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Rob and Jesse go deep on the universe’s smallest molecule.
Rob and Jesse talk all things solar, steel, and cement with CREA’s Lauri Myllyvirta.
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Jesse hosts a panel discussion at the annual meeting of Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
Rob sits down in New York with the outgoing head of America’s energy apparatus.
Revisiting a favorite episode with guest Ilaria Mazzocco.
The Chinese electric automaker BYD is entering a new stage in its history. Last month, it sold more than half a million electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. BYD has already shipped more cars this year than Ford and Honda, and it is fast coming for Volkswagen, GM, and Toyota’s crowns as the world’s three largest automakers.
Earlier this year, Rob and Jesse spoke with Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow with the Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. She has watched China’s EV industry grow from a small regional experiment into a planet-reshaping juggernaut. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we’re re-running that conversation — one of our favorites ever to happen on the show. We’ll be back with a new episode next week.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: It’s been clear since Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement, to some degree, that China was trying to race ahead in these clean technologies in a way that America was not. But I feel like the full arrival of the Chinese EV industry in the U.S. discourse has only happened in the past year. Can you zoom out and just give us a sense of how we went from the Chinese car industry being … not a joke, necessarily, but not really seen as a serious global competitor, to now, where the Chinese EV industry is shaping U.S. and European policy at the highest levels?
Ilaria Mazzocco: I actually think the fact that the traditional internal combustion engine automotive industry in China was so uncompetitive is part of the reason why we’re here, right? So the Chinese government for decades tried to come up with ways of getting a world-class industry. So it’s like, you know, to access the Chinese market, you have to create a joint venture, and the government picked — usually it was state-owned enterprises, which are not known for their dynamism and creativity and innovation.
And in fact the car companies that did do better in China were often sort of the private, or like the small state-owned enterprises that were sort of coming in from the margins and maybe struggled to get a license to operate initially — like Geely, right? Geely was sort of a classic example of that.
But essentially, by around the global financial crisis, there was the sense that this just wasn’t working. And this was also at a time when the Chinese bureaucracy is starting to think more and more about industrial upgrading. Salaries in China are going up. So you want to think of what’s next steps as maybe textiles and other sort of lower-end manufacturing moves outside of China. And so the thinking was, well, why don’t we invest and put our weight behind the next-generation technology in automotive, and sort of invest in that. And that way, we’re competing on a level playing field.
Ironically, that’s sort of the idea — or in the sense that, you know, you’re not competing with companies that have been accumulating IP for over 100 years, you’re sort of playing … Chinese companies may have even an advantage if they start early.
This was sort of the brainchild of the minister at the time, the minister of science and technology, who was an auto guy, Wan Gang. And so this was a fairly small project, to be honest. This wasn’t something that the secretary of the party or the premier who came up with it. It was a ministry-level initiative. There were four ministries working on it, but yeah, pretty small. It was really pilot city programs, not a big success initially — kind of expensive — but they stick with it. And that’s kind of the key there, right? So that’s what the big advantage that the Chinese bureaucracy has, that it can have that policy continuity. These are not politicized things, issues. These are, there’s also not, there’s no voters there looking at the budget and saying, You’re spending a ton of money on this unproven technology. And so that’s one advantage.
What I also like to point out is that it was the right time. This is, they started the program to commercialize, right? Obviously there’d been R&D grants and that sort of thing, but there’s a program to start actually giving consumers rebates to buy EVs and incentivizing taxi fleets, which was pretty crucial in China, and bus fleets to electrify self-starts around 2009, 2010. And you know, in those years, that’s also when Tesla is starting to emerge, right? This is a moment in which the technology is … not mature, but it’s mature enough that it can actually make real strides when it starts to be commercialized.
And then the third part is you had really good entrepreneurs. You had BYD that was just there lobbying to get this. You actually had Tesla in there trying to get more incentives for this, as well. But, you know, you had Chinese companies like BYD that were really at the margins and quite hungry that really took up this opportunity and started investing and really believed in it. So I think you had that combination of factors and, you know, now we’re like 15 years later, I think we’re seeing the results of it.
I will say it doesn’t always work that way. To an extent, there’s an element of luck, right? This is the problem with industrial policy. You can do the work right in the research and you can get it right, but it’s still not a … you don’t always know that it’s going to work out. And I give the example of fuel cell technology. They received the same types of subsidies, fuel cell passenger vehicles in China. And that, you know, we’re nowhere close to seeing a mass market for that.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Rob and Jesse talk with the deputy White House official in charge of implementing the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, is the biggest investment in clean energy in American history. It is also in danger. In January, the Trump administration and a GOP Congress will take over the federal government — and they have made a variety of promises about how they’ll disrupt the law, ranging from full repeal to a more “surgical” reform approach.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has worked since 2022 to implement the IRA’s climate provisions at the White House. She joins us to discuss what went right about the Biden administration’s rush to implement the law, why state government capacity is holding back Democratic policy goals, and why the federal government needs more tools to support energy innovation if it wants to keep up with China. She also discusses how the administration is trying to Trump-proof the law. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What do you hear from the companies? And I guess from your vantage point, are they beginning to do the lobbying work you feel like they should be doing to protect the parts of the law that are working?
Kristina Costa: I think they are. You know, we hear a lot of anxiety, as you can imagine, which is —
Meyer: Theme of this period.
Costa: Theme of this period is that there’s a lot of anxiety. And our hope is, and our belief is that they will turn that anxiety into action, in terms of educating members of Congress about how the law actually works and how it is underpinning the investments that they’re making.
And I think, you know, to take a step back and talk about policy for a little bit, one of the things, I think, that is not well understood in the rhetoric about how the different pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act actually work together is that — you know, we have provisions that are incentivizing investments in manufacturing, and people are generally pretty excited about that. We also have provisions that are incentivizing adoption of the technologies that are being manufactured. And in some cases people are pretty excited about that, and in other cases, it has been turned into a bit of a political cudgel. But the fact of the matter is that those two things are pretty interdependent.
So, for instance, we have what is called the 45X advanced manufacturing production tax credit, and that is largely a per-unit tax credit that goes to manufacturers of a specified list of clean energy components, including batteries for electric vehicles, as well as for grid storage. And we have seen just gangbusters investment in the EV battery space since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. It has set the United States up to be an EV battery manufacturing powerhouse. And this is, of course, an area of importance for the clean energy transition. It is also an area of incredible importance for U.S. energy security, given the currently dominant market position that China plays, that China holds in the EV battery supply chain.
And I think people generally think this is pretty good. But one of the reasons besides the 45X credit just providing a strong, straight-up incentive to invest in the United States and make these things in the United States is that the much-maligned 30D new clean vehicle tax credit that provides a subsidy to individuals to buy electric vehicles that are made in the United States has a bunch of pretty stringent requirements about the sourcing of batteries and of critical minerals contained within those vehicles in order to be eligible for the tax credit. And so you have both incentives to manufacture, but you also basically have incentives to provide support for the offtake of what those manufacturers are actually producing.
Those two things go hand in hand, and I don’t think that is well understood in the political rhetoric.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
