you again two things I guess you because you kind of didn't answer do you feel that there is a human condition and that we will come to a unification somehow or there will always be that polar opposite the kind of the quantum dilemma where there's always off and on at all times or do you do you not see that in your areas of work I think we don't think we're going to sort of be a globally unified nation where everyone agrees I think that's we're always going to be want to group ourselves into smaller cliques I think that's just natural because you can't sort of there's so much reward that comes from having people agree with you basically people rub each other different ways so it's it's difficult to see how we're going to get away from that but if you get to the point where you have intercity rivalry around who soccer team is the best that's fine that's not going to kill maybe kill a few people if they're really nasty fans but it's not civilization threatening so if you get to that point of disagreement I think that's something we can live with but obviously it's quite a long ways to go towards we get to that but just to say one thing more about the exponential I think it's important to see also that the development that we've seen really positive in the energy sector and a lot of developments have been happening there is very promising but it's not and that's helping been a really large help in terms of driving climate change mitigation along the way but we're not we shouldn't see that as that's something that can simply replicated in everything else you mentioned Washington and I think it's going to be a completely different set of a completely different but it's going to be a different way of managing things it's not going to be as easy probably relatively speaking just because the sort of conditions and how sanitation as a sort of societal services is completely different than energy in any way so I think we really need to yes we need to learn from the examples and the developments that we've seen in solar and wind and batteries and some other technologies but we shouldn't take those for granted we really need to figure out okay why has this been very positive what's been happening here what are the conditions that made this work and what can we take from these developments and apply to other sectors and what doesn't apply basically how do we what lessons can we learn and what what sort of doesn't really apply I think just taking that analytical mindset I think that's going to be super valuable for solving the rest of our societal sustainability problems well just for my listeners in case they don't know what wash is wash stands for water sanitation and hygiene there's also some very specifically issues around women and girls gender as a major issue around disproportionately around wash services and those basic needs of humanity I tend to be one who groups them with energy so I believe that all basic needs air breathing water energy those things are kind of the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that they're very closely tied one where the other just as I feel our biome our biodiversity and our biome of our plant is closely tied to basic needs and the biome of the human body our human gut and now when we see those two out of alignment then we start to see pandemics and other things emerge that create a ripple effect of problems it's always kind of an easier point for us to be Sweden's a beautiful place your academic even though you work in other places around the world I'm in Hamburg Germany from the US also traveled to developing countries work a lot with Asia but we come from what Kate Raworth would say this weird societies Western educated industrialized rich and democratic so weird acronym kind of societies and and here is also the place where most of the economic research is conducted thereby also producing a biased response and specifically biased and fortunate for those in developing countries like we think we know how we can solve their problems the one thing that I do know is historically it's been shown that basic needs specially around food is something of how we can control and manipulate other people around the world whether it's colonialism or whatever else whether it's Native Americans who their food supplies were cut off and so it's an issue that's not only tied to the sustainable development goals but it's one that we need to understand and grasp in order to get us into a new epoch a new epoch of sustainability or whether it's like Jim Lovelock said you know this Nova scene this hyper intelligent new future that we need to go on for humanity I like to call it the regenerative economy people a lot of the time don't understand or don't when I talk about sustainability why I talk about one economies two innovations and three the future and that those are really pillars that all tie to sustainability they're all you have to have a good grasp of economics and not only the bad economic models of extractive economies and capitalism but ecological economics one innovation sustainable innovations that catapult us like renewable energy battery solar panels whatever else that could have the opportunity to catapult us into the future and then why would you say Mark you're a sustainable futurist or a resilient futurist and I'll tell you why it's because you really need to have a good grasp of what a sustainable future is or what generational sustainability looks like one well into a few decades into the future if not more centuries in order to reach that and that leads me to my hardest question that I have for you today and it's really the burning question WTF that's not the swear word although maybe you've said it during this pandemic time but it's what's the futures what's the plan where are we going where's humanity what's the path and if you don't know for yourself or for the organization SEI where do you think it should be and what should we be doing to get there yeah you know again you know from my point of view getting rid of fossil energy I think that's a good start I think we can work it from there that itself is a huge probably one of the largest technological transformations in human history and it's going to happen in a very very short time speaking in terms of historical perspectives we are not going to solve everything people are going to suffer even in a climate change zero emission world there's going to be shitty things happening but it's it's a philosophical question so what's the point of humanity so I think we should really try to avoid extinction I think that's a good good first start but then there's so many things that will interestingly when you talk about climate change you talk about sort of you throw years like 2050 and 2070 you throw around those like it's comfortable knowing what's going to happen at that point but there's going to be so many things changing that has nothing to do with or that may have to do with climate change and the environment we don't even we cannot even what they're going to look like at this moment in terms of technological development but also political development and so on so just throwing a pandemic in us oh wow I hadn't really had that in my that wasn't in my projection for the coming five years and look at that twist things around so I think yeah but just to know get rid of those fossil fuels I think that's a good start do you have another what's the futures for you and your family I try to live in the now as much as I can but still doing things that in the right direction I don't think that much forward I have an awesome life I'm so I'm very happy that I get to do the things I do and what sort of drives me is just learning stuff I think that's a good thing to have as a researcher that you really love being wrong and sort of realizing that oh my god so the best things in my work is when I have these moments my god this changes everything I haven't understood anything about the world until this specific moment and I have lots of those and I think that's awesome it's feel like you're sort of being reborn every time that happens it's like oh my now after this realization I see the world in a completely different way and that's so rewarding that if I can just continue having a couple of those months that's I can live with that in some respects the reason I ask the question what's the future is I want to know if there's a roadmap a plan that we're moving towards a direction you know the old strategy if we don't have a plan or a map or don't know where we're going we're sure as heck we're not going to get there we'll just be kind of taking wherever the wind blows us but the question is really do you believe that there is a plan a earth shot a moonshot a climate shot or something out there that will get us to 2030-2050 those numbers those years that you were just mentioning or do you think yeah there could be a roadmap but it might be disrupted by more pandemics or more future that just we just can't even tell I think it's good isn't this this old saying that no war plan survives the first day of battle something like that so I think it's good to have a setup because it forces you to do to think things through but then you shouldn't sort of you should also sort of you know have it as a as a general direction but then be prepared to change things as you know circumstances change I think that's the key way of working things and we've done a lot of work on scenarios and it's really valuable to do these kinds of exercises but you shouldn't see them as or see them as strategies and stuff but see them as tools that force you to imagine different things that could happen and then sort of you know when things happen rapidly you have to work when you've got feeling pretty much as well and I think that's something that shouldn't be shouldn't be underestimated we could go down a whole different rabbit hole one of my events and talks today was about the microbiome and our gut health and how the people are saying that's our second brain so you know there is there's a lot of that you know guiding us around in certain ways to make those gut instincts I have three more questions for you but they're all for my guests they're kind of a sustainable takeaways for them but before we go into those I just want to ask you is there anything you want to tell us about perspectives or about Stockholm Environment Institute that basically we need to know that we need to be thinking about that it's coming up new that you're working on what your hopes and ambitions are for us all as readers and listeners some things change really fast some things change really slowly and it's not really clear which is which and how to classify things so just don't sort of just because nothing happens for a long time doesn't mean that that's the sort of the end of it all or the sort of the way things have to be because suddenly you know things can happen really rapidly I think that's promising but also scary definitely if there was one message you could depart to our listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change your life what would it be your message do you mean in terms of from a global perspective or from a it's totally open to you it's basically a message that has to change my listeners life a kind of your message something that is the only gift from you I think this thing of learning to love being wrong and learning to love seeing things having your world you reconfigured often I think that is because that's going to happen anyway so you better you'll have a happier life if you sort of incorporate that into your person I have a lot of PhDs a lot of researchers listen to the podcast a lot of people who are interning with the UN or trying to just get their feet wet at some university here or there in many areas but what should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make real impact leave a positive mark on this world I think you shouldn't be afraid to dig deep but at the same time it's super important to geek out for sure but also try to see the big picture have the big picture in mind but then choose something to geek out because I think that's super valuable to have that combination where you have a broad perspective you understand how the world works but you have something that you're really good at that you can bring in terms of contributions I love that what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the beginning from the start things usually work out and there's very few things in my line of work that I've seen in my life even if it feels like that when you sort of mess things up it's very rarely that you kill someone I just compared my wife's medical doctor and she has a different situation there so I consider that just to have that perspective and just try to see things well yes I think my work is important and interesting but I don't see it as nothing super special about it and also have this perspective a very good example one of my sons is learning to bicycle and this in I think August he was practicing in a backyard and then he sort of rides his bike right into the road just outside her house and so he doesn't break and first there's a car that comes and just just like 30 centimeters from his legs and then there's a buff coming from the other direction breaks like 30 centimeters from his leg and since then every day I think of almost every day okay this is another day where my kid isn't dead so from that perspective most days are pretty good so if I feel sorry for myself I can sort of bring out that thing oh yeah well he's not that so that's something that's better than it could have been so I think that's just to have those kind of perspectives that sort of makes you realize what's important in life I really appreciate you letting us inside of your ideas and sharing your perspectives with us and there are some great words of wisdom and learning lessons in there and we'll post all these to perspectives and to the Stockholm Environment Institute on our website and in the show notes of this recording and I really appreciate you being here and taking the time to talk to me it's been wonderful thank you so much Ola good talking to you talk to you later bye bye