Deez Interviews: Meet the clean energy reporter leaning into the wonkiness & staying optimistic
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Julian Spector, a clean energy and climate change reporter who shared his thoughts on his v. niche field of coverage, tech reporting cliches that need to stop, and how not all hope should be lost. A v. encouraging start to the weekend, IMO. Enjoy!
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The interviewee: Julian Spector (follow him @JulianSpector)
The gig: Staff writer at Greentech Media
How did you get interested in covering clean energy? You’ve previously covered climate change at CityLab and a grant-funded reporting project in Bangladesh.
Initially I was really interested in climate change reporting, which led me to Bangladesh. Climate stories tend to be pretty depressing, though, because it’s almost always moving in the wrong direction. At CityLab, I became interested in how to talk about climate change but in a way where there’s some possibility of progress. Clean energy is a prime example of that: there’s a ton happening right now, which means lots of ideas to examine and stories to tell, and if some of these new approaches pan out they will have meaningful effects for the climate effort.
What was it like developing an expertise on such a niche topic?
When I started at Greentech Media, they were like “We want you to write about energy storage.” I was like, “Okay.” I knew that stuff was important but it had been much too wonky and obscure for publications I had worked at before. So I had to just learn everything I could about it from day one, which was definitely kind of daunting.
I lucked out because aside from the news site, GTM has a research brand — they build all these datasets on how much solar is deployed, where batteries are, what their pricing structures are — all this high level stuff that’s really valuable to know. As a journalist, I get access to all that data too, as well as the analysts who are geniuses at these pretty specific subject areas. So that helped get me up to speed pretty fast.
Energy storage is basically fancy batteries for the grid, and it’s such a small and new industry that only a handful of publications pay attention to it. I end up learning a lot more from talking to the people in the startups and utilities trying to change the grid because in most cases, it hasn’t been written about yet. The whole clean energy world is quite small, but the growth potential is huge.
What surprises you about covering this industry?
Part of our job is to sort through all these ideas and figure out what’s real and what’s not. I usually try to give the benefit of the doubt up front, if something makes sense and sounds good and it looks like they’ve done their homework. But there’s also a lot of really terrible ideas that still manage to get millions of dollars in funding and never produce anything, so you always have to be on the lookout for that…
It’s really important to go back after a while and revisit these companies and these big ideas. That’s hard with the daily hustle of the news cycle, and you're getting barraged by all these new press releases about the Next Big Thing, and there’s a lot of people who come up with all this fanfare, and they get all that press, but then a year or two go by and you’ll be like, um, have we ever heard anything from them? It’s crucial to budget some time to go back and revisit.
What I was super surprised about after digging into the clean energy world is it’s a lot more chaotic and fascinating than the narratives that make it out into the mainstream news coverage. Energy is really complicated inherently, so the headlines that come out often are really good (solar just beat another record!) or catastrophic (Trump’s killing clean energy!).
Elements of those might be true in the broad narrative, but there’s all sorts of ups and downs in the meantime. It’s kind of the wild west! It’s all so new and all the entrenched experts in the energy sector all of a sudden don’t really know how things work anymore, the world that they mastered is rapidly vanishing, and no one’s mastered the new world yet. There’s all this opportunity to come in and make a lot of money or come in and lose a lot of money,
What’s a reported piece that you are most proud of, and why?
There’s this story line I’ve been following about a new gas plant in Oxnard, which is north of LA a bit. It’s a largely working class, minority community that happens to have a bunch of power plants dumped on its beach for the last several decades, because power plants tend to be built in the less affluent neighborhoods that can’t prevent them.
So the utility was planning to build another gas plant there, and in the process of this, there was a study done to compare like ‘could we do clean energy instead of the gas plant?’ and the official group that did the study said yes, but the clean energy stuff will be about 3 times as expensive. Since I spend a lot of time dealing with the pricing of lithium-ion batteries, I noticed their cost assumptions were wildly out of date, and published a story on that. The group that did the study later testified that its analysis was very high level, and to really know the answer all the new clean energy stuff would have to get a chance to bid in and compete.
So that’s actually happening now, and the upshot is that this might be the first time that environmental justice and clean energy advocates stopped a new gas plant from being built and had it replaced by cutting-edge cleantech like solar, batteries and demand response.
That made me realize how diving deep on this very obscure wonky thing can be actually very useful to the public and can inform these debates and processes that are still in the works and unfolding.
So, per climate change and our energy situation right now. Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
I feel much more optimistic living here in California than I did covering this stuff from D.C., because stuff is actually happening here, companies have popped up all over the place, and a lot of smart people are thinking through how to make a cleaner grid come to life.
Nationally, there was a lot of talk about Trump’s election spelling doom for clean energy, but it’s not nearly that simple. The US energy system is really 50 different systems — the states have their own independent market systems and regulatory systems. Trump really wants to bring back coal, but he’s actually quite limited in the ways he can try to make that happen...
Meanwhile, states are charging ahead with ever larger shares of clean energy, and coming up with interesting ideas for how to get batteries out onto the grid, and how to get electric cars and charging systems into the community. A lot of Republican states are moving ahead on renewables and grid improvements; there are a lot of jobs involved.
The clean energy industries are growing a lot faster than the economy as a whole. In a lot of rural areas like North Carolina and the Midwest, where there isn’t a lot of economic development happening, solar projects are one of the primary new sources of income. So I think there’s a lot happening, and there’s definitely a lot of obstacles and unnecessary bureaucratic blockages in the way of progress, but it’s kind of surprising how quickly things are moving for all the challenges and frustrations and obstacles out there.
A lot of that story never makes it out to the general public. There’s a lot of storytelling to be done.
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We’ll toast to more storytelling always, and to a good weekend ahead. See y’all Monday!
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