Can the LA Olympics in 2028 be a catalyst for clean energy? How the games could remake transport, power and clean air in the car capital of America

0:00The fact is that it's equivalent of seven Super Bowls happening every day in Los Angeles. So that's a lot of people. It's a lot of energy. It's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of people to move around. It often feels like you have in the run up to a game, a lot of talk about, oh, this will deliver huge infrastructure benefits for our city. And that's one of the things that cities like to talk about when they're bidding to secure games. and sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't. You know, what a great opportunity to use the games to both inspire and help accelerate and motivate people to take advantage of this moment to provide lasting investment that isn't about, you know, stadia or arenas but is about creating more economic opportunity and accelerating equitable climate action.

0:55With the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games just around the corner, the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, is working to accelerate clean air, clean energy, clean transportation and other sustainability solutions for Los Angeles while inspiring global action by the time of the 2028 Games. Learn more about how you can join LACI on the road to 2028 at laincubator.org slash road to 2028.

1:22Hello and welcome to The Energy Gang, a discussion show from Wood Mackenzie about the fast-changing world of energy. I'm Ed Crooks and on this show we're going to be talking about the Olympics. The 2028 Olympics and Paralympic Games are going to be held in Los Angeles and that's of course both a huge challenge and also a huge opportunity for the city's infrastructure. To discuss that challenge and the opportunity. I'm joined by Matt Peterson. Matt is the president and CEO of Lacey, the Los Angeles clean tech incubator. Hello, Matt. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Ed. It's great to be with you. Great to have you.

1:55So look, we want to talk about the Olympics, as I say, in a moment. Before we do that, one of the things we always like to do when we get new people onto the show is talk to them a little bit about their background, the career paths that took them to the roles they now hold. Perhaps before we do that, even, could you tell us a little bit about Lacey? What is it? What do you do? Great question. So the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator, our mission is to create an inclusive green economy for Los Angeles and far beyond. And we were founded in 2011. It was really an outgrowth of an economic development initiative of the city of L.A.

2:32At the time, Mayor Antonio Villargoza wanted to make L.A. the clean tech capital of the world, building on the legacy of the aerospace industry and other industries and engineering-based industries in Los Angeles. and really embraced this opportunity and worked with the city partners and agencies to manifest, where I'm sitting, you can't see it, but this campus that's 60 ,000 square feet in the middle of the Arts District, which at the time was a neighborhood you really wanted to be careful about walking around. It had been historically an area of manufacturing, and the building we're in actually was the, is the warehouse where furniture that was manufactured across street was stored before it was sent out to retail stores to be sold to customers.

3:23And so this, this place is a place where entrepreneurs gather, investors gather, policymakers gather. So we really use this beautiful campus as a catalyst and, and then do our work out in community to do three things, help unlock innovation by helping the startups and lots that we could go into there. We provide access to capital. We have a debt fund. We have a sidecar venture fund. We give them access to pilot funds. The city of LA allows us to provide the sweat equity to lean in to help these companies. Our other programs are market transformation. How do we really transform markets by recognizing that policymakers send market signals to entrepreneurs and then bring the public and private sector together to accelerate progress around shared priorities in responding to those market signals, as well as informing them for the future.

4:15And then last but not least, the third piece of our holistic approach is enhancing communities. How do we bring in the workforce that's underrepresented, train them in green technologies, and then we place those graduates into paid internships with our startups. So it's really a microcosm of the green economy we want to create in the world. Right. Got it. So what about your story then? How did you get interested in energy and sustainability? And what was the path that led you to that role you now hold as president and CEO at Lacey? Yeah, it's, you know, everybody has their own unique origin story.

4:49For me, as a kid, my dad, when he was still alive, would tell this story to anybody who would listen. As a proud father, often does wax on about something about their kid. He would tell the story. We were in the park on a Sunday afternoon and it was a busy weekend. And he said, I think I was four or five years old and there was trash everywhere strewn about. And he said, I looked up to my dad and I said, dad, we got to do something to take better care of our planet. And I have no recollection of this, but as I look back upon things that are embedded in my memory around that age. I remember my older brother who was nine years older.

5:36He made a Super 8 film that must have been around the first Earth Day that was in the early 70s. He shot, I remember vividly, the tailpipe emissions, the emissions from a jet plane flying overhead back then where I grew up in Modesto actually had jet plane service. and that stuck in my brain. And I mean, there are other aspects around that time as a kid that I remember really just like didn't sit well with me and didn't make sense. Why were we polluting? And I, you know, I jumped forward to when my son was around the same age and we were driving at the time I drove a Prius and he asked me as he was strapped into the back and his kids car seat, he said, dad, if people know how to make cars that aren't stinky, why do they make cars that are stinky?

6:26and you know from the wisdom of babes it really is true and so i yeah i mean as a father of course i do this work for my son and other in future generations um uh that how do we make sure humanity can just not just survive on this planet but thrive and that's what motivates me so i over the course of my career there was a lot obviously between the four or five year old kid and modesto and where I'm sitting now here in the arts district in Los Angeles. But working in politics and my parents both being in public service, my mom active in democratic politics, my dad an educator and a public servant for his entire life, certainly shaped me.

7:11And along the way, the people that I worked with and worked for shaped me in a way that really took me in this direction in this career. And, you know, I think what cemented it, though, was after I ran, when I went to grad school, I wanted to get involved in running a nonprofit after working in politics and got this opportunity to run a nonprofit a month in. And it was an environmental nonprofit working to stop this radioactive waste dump in an unlined dirt trench near the Colorado River that could have made tritium get into the Colorado River and pollute the water supply for 20 million people.

7:53And that was the beginning of my professional work directly in the environment. But what really cemented it was the bet towards the end of that role. I got connected with an amazing woman named Diane Maraj-Saman who Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former head of the Soviet Union, had asked to help him start this environmental organization called the Green Cross in the United States. And that was in 1994. And so that really kicked off the 30 plus years since that I've been working in the environmental space. Yeah, it's amazing to think about Earth Day all those years ago and that kind of event, sort of starting on this journey then many decades later, you know, planting that seed that has now grown into this shows what kind of an impact those things can have if they catch your imagination at a young age.

8:46Absolutely. You know, I mean, yeah, you'd never know what nugget might stuck and stick in someone's brain or touch them. So that's why, you know, one of the reasons we do this work is hopefully you can touch someone's life and then they go off and do great things and you're just cheering them on and following that lead. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me about the Olympics then. So as I was saying, the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be held in Los Angeles. What is your involvement there? Yeah. Number one, I'll just say really upfront, Lacey has no formal role in the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

9:23That is the role and responsibility of LA28, the organizing committee. Yet we have been hard at work using the fact that the world is going to arrive in 2028. millions of people will be coming to Los Angeles. And during that time, as LA28 leaders have said, the fact is that it's equivalent of seven Super Bowls happening every day in Los Angeles. So that's a lot of people. It's a lot of energy. It's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of people to move around and things to move around. So within that is an opportunity to use the games as a catalyst. That's why in 2018, a little less than a year after I got here as CEO of Lacey, we really embraced that opportunity and said, let's create a public-private partnership to work together to see how we can accelerate progress around transportation electrification.

10:20It's a trans, you know, that transportation electrification touches every part of the economy and it's, you know, as it transforms our economy really and how we change, how we move goods, how we move people. And so we sat about the work of setting a goal. At the time, we said we wanted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a further 25 % beyond the 2018 baseline, which we sat as, at the time, Governor Brown, Jerry Brown's executive order he released that year, did the modeling, played with the dials and knobs, and set a series of targets that we've been working towards with the public and private sector involved.

11:04And at the table were, you know, of course, the electric utilities, Southern California Edison and LA Department of Water and Power, LA DDP, which is actually our landlord and core partner here at the campus. And then the Air Resources Board, the chair, then it was Mary Nichols, a legendary climate leader. And we sat in a room along with the mayor of LA and other partners and said, let's do this. And we attracted automakers, Nissan, BMW, BYD, and then later companies like Audi and others. Rivian have joined us along the way to say, all right, well, this is the largest urban auto market for every one of these OEMs, LA.

11:54So what we do here matters. California is the most important regulator, although that's obviously being challenged and from efforts out of Washington right now. But the fact remains that this is still, you know, L.A. is the third largest metropolitan economy in the world within the fourth largest economy in the world, California. And what we do here matters from an early adopter perspective in terms of scaling. And so that's really the spirit of what we brought together with the Transportation Electrification Partnership and the work we began in 2018. And then later looked with the Clean Energy Partnership, how do we set the targets around making sure we have the power that's needed, the clean energy needed to power the transformation that is transportation electrification, as well as building decarbonization, ensure grid reliability.

12:47So we set a number of other targets in that process for clean energy. Right. So to be clear about that, then when you think about the carbon footprint of the Games as a whole, it's going to be transport that's going to be absolutely critical to that. Is that right? Yes. I mean, look, the biggest footprint of the Games are going to be is their transport by far. I mean, then you look at the movement of goods and then the movement of people once they're here. And so one of our partners in the Transportation Electrification Partnership is Metro, which is the regional transit agency that is building out historic levels of funding, using historic levels of funding for building out the light rail and subway system, as well as bus system in Los Angeles.

13:31And they'll be responsible for the bus system that takes people from a park and relocation to the final destination, the venues. And we're working with them this summer during the World Cup to pilot a couple solutions. One is a shading structure that how to have people as they wait for the bus be able to stay cool. And during periods that are likely going to fit, we're going to see extreme heat sometime this summer here in Los Angeles. We're already seeing it in different parts of the country, of course, and around the world right now. But like, how do we do that? And then mobile charging where we can't get permanent charging into these parking lots that people – there's a lot of people showing up to park their car that they – if they have an EV that they can plug in and have a charge when they get back.

14:22So we're working hard right now to see how we can accelerate the final deployment of infrastructure, both using the World Cup as an opportunity to pilot different solutions and then lean in to accelerate the final deployment of infrastructure and investment in Los Angeles in these next two years. Right, because when you talk about the electrification of transport, then that is very critically, is it the electrification of private cars? I mean, obviously, when people think about LA, they think about it as a great city, as you say, one of the largest metropolitan economies in the world. It's also a great car-based city.

15:00Driving in LA is famous. The traffic in LA is famous. And realistically, then, if you're talking about electrification, that has to be the main focus, does it, rather than trying to build out more mass transit, public transport of any kind? Yes. And I mean, look, we're we're we're our ability as an organization, even as a powerful of a convening power we do have as a as a nonprofit here in Los Angeles. We single handedly can't build out the transit infrastructure. There's$120 billion being spent, funded by a sales tax measure that my former boss, Mayor Eric Garcetti, led and championed to really accelerate investments, building on a previous tax measure that the previous mayor, Antonio Villagosa, had championed.

15:50That is historic levels of investment that I mentioned earlier. Yet, to answer your question, our modeling showed that, yes, if we get to 70 % of all the cars sold to be electric by 2028, that 40 % of the medium-duty delivery trucks were electric by 2028. If 40%, 60 % of those trucks were electric, if 40 % of the drayage trucks, the heavy-duty Class A trucks that pick up the goods at the airport at the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach were zero emissions, we still wouldn't get to that GHT target. So we have to get people out of their cars and into transit. So just recently, a new line opened up here, the D-Line.

16:35There's been a lot of the Metro and others have had a lot of fun with the D-Line and ride the D and take your D-picks and they've been really having fun with it. But it is incredible. The extension of that line to different parts of Los Angeles is a lot of fun. You can get to the new LACMA Museum, this iconic new museum that just opened up in Los Angeles. It just really does open up new possibilities. Now, we still have the last mile, first mile challenge in Los Angeles. And that's why making it easier to walk and bike and use Metro's shared mobility systems. That's why we're piloting with community partners, solutions in South LA with public housing, the public housing authority here doing EV car share pilots, doing e-bike share pilots.

17:29How do people get from that last mile? First mile already is the primary source of transportation if they don't have access to adequate transportation. And just a sidebar on that, like this is not about the GHC side, but this is really about the economic opportunity side of our work. in Los Angeles, because of what you just said, it's a place known that you need a car. If you don't have access to adequate transportation, to get to a job for some families, somebody might have to spend two hours on the bus and have three connections because we're still building out the transit infrastructure. So how do they get access to a reliable car?

18:05Well, that's why we've been piloting this EV car share program with the Housing Authority Los Angeles and one of our startups that we incubate called this now an alumni company called Envoy. And so we've been looking at all these things. So it's a long answer to your question that, yes, at the core is we need to get more EVs on the road, get more charging ports in place. And we've made great progress on that side. And we need to, of course, get people out of their cars and into transit. But the last piece I'll just share that most people don't realize is that 40 % of all the goods that come into the United States come in through the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles.

18:48And that is a huge part of our economy here. And it is the largest source in aggregate of air pollution and therefore correlates to more the largest, if not the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions depending on the source. So, those are diesel trucks. Those are the ships that are powered by bunker fuel. the dirtiest fuel used in the world. You've got the cranes and trains that move the goods. So there's a lot of pieces here in LA, not just the cars that we're known for so well for. Right. And as you were saying, then you at Lacey are not specifically responsible for the sustainability strategy of the city, what happens in terms of transport policies, where transport investment goes and so on.

19:33So what you are doing is supporting private sector companies that are coming up with these new innovative ideas for doing things better with improved environmental impact and so on. What are the key companies then that you're supporting in this and which ones do you think sort of imagine a visitor coming to the Olympics in a couple of years from now, what are the things they might notice the most? Yeah, it's a good question. I think one of the things they'll notice is that they will be riding transit one way or another because there's going to be the LA-28 and the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and others have said, we want this to be a transit-first games.

20:14I think making it a transit-only games was originally put on the table, but that's going to be difficult to execute. So the idea is that you make it as easy as possible and as difficult to get on transit to the games venues and as difficult as possible to park at the venues. So that means that people are going to ride transit one way or another. So, riding these new transit lines, I think, will be hopefully one of the great experiences that people come. Like, I always thought LA was known for cars and traffic and a lot of swimming pools and green lawns in the middle of the desert, quote unquote.

20:56They'll experience great transit. They'll see EVs all over the place. It used to be you'd see the Toyota Prius everywhere. Now, of course, it's the Tesla. Certainly west of the 405, as we talk about, one of the great delineating lines in L.A. is the 405 among other freeways and interstates. So those are the aspects, of course. But they're also going to see a lot of charging infrastructure, which is visible. Where the Ubers that is working to accelerate the electrification of its entire fleet, where Waymo is charging their vehicles. One of our corporate partners that's part of the transportation partnership, Volterra, is building out fleet charging depots to charge those Waymos that you and people get into.

21:43They'll ride maybe their first electric autonomous vehicle might be here in L.A. And sort of seeing the future in the place of California, which is the land, as I said earlier, of early adopters where our policy is so far ahead of the rest of the United States and much of the world that has set the market signals to entrepreneurs, whether it's Elon Musk or one of our startup founders, Jackson Alvarez and his partner, Bill Beverly, who are creating a company called Evo Electric that is taking medium-duty trucks and electrifying that are cheaper than someone can buy them as a new vehicle so that smaller businesses can afford to transition to zero emissions of future while creating jobs here in Los Angeles.

22:26And so that power of the California regulatory framework of LA's leadership, of our can-do entrepreneurial spirit here in Los Angeles, that pioneer spirit that is embodied in Los Los Angeles and California is really what we want to have on the world stage. A lot of it, obviously, they won't see. The solar and battery storage systems where we've seen explosive growth, we're about to release a paper that shows that about$10 billion have been invested since 2020 into clean energy, into transportation, electrification, infrastructure in Los Angeles. They won't see all of that, but some of it they will see.

23:06And I think they'll be hopefully impressed. And for some Americans coming here, they'll be like, wow, this is really great. I actually want to get behind the wheel of an electric car. I want to put in solar and storage, especially after we were on the tail end of the Iran War and the incredible spike in gas prices. And a lot of people complaining about that gas price and seeing the ROI on electric cars. Yeah, absolutely. And still, even though it looks like gasoline prices are going to be coming down because of the peace agreement in the Middle East. Yeah, that possibility for prices does spike very high.

23:39And the implications then in terms of the cost of transport for everybody and the cost-benefit calculations of owning an EV, I think, as you say, that's very fresh in everyone's minds right now, and I'm sure still will be in a couple of years. So let's just think a little bit about the barriers and obstacles that you face then. Of course, notoriously, when any city hosts the Olympics, there's always stories about how difficult things are and issues with construction projects and things being delayed and issues with bureaucracy and whatever it might be. In terms of your thinking about the goals that you have for the Olympics and in terms of reducing emissions, improving sustainability and so on, making a better visitor experience for everyone who attends the Games, what are the key challenges for you?

24:31Yeah, it's a good question. I think a couple things. One, when I was working for Mayor Eric Garcetti, I served as Chief Sustainability Officer for his first term. I was the first such person in that role. First time that role was created in the city and the first person to serve in it. And he made a move early on to bid on the games for 2024. And at the time, there's a long story how L.A. became the American, the U.S. candidate for the games. originally was Boston. There was a lot of public outcry there to push back and LA had already been and when they were asked, they said, yeah, we're ready.

25:22We'll stand behind what we said we do. One of the original concepts, could the games be powered through a virtual power plant sort of solution with solar? And so there was always obviously thinking about sustainability, but But the core really piece of both the economic equation and the sustainability argument for LA's bid is that we don't need to build any new facilities. We have everything we need. We've hosted the games two times before. That was really the argument. And yes, the transit and transportation systems would need to be figured out and that would have a cost. But no permanent facilities.

26:03Now, there's some temporary investments that people can read about that are being made to adapt facilities for the use, just as we're seeing with FIFA, they put in places that are artificial turf. They put a new infrastructure on the floor of the stadium to put in the natural turf for the World Cup. Similar things are being done. And there's some temporary facilities, I think, for volleyball being created. But to be able to use existing facilities, that also meant that the organizers went outside LA. So they're doing a couple of the games, sporting events in Oklahoma City. Some of the soccer football matches will be played in venues around the country, as we're seeing with the World Cup.

26:52But really, back to the core of your question, it's that we already have all the infrastructure. So that's number one. Number two, well, we won't get probably 100 % of all the power that the games venues needs. It's not a public commitment of anyone involved with the games delivery. But there is a real commitment to figure out in California, in LA, how do we accelerate and get as much clean energy online as possible? So Lacey was the only nonprofit involved in the Games Energy Council that was part of the agreement with LA-28 and the International Olympic Committee was that Save LA would form this Games Energy Council.

27:35There's a similar Games Mobility Council. We co-chaired the Transportation Electrification Committee to really look at how do we accelerate progress. Now we've created a Tiger team with the utilities Department of Water and Power and the City of L.A. figure out how we get the final wave of charging infrastructure projects online for every major charging operator is involved in this Tiger team. So the city of LA is really rolling its sleeves to figure out how to get the charging in place. We're working with the governor's office, Governor Newsom's team and the administration and our state agencies see where they can move money and fund projects that meet the eligibility requirements of their existing programs to help get more charging infrastructure online, to enable more EVs, to support the electric school buses that LA Unified School District is committed to deploying and providing a healthier experience for the bus drivers and the kids in doing so and cleaning up air for everyone.

28:33So those are the kinds of things going on. The final thing I'll say, though, is Paris got the nod for 2024. Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who just left office, did a phenomenal job. She is one of the great climate leaders of any mayor that we've seen a long time. Yet one of the powers of the Paris mayor are pretty significant and able to shut down streets and do the diesel ban and the inner core. And of course, there are a lot of people I know that didn't like what she did. But the delivery of electric buses of creating cleaner air is palpable. You look at a heat map of pollution before the work she did and after, and it's night and day.

29:16And so the health conditions of prisons have changed as a result. L.A. is the city is four million of 10 million people in this and just in the county and the region's larger. So the mayor of L.A. controls just those that part of the region. There's 87 other cities in the county and there's a million people that live in the unincorporated county, in incorporated areas of the county, meaning the county serves as sort of the city of services of the region. So that's a lot of parties to bring together. And that's one of the things that we've done through our transportation partnership, our clean energy partnership is bring utilities and municipalities of Culver City or the Pasadena Water and Power or Burbank or Glendale or Santa Monica to be part of our solutions and really get creative.