How to build the next wave of clean energy | with Jennifer Granholm, Ryan Panchadsaram

0:00Jennifer Granholm: We are competing against nations that have full-on industrial strategy, and if we don't, it is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

0:11Ryan Panchadsaram: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Jennifer Granholm has spent much of her career focused on how America builds things. As Michigan's governor from 2003 to 2011, she guided the state through the near collapse of the auto industry. And as the U.S. Secretary of Energy under President Biden from 2021 to 2025, she oversaw a massive wave of federal investment in clean energy. But since then, much of the policy she helped put in place has been reversed, with tax credits for electric vehicles eliminated and support for wind and solar cut short, just to name a few.

0:52Ryan Panchadsaram: all as the climate crisis grows more urgent.

0:56Jennifer Granholm: How do we move forward? So the first revolution of clean energy was about innovation and invention and technology. The second revolution is going to be about construction and building, and that I'm very excited for.

1:09Ryan Panchadsaram: In this conversation with engineer and climate investor Ryan Penchaseram, Jennifer talks about what it'll take for the U.S. to compete globally on clean energy and manufacturing. She argues that winning isn't just about beating other countries.

1:24Jennifer Granholm: Winning means that we're manufacturing in the United States, and we are allied with partners across the world who also do not want to have a single source of supply that they are relying on. Communities that have been left behind have to be a part of prosperity.

1:40Ryan Panchadsaram: She also shares what she thinks tech companies will have to do if they want to earn the support of communities where they're building data centers. what the history of nuclear weapons teaches us about keeping AI safe, and the story of one small Michigan town that still shapes everything she does. It's coming up right after a short break.

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4:38Ryan Panchadsaram: And now our TED Conversation of the day. You fought for the auto industry, Secretary of Energy. You led the largest investment of clean energy in our history. You know how to build.

4:51Jennifer Granholm: It's all about, as we would say, deploy, deploy, deploy. Same kind of thing. Yes.

4:56Ryan Panchadsaram: On climate and energy, could you paint what the road looks like we're on now and what we could go to? Okay. Yeah.

5:04Jennifer Granholm: So first of all, everybody, do not be totally bummed. I mean, this is a moment. I mean, right? Because there's a little hiccup right now. And we pulled out of the Paris Agreement. But in January of 2029, we're back in. This is a small hiccup. And even with the withdrawal of support for wind and solar, stuff is happening. You all are building out there. When we left the Biden administration at the end of 2024, we thought we had just blown away the amount of clean energy that we added to the grid. We added 25 Hoover dams worth, 50 gigawatts worth of clean power to the U.S. electric grid. The Energy Information Administration this year is projecting that 70 gigawatts of clean power is going to be added to the U.S.

5:56Jennifer Granholm: grid. So it is happening despite what's going on. And of course, as you know, those of you who are doing this, there is still tax credits out there for geothermal, for batteries, for, you know, hydroelectric, you name it, all of our favorites for obviously for nuclear. So stuff is happening. All I'm saying is that we are in this moment and the private sector is leading us right now. We will get back to a place where we have public-private partnerships in renewable energy as well. So the first revolution of clean energy was about innovation and invention and technology. The second revolution is going to be about construction and building.

6:40Jennifer Granholm: And that I'm very excited for.

6:42Ryan Panchadsaram: That's so exciting. Tell us about IRA, the lessons. What advice do you have for this next?

6:47Jennifer Granholm: First of all, I'm really happy that we are in a moment where this country actually understands for a moment that we need some kind of industrial strategy. And the Inflation Reduction Act was that. We are competing against nations that have full-on industrial strategy, and if we don't, it is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. So the ability for the Inflation Reduction Act to be able to provide both supply-side and demand-side strategies to create a whole ecosystem for clean technologies was amazing. And that, I think, we're going to see an IRA 2.0, Inflation Reduction Act 2.0. It might be a little bit different, and some of the lessons we'll learn.

7:30Jennifer Granholm: One of the lessons is we've got to get stuff in the ground quick enough so that communities feel it. You know, some of the rules weren't written until December of 2024, so people didn't feel it. That's lesson number one. We're going in guns blazing the next time around to make this happen. I like to say we will be breaking eggs, not breaking laws, but breaking eggs to make it happen. But the Inflation Reduction Act, by the end of 2024, we had 950 factories that were announced they were coming or expanding in the United States just to build clean energy. 400 ,000 jobs that represented. Over$400 billion worth of investment.

8:13Jennifer Granholm: That is policy that was working. And we ought to be taking a page from that. And I will say, there's one thing I'll say about the Trump administration is that they have opened the aperture for industrial strategy and both right and left understand that if we're going to compete globally, we have to be in partnership with the private sector, public and private, to be able to make us competitive globally.

8:36Ryan Panchadsaram: Speaking of being competitive globally, what does it look like for America to win?

8:40Jennifer Granholm: Well, for America to win, communities that have been left behind have to be a part of prosperity. And so thinking about that and how we are strategic about building out manufacturing. I come from Michigan, and the manufacturing stuff is really important. And there's a lot of folks who kind of blew off manufacturing. Well, if we're going to see job transformation as a result of AI, we better believe we should be building stuff in the United States. It's advanced. We're not going to build shoes, perhaps. But we are going to be building next generation technologies for clean energy. And we should be building them here.

9:16Jennifer Granholm: And we've got the innovation. And we've got to have the innovation and the research and development in some adjacency, perhaps, to the actual building of the product. So to me, winning means that we're manufacturing in the United States. And we are allied with partners across the world who also do not want to have a single source of supply that they are relying on. We're seeing this, of course, with oil in the Strait of Hormuz. We saw it with natural gas when the invasion of Ukraine. We're also seeing it with technology. So if China is going to dominate on clean technology and we're not in the game, a lot of our allies are uncomfortable with that.

9:56Jennifer Granholm: And we should be uncomfortable with it too. There should be a diversification of supply. So there's an opportunity there for us to be able to, in January of 2029, get back in not just to Paris, but into relationship with our allies when we can create buyer's clubs, we can create an opportunity to be able to sell and export our products as well as get trusted supply from our trusted allies. We were in the process of doing that in the Biden administration. We have got to get back to that because I think we are stronger together. America wins when we are with our allies and strong in the world.

10:32Ryan Panchadsaram: I completely agree. We've got a handful of investors in the room. Do you have any favorite clean technologies?

10:39Jennifer Granholm: I love them all. But if I had money to put on the table right now, I really agree on long-duration energy storage. So I like advanced solar technologies. And I will say I really love making best use of the grid that we have and distributed energy resources using aggregation of those DERs for virtual power plants And so if we don't do that, shame on us, because I think that's a huge opportunity. So those are the technologies I really like, in addition to a whole bunch more.

11:11Ryan Panchadsaram: Fusion. Fusion. Look at a lot. As governor of Michigan, you know cars. What does the future of that industry look like?

11:18Jennifer Granholm: It's challenging right now, obviously, because of what has happened on the EV side. Because of the exigencies with the price of fuel, we're certainly seeing an uptake in used EV sales. And as people know, once you drive an EV, you don't go back. And we had a goal and was projected to be able to sell new, 50 % of all new sales of EVs by 2030 was the projection. That has obviously, the goalpost has moved on that because of the reduction of the tax credits. But I do think that, you know, we need to say, in the United States, we need to have a strong auto industry. The auto industry is the backbone of manufacturing.

12:06Jennifer Granholm: The suppliers to the auto industry are all over the country, and it's one particular product that we can excel in. But again, we've got to have a partnership, and we've got to have constancy. We have to have certainty. There can't be this ridiculous flim-flom back and forth because the auto industry, you know, of the 950 factories I referenced, 450 of them that were announced under the Inflation Reduction Act were related to electric vehicles, whether there were batteries, anode, cathode, separator material, electrolyte, assembly of the EVs, etc. All of that was happening in the United States, and so much of that was retrenched.

12:47Jennifer Granholm: Now, some of the auto industry got really smart and said, when the tax credits were taken away, we will convert our EV batteries to long-duration energy storage batteries, and that's exciting to see happening. But it's just, this is going to come back on if the auto industry can hang on this period of time.

13:08Ryan Panchadsaram: This is an auto question, but more. Can we, for energy and other sources, can we build faster than China? Can we build better, cheaper? What's China?

13:20Jennifer Granholm: well uh you know i it's the it's the perennial question i don't know that we can build um cheaper we might be able to build faster because we have the help of ai yeah um we might be able to if we're really focused on being excellent about it i i will say this that because of the desire not to have a single supplier of any technology, there is some who believe, especially in the EU and other places, that there is a security premium that they might be willing to pay to not have a single source of supply, like BYD supplying all of your electric vehicles. There is a national security component to it.

14:03Jennifer Granholm: And of course, we have to be sensitive to cost. Of course we do. And there are ways we should continue to have that continuous improvement. But I do think that we can be globally competitive if we have a comprehensive national strategy and we don't flip-flop about it.

14:21Ryan Panchadsaram: Data centers, how do we get this right?

14:24Jennifer Granholm: So data centers can be a huge asset to communities, but they're obviously not there yet. The communities, what have we got now? 150 moratoria that have been passed across the country. Most of the moratoria are putting a time frame on the moratoria to be able to work out what the guardrails are. What should the guardrails be? Obviously, the whole Beyonce thing, bring your own clean energy or bring your own capacity. That's got to be a component of it. Paying for the grid upgrades have got to be a component of it. Making sure that there's no stranded assets has got to be a component of it. What I think the community wants, and of course, the environmental stuff about water, noise, et cetera, setbacks.

15:01Jennifer Granholm: I think that we may need a little bit more imagination about how to work with communities. The lack of trust is huge. And if we don't have the guardrails right on AI overall, we're going to continue to see the no, no, no. But if we get those bigger guardrails right, AI safety right, then communities have such leverage right now to be able to ask for what they want in that community to make it work for them. And so, you know, what if there is a community dividend from a data center? What if a tech company is paying for batteries for homes in the region that the data center is in, and that adds to the capacity stack of the data center?

15:46Jennifer Granholm: What if a community asks for a data center to be beautiful? If you right now went to chat and said, design me a beautiful data center for an agricultural area with parks and with a community center and with ponds and contextually designed so that you would see beautiful data centers. But people aren't looking at that or thinking about that. What if the tech companies subsidize electric vehicles for that area and use that as part of their capacity stack? I mean, there's so much, including a dividend that could actually pay for their energy bills, et cetera. So I think we've got, there's a lot of potential that we can bring to the conversation.

16:31Jennifer Granholm: But the first thing that has to happen is AI safety and guardrails on that have to be taken care of.

16:37Ryan Panchadsaram: I like this community dividend idea. I don't know, for the Beyonce fans out there, she does say, pay me in equity.

16:42Jennifer Granholm: So there, exactly.

16:44Ryan Panchadsaram: I've got one last question, which is, so as Secretary of Energy, you were also in charge of America's nuclear weapons, which is not a normal line on a resume. You've had a job where the worst case is the end of the world. So AI, what do we do about AI?

17:02Jennifer Granholm: So what are those guard rails? Who's doing the testing? What are the independent validators, et cetera? What are the scenarios where you shut it down in case of a crisis, in case of really catastrophic? But internationally, this is the lesson from the nuclear space. The International Atomic Energy Agency was created in the wake of the Manhattan Project and what happened. And that worked. There were treaties. There was inspections. There was validation. There was safety. And we haven't had an incident since then. Now, obviously, AI is different than nuclear power. But you need an international component of this, obviously, to make it safe around the world.

17:48Jennifer Granholm: And that's got to happen ASAP along with what has to happen in Congress ASAP to prevent further harm from happening. I think that lesson is there for us.

18:00Ryan Panchadsaram: Actually, I'm going to sneak in one more question because I am so energized. What keeps you in this fight?

18:07Jennifer Granholm: Well, when I was governor of Michigan, we were in the throes of the auto industry going through bankruptcy. And we were in the throes of the loss of manufacturing jobs in general. and looking into the eyes of people who live in communities who had the rug pulled out from under them was was it seared my soul and I know we can do better I know we can pay attention to communities that have been left behind where there are tumbled weeds down main street because the main employer moved out I know we can do better to for the workers who had been left behind one of these one of these factories that left in a tiny community in Michigan of 8 ,000 people called Greenville.

18:52Jennifer Granholm: Electrolux was a refrigerator factory, and it moved to Mexico. And on the last month that the refrigerators came off the assembly line, the community had a gathering called The Last Supper at Clackle's Orchard Pavilion. And I went to it, even though I wasn't invited because I didn't succeed in keeping the factory there. And when I went in, there were all these people at around eight top tables eating out of box lunches. And there was a sad band playing. And I went up to the first table and a guy stands up and he says, governor, he said, I worked at this factory for 30 years. I went from high school to factory.

19:30Jennifer Granholm: I'm 48 years old. There are my two kids. All I know, he said, is how to make refrigerators. And then he puts his hand on his chest like this. And he said, who is ever going to hire me? Who's ever going to hire me? And that question was asked by everybody in that room that day and by everybody in one of the 50 ,000 communities that lost factories in the first part of the century. And we as a nation did not do right by those communities. And we have a moment now to fix that and to do it differently. It can be with AI. it can be with manufacturing clean energy projects it can be with retraining people for those jobs but we cannot walk away from these communities that is how you build trust is by investing in these communities that have been left behind and that's what keeps me up at night thank you Governor applause

20:36Ryan Panchadsaram: that was Jennifer Granholm and Ryan Panchasaram at TED Countdown, The Next 10 in Berkeley, California in 2026. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team,

21:10Ryan Panchadsaram: additional support from learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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