Blueberries, watermelons and BANANAS: a conversation about energy transition education
Stanford instructors Jane Woodward and Diana Gragg are helping to educate the world on the impact of energy systems on climate change.
When Jane Woodward attended Stanford in the 1980s, she took a class that would change her life. Four decades later, she finds herself in that same classroom, only this time standing in front of a class lecturing, rather than taking notes as a student. Woodward is not just an educator but an impressive climate investor. Her firm, WovenEarth Ventures, just secured its first fund of over $150M this year. In the classroom, she is joined by a former student Diana Gragg (Stanford MS ’05, PhD ‘12), who co-teaches with Woodward.
Woodward and Gragg’s goal (along with their colleague, Kristen Stasio) is to educate not just the next generation of energy leaders but anyone who will need to know about climate issues and how energy systems work (spoiler: it’s everyone.) Their Understand Energy course is focused on the links between our energy systems and climate change. Both Stanford students and anyone around the world can access the course information thanks to Stanford’s Understand Energy Learning Hub, which offers free access to the class’s information.
The Cooler sat down with Woodward and Gragg to learn more about their approach to educating the next generation (and the rest of the world) on climate and energy.
Jane, we've heard you talk about an “aha moment” regarding the complexity of the energy system that struck you while attending Stanford. It pertained to how much energy is used in a single gallon of gasoline. Can you explain why that moment had such an impact on you and how it set you down your path to becoming a professor? Diana, what was that moment for you?
JW: In my first quarter at Stanford, I took a class called Survey of the Energy Industry, which is the precursor to Diana’s and my Understand Energy class. Daniel Yergin wrote one book called Energy Future, and Amory Lovins wrote the other book for the class which was called Soft Energy Paths.
After reading them, I went to the phone booth and called each of them because I was so blown away by these books. That “aha moment” was how incredibly complex the energy system is. I was really impressed with Amory showing how for every gallon of gasoline you put in your car, 1% moves you, 13% moves the weight of the car and all the rest is lost to the engine, aerodynamics and other losses.
We go to a gas pump, we turn on a light switch and we don't appreciate what's behind all of that. I think the biggest realization was not whether oil or gas or internal combustion engines were good or bad, but I was humbled by my lack of literacy in understanding what it took to deliver mobility, cold beers and hot showers (Amory Lovins’ playful way of describing energy services).
DG: I grew up in Houston and had air pollution personally impact my health. In 2004 I took this class Jane was teaching and realized I don't want to study air pollution because that's the problem. I want to study energy, which is where all the solutions are.
It was an eye-opening, life-changing moment when I started thinking about these systems. Thinking about what services we want and what are the best ways to get them? It's not even about getting the oil or getting the resources. It's about how we provide what people want and need in the best way possible with the least impact and the most consideration of equity. Jane changed me from an air pollution person to an energy person.
What sticks out to you in terms of this rising generation of innovators and people who want to study energy and the climate? What motivates them and what are the things they care to learn more about?
JW: A common joke amongst teachers is, ‘We get older, but the students are always the same age.’ Over the last 30+ years of teaching, I’ve seen an exponential rise in fluency and interest in decarbonizing our energy system. Stanford’s admissions process has broadened considerably to global admissions. We have students from all over the world. They have sacrificed enormously to study at Stanford.
Their interest can come from a variety of origins. We have students interested in policy, land rights and equity topics around energy. We have brilliant people in electrochemistry. We have people in materials and computer science. We have students coming from all these different backgrounds, and they want to use their superpowers to address climate change.
That’s part of the reason it’s a passion play for Diana and me. Whether they’re law students, business students, education students, civil engineers, or English majors – we want them to see and “understand” the complexity of energy systems. They feel empowered and they remember it when they're voting or when they’re making decisions about things.
That global perspective is very interesting. We know that climate change and clean energy issues are global problems, but so often we think of them in how they impact our own lives. Do you think that diversity of thought enhances the learning environment of your students?
JW: The people who come to Stanford from Ohio, Minnesota or Menlo Park have their own point of view because they have privileges and a culture that you and I are familiar with broadly. But they're getting intertwined with people who have a perspective from Dubai, Cairo, Olso or Shanghai. This diversity of worldview, what’s normal and the different ways to approach things is expanding in terms of solutions and humility. That’s certainly true for many of the Americans in the class, to appreciate the complexity of the challenge from other nations’ cultural points of view.
What are some of the factors around the world that are pushing students toward studying climate and energy?
JW: I show a slide in class that breaks down a few factors the students inherently understand when they think about energy systems and climate change.
Weather volatility is rising – we have shifted from an age of prediction to an age of consequences that feel very real to students.
We are seeing scaling capital to support early-stage climate tech companies towards commercialization.
US federal policy is supporting unprecedented funding for decarbonization.
Supply chains are being domesticated and they're going to be simplified because we're closing the loops and driving for far less waste.
Unprecedented tools are spawning broad radical reinvention.
We can collect data like we never could before from satellites, drones, sensors, and cameras. Fidelity is going up and the cost is falling.
We have AI, machine learning and cloud platforms that allow us to hold, utilize and optimize all that data.
Electrochemistry, material science, biochemistry, and subjects like this are having a huge renaissance. We're making structural magnesium out of water. We're making food protein and jet fuel out of air. These forces are all working with great momentum and compounding benefits.
The brightest minds are migrating to this space.
We see corporate investors and other strategics in roles we've never seen before, stepping up to address the issues.
Stakeholders, including employees, communities, insurers, shareholders and members of the C-suite, are much louder than they've been in the past.
These forces are a huge motivation for WovenEarth to invest in early-stage climate tech. They are also a big factor in attracting Stanford students to build start-ups in this space, much like the ones in the other course I help deliver, Stanford Climate Ventures.
I think the students may not see all those things at once, but they get it and they're being driven, some of them by a couple of those forces more than others. That radical reinvention culture is an inspiring thing to be around. The conventional wisdom of incrementalism is being left behind and there's this "we can do this differently," mentality that is so mainstream compared to what it was before.
You’ve opened up your class to be available for everyone, not just your students, through the Understand Energy Learning Hub. Why make it a public resource for anybody to access for free?
JW: With Understand Energy, we put a lot of effort into delivering this class and maintaining the currentness of the data. We want to help people understand how energy or current climate solutions work. There is a lot of technological innovation going on, and part of our goal is to help people understand what's a blueberry and what's a watermelon (e.g., what is quite significant vs not). Like ocean power, it's a blueberry right now. We would love it to be a watermelon, but it's a blueberry. So we opened it up to the world for free to help people contextualize things, and then also help them understand how things work politically, technically and environmentally.
If you have a meeting tomorrow and need to have some fluency in hydrogen, you can go to the Understand Learning Hub and check out the hydrogen section. We designed it like a Russian doll so that at the outer layers are the fast facts, which you can download as a PDF. Then there are readings, which are largely videos that we've curated from others like CBS News, PBS NewsHour, or Scientific American. We ask our students to read or watch those before class. Then, there's the lecture. If you're still curious after you've gone through those three layers, we create additional materials for people who want to dive deeper, like big conferences on a certain topic. We constantly hear a sense of desire for literacy, so we want to make it flexible, fun and accessible to people.
DG: Big picture, our mission with all of this is that if people understand energy better, they'll make better decisions personally and professionally. We want to be putting this out there so it can be a resource, even for people in the energy industry. I was just talking to some of our former students who now are at the California Energy Commission. They're sending it to all their colleagues because they work in energy, but they may still not know the whole energy system. So, it's a resource for all of them.
We also want to give thanks to our Understand Energy team: Kirsten Stasio (CEO of Nevada Clean Energy Fund), Justine Dachille, Sharon Poore, Shirley Chang, Erik Zarazua, Helena Garcia, and many others! We are grateful to have a team behind Understanding Energy to make it possible for this information to reach everyone.
You talked about organizing the learning hub into layers to peel back the complexity of energy systems. What are some other ways you approach breaking these complex topics into something more approachable?
DG: Everything that we do is about context. We compare things to watermelons or blueberries. We make it relatable and also focus on how you understand it as a part of the world around us. One of the things that we do is look at energy in the news at the beginning of our lectures. That's where students say, "Hey, I read about this thing about energy." Then, we can help put the media into context in terms of how important it is and what it means. That gives them the tools to be able to read energy in the news and analyze and understand it themselves.
JW: Field trips are at the top of our approaches. You don't appreciate what happens in a nuclear power plant until you go visit it. Nobody puts AK-47s and super-armed guards in front of a solar plant. It doesn't represent the same national threat. So, being there and seeing the scale and nature of the systems are helpful.
We try to emphasize systems thinking in all the building blocks of the class, it's not just the technology. The technology and the policy need to line up, as we see today with something like 45Q (a tax credit for CO2 sequestration, expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act.) We try to show the history of how we got here. With wind power, we started with investment tax credits and that didn't go so well. It was better when we had production tax credits.
This emphasizes the systems thinking that we try hard to make every topic in the class applicable or relatable to everyday lives. Sometimes with a topic like carbon capture, it doesn’t feel like something you’d have anything to do with. But we can relate the scale and the volume to the Stanford swimming pool or how many Empire State buildings or things like that. We give a majority of the topic lectures, then we bring in a large minority that are subject matter experts.
To close, what energy transition developments are you excited about? Or is there anything under the radar you think more people should be paying attention to?
JW: One is the acronym BANANA, “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.” We're in this time where we're innovating like crazy, and we need all these locations for everything. And I think a former colleague and friend of ours, Emily Grubert, who's a hybrid sociologist and civil engineering Professor at Notre Dame. She has a TED Talk that's 10 minutes long on this. Hers is not so much on the BANANA part, but more on the humanity of energy transition. These communities are getting dislocated.
So, how do you do good community-based project development, which is a post-early venture, to get the scale that we want? Being sensitive to thinking about what it takes to create locations to scale things is always of interest to me. It's very doable, but it requires deep and patient engagement with communities, and building allyships with them.
The other topic is the level of biomass waste we’re going to put in the ground. We’re going to put hydrogen in the ground, we're going to pull hydrogen out of the ground, we're going to inject CO2 in the ground, we're going to do enhanced geothermal. There’s momentum around the subsurface with companies like Kobold or Zanskar utilizing AI to bolster our understanding of what's going on down there. Fervo, Valuted and Charm are companies that in one way or another are engaging with the subsurface in ways that are different from oil and gas. Redwood Materials is the first significant cathode manufacturer in the U.S. They aren’t just recycling battery materials. They are manufacturing battery components. The battery recycling space has momentum right now and that is very intriguing to me.
DG: The thing I'm excited about is electrification. I'm a big transportation person and air pollution was my background, so electrification of everything, transportation in particular. There is momentum that has been building and will continue to build. We are super excited to build on the success of the Understand Energy Learning Hub and we are incubating a new Learning Hub focused on the five-decade career of Amory Lovins and the practice of Integrative Design for Radical Energy Efficiency.
Water (Cooler) Talk
🎲 Settlers of clean energy
Most people are familiar with the board game, Settlers of Catan. Some of us may even turn into ruthless barons of industry for a few short hours while playing the game with friends and family. Now the creators of the game are releasing a new edition that caters to teamwork and sustainability. Catan: New Energies is the latest creation of Klaus and Benjamin Teuber. In the game, players will be tasked with deciding to build fossil fuel power plants for quick and cheap, or sustainable energy more slowly. If pollution becomes too rampant, the game ends. It's a fun and interesting way to experience the energy transition (even if it is actually more financially viable to use clean energy in reality!) The game is available for preorder now and will be released this spring.📸 Climate snapshot
A few weeks ago, the Cooler released a piece on the power of visual storytelling. Last week, Bloomberg wrote a piece highlighting the best photos telling climate stories from the 2024 World Press Photo contest. These photos include drying river basins, wildfire fighters, climate protesters, refugees and more. The images are a reminder of the current reality that we face. As many of us know, climate change isn’t a distant, hard-to-grasp future. It’s here, viscerally displayed in the photos submitted to the contest.💲 Carbon removal investment
The U.N. agrees the world needs to remove gigatons of carbon from our atmosphere to meet our emission reduction goals. Just what would that cost? A recent study from the Rhodium Group found that the U.S. Federal Government spends just under $1 billion a year on carbon removal research, development and deployment. Their study finds that the county needs to be spending roughly $100 billion per year by 2050. Carbon removal is another climate topic that is often discussed like it’s far away, but with the U.S. committing federal investment into direct air capture (DAC) facilities, it’s time to start talking about the industry in a more pressing manner, as the Rhodium Group’s study does.💡Retail choice
“The language we use shapes our ideas,” says friend of The Cooler, Allison Bates Wannop. In her latest opinion piece for Utility Dive, Bates Wannop argues that “retail choice 2.0” should be embraced as a new opportunity for retailers to act as technology companies, not just energy traders. She defines Retail Choice 1.0 as “competitive retailers buying power in wholesale markets to serve competitively acquired customers, in an attempt to offer lower electricity costs for consumers.” Whereas the new era of Retail Choice 2.0 should focus on creating innovation and customer engagement beyond the utility bill. She mentions that with a new era that is so promising, now is the time to be cognizant of the negative history of Retail Choice 1.0, and not regress to old ways. It’s a compelling vision for how the clean energy transition can move forward while being conscious of—and improving on—its past.