Episode: 1310
Title: HPR1310: Energy Democracy defined
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1310/hpr1310.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:20:24

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Hey Hacker Public Radio Denizens, I'm a huge fan of HPR, given that I'm into all things
floss, copy left, and just in general, I'm a geek.
And while I don't have code, I do have policy in my state legislature and in social media
as an electric vehicle evangelist, renewable energy feed and tariff analyst, podcaster,
and vehicle-degrade V2G Advocate.
So what you are about to hear is a program that I've been recording for about three years
now.
It's called This Week in Energy or Twee.
It's a podcast that reviews the week's energy news headlines is viewed through the lens
of two energy democratizers, which is why I think HPR listeners may find it of interest.
I'm based in Reno, Nevada, and my co-host, she's a Danish energy economist who bounces
around between Denmark and Germany.
But the following isn't an example of our typical show in that we don't talk about
the latest energy news headlines, rather, we invited a solar energy blogger from South
Korea to join us.
And he asks us, the two Twee co-hosts, to explain what the term energy democracy means.
So without further ado, here's a special 30-minute episode of Twee, which explains what energy
democracy is, how the movement is hacking the traditional monopoly utility business model,
and what the future of energy may look like if the people get engaged in the energy transition
or what is called the energywender in Germany.
And finally, I'd like to thank the volunteers at Hacker Public Radio for making this venue
available to the community.
Thanks guys and gals.
Next up, on Twee, this week in energy, we have a special edition where solar energy blogger
Roger Wilhite, who's based in Korea, interviews Twee co-host Kristen and Bob on the topic
of energy democracy.
This podcast is sponsored by the kind donations from listeners like you to sponsor our show,
please head on over to www.thisweekandenergy.tv to donate.
And we appreciate your kind support.
From the high desert of northern Nevada to the temperate woodlands of Berlin, Germany
to temperate coastal Siwon South Korea and around the world, welcome to Twee this week
in energy for the week of July 15th, 2013, episode 97, energy democracy defined.
And I apologize in advance for the audio quality of the show.
Hopefully it'll be back to normal in the next edition.
We thank you for your patience.
Hey everybody, welcome to Twee today.
We have a really special show today.
We're going to do question and answer format on energy democracy and try and kind of
unpack the term because there's so many aspects to it.
Joining us today is Roger Wilhite and he's in Siwon South Korea.
He's an English teacher there for grammar school.
He runs a blog at secondsilicon.com, which he brought to our attention and it's a really
good blog.
I would go check it out.
Welcome to the show Roger.
Thank you Bob, hi Kristen.
I'm a huge fan and I think you guys are doing a fantastic job in this space.
Twee has been an invaluable source of inspiration for me as a solar energy blogger and a renewable
energy advocate.
Thank you so much for extending the invitation to appear in your show to ask about energy
democracy.
Yeah, and that's what Roger did, he had emailed me and he was asking me if he had gotten
the definitions or he had written a blog post about energy democracy and he was curious
if I had any input on how he had defined it and I thought well since Kristen and I are
going to be taking a couple of weeks off here and we're trying to do some kind of special
pre-recorded shows that we could try and impact the term with Roger and see how that goes
and then of course we have Kristen and where are you at today?
Well, I'm still in Berlin so this doesn't happen so often that we do two shows where I'm
at the same place, right?
I guess so, yeah.
Where are you at today?
But I think this is very interesting that we're really spanning the globe with Korea,
the US and Europe today.
So yeah, welcome also here from Berlin to you Roger and thank you for your interest
and your blog post.
No problem.
Yeah, I was really blown away when I was looking at his blog which is, again, secondsilicon.com
and then I went to see the about page and I said wow, he's in Korea, how cool is that?
But he isn't American and I guess he's heading back to the States in 2014 and you've been
in Korea for nine years.
Yeah, that's correct.
So how has your experience been there?
Oh, it's been fantastic, I've in the process of living here, I've gotten married and had
my first child so it's been great, learned a lot about the culture and it's been a wonderful
experience.
Well, congratulations.
Thank you.
Okay, well, why don't we get on with what we're going to do here and what's going to be
kind of, you know, we're going to do this as I often describe to guests that I invite
on to Tweet, I describe the show as sort of like friends sitting in a coffee shop and
just casually discussing the latest energy news headlines, although today we're going to
be more of a kind of a panel moderator format but we still want to be conversational and
I think Rodgers, many regards, probably much more knowledgeable about solar energy than
I am judging by his blog.
So I'm sure he's got a lot to say as well.
So Rodgers, why don't you start out by asking, I guess, what the first question will be and
we'll then let Kristen maybe jump in and answer that and then I'll see if I have anything
to add.
Okay, well, it was on Tweet that I first heard the term energy democracy.
The phrase kind of intrigued me and I wanted to know more about this, I had no idea and
I did some searching and I kind of found what I was looking for with a website called
the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and that URL is lsr.org and according to this site,
they've been fomenting this vision of democratized energy since 1975.
So given the nearly four decades since the inception of this idea, you would think there
would be an abundance of material on this topic but that's just not the case.
There's not much information at least online on this topic.
So that's what I'm here today.
I'd like to pick your brains about this idea of energy democracy for me and hopefully
some of your listeners can get a better grasp of it.
So could I get a summary of democratized energy from each of you?
Yes, thanks, Roger, for this question and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance are
well, friends of us, even though I, you know, spanning the globe, this is maybe a term
that we use for the people who are in the space and some of the few people using this term
just as you're saying, there's not so much of a resource out there.
So when I talk about energy democracy and democratizing energy, what I mean is that
the ability to take energy back into people's hands, that means that renewable energy is
it's the first time that we really have the opportunity to take ownership into our own
hands as citizens, you know, fossil fuels.
There was no possibility of having your own little nuclear reactor in your garden,
with renewable energy, this is now possible that the ownership is now back in our hands
and that could be in many formats, it could be literally the solar panel on your roof,
but it could also be co-ownership, like in co-owned, cooperatively owned, wind turbines
or cooperatively owned other renewable energy installations.
So it's really about the ownership and, yeah, that's what you're also discussing on your
in your blog post where you're relating the terms energy democracy and discussing the
leasing models and the leasing model discussion in the US that's currently going on.
And I really think that is the point and the important thing is also, so this is a structural
change and it's not only the technological change because as you were pointing out
as well in your blog, it's perfectly possible to stay with the current centralized energy
system and, in quote-unquote, just switch the energy source.
So democratizing energy is about more than switching to renewables, it's about decentralizing
the system and as you're pointing out, also, you could even decentralize the system and
still keep ownership in few hands, but it's about decentralizing the system and decentralizing
ownership.
And I like to compare it to the digital revolution because these paths are actually so similar.
The digital revolution, all of a sudden, allowed all of us to become content producers
without any gatekeepers, just like we're doing it with Tweet and you're doing it with
your blog.
All of a sudden, we're actually all publishers and this is something that became possible
through a technological innovation, but it's up to us to take this chance and use it
and the same is with renewable energy.
It's up to us to take this chance and actually democratize energy now.
Great analogy with the digital revolution.
That was a great analogy.
That was kind of what I was looking for.
Bob?
Yeah.
Well, to add to what Kirsten was saying, I think John Feral at the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance and who, by the way, we should have on, I think, on the July 29th recording
I've got him penciled in, so he'll be in on that week if I can get him to shift his
time, but that's another thing.
So anyway, he wrote in energy self-reliant states, which is a little report he wrote about
four years ago now, but in the preface to it, he said, the ubiquitous nature of renewable
energy argues for a decentralized energy approach, which is clearly it seems just really not
the efficient way to do it, to throw these big solar energy systems out into the middle
of our deserts here in particular in Nevada.
Energy democracy is about ownership and it's about decentralizing something that was formally
centralized.
And this has been, since the dawn of civilization, I do have a presentation that I give where
I actually go clear back to the epic of Gilgamesh and talk about the cedar forest and a lot
of people don't realize is even in ancient times if a group of people were able to control
an energy resource which back then, of course, was forests, they could bring down a kingdom
and it happened.
And this is part of what the whole story in the epic of Gilgamesh is about where he
left, you know, he takes off to go into the cedar forest and claim it from the monster,
of course, they have all these metaphors, but it's, you know, you can move this all the
way forward until present time and it's still the people who control these energy resources
that control our civilization and now that paradigm is breaking down, thanks to technology.
And this is much as, Kirsten has just related it to the IT revolution, it's very much the
same thing that's happening and it's a huge disruptive thing that's going on in our society
around the globe.
Okay.
So I'd like to get a little bit more into the technical side of energy democracy.
As you know, we have higher efficiencies along with lower prices and solar PV and that's
led to exponential growth in recent years over in solar capacity.
The electrical vehicles getting a lot of attention these days and people are imagining things
like smart grids and micro grids as promising solutions to our energy problems.
I'd like to discuss the role these developments take in relation to our topic.
And so if I could get you to elaborate a little bit on these and any other technological
advancements that help to make energy democracy now feasible.
Well, so the smart grid idea and the entire idea of decentralized units of energy supplied
that communicate and work as small sales instead of large grid systems, I think that's the
next step that we're going to see spread around the world because right now, I mean, these
are still, so to speak, in test phases.
You mentioned a city in Korea where they're testing that smart grid idea, smart city idea,
but basically, yeah, oh, that was the name, yes, exactly, but the problem that we're having
in front of us is that solar energy in particular and wind, so the two large fluctuating renewable
energy sources are eroding their own market prices on the terms that markets, and
the electricity markets work today.
So that's this married order effect.
We don't need to go into detail with that right now, but the fact is that as long as you
don't have storage and communication completely combined with the producing source, the marginal
cost of producing an extra unit of solar or an extra unit of wind is virtually zero.
So they have a clear downward push and electricity prices, which is a really good thing, apart
from that they are eroding their own competitiveness, so to speak, the more solar, the more wind
you have in the system, the lower the market prices are, the harder it is to get the payback
times on a so-called pure market basis.
So this could change once we have smart grids with integrate wind and sun with a storage
medium, and of course there are lots of different storage mediums and the extra cars is one
option, but what we see is a really cheap storage medium in a country like Denmark is that
you can use the district heating system as a storage medium.
So what we see is that the different energy sectors start to integrate.
You have the electricity sector, the heating sector, and the transportation sector, and
you can integrate these and use the transportation sector, the electric cars, and the heating
sector hot water basically, as a storage medium for electricity and thereby keep the prices
more stable on the very fluctuating resources like solar and wind.
So I think it's from an economic perspective that smart grids are really interesting and
that the technical development of communication systems for smart grids should go along with
business model innovation, that's like the fancy word, right?
Where you actually try to not only trade electricity under larger power exchanges, but you
start developing smaller, localized, regionalized electricity markets.
Okay, yeah, that was great, I answered a lot of questions, I have to digest that a little
bit more.
That was great though.
I want to get on the political side of this a little bit because as an American, as an
American I realized there were certain words and phrases that when heard they ignite kind
of a frenzy of negative emotions to some groups of people, mainly words like subsidy
and incentives.
But I've never heard anyone on Fox News chastising the word democracy, so can we get back to that
for a moment?
Yeah.
Alisa Wood writing for realenergywriters.com wrote that renewable technologies like electric
vehicles, smart grids, they offer a vision of a less centralized energy system where
communities and households can vote in or shape the electrical grid by how they decide to
consume energy.
You've touched on this earlier, but I was wondering if you could elaborate on this and
kind of explain like what are the elements of energy democracy that make it democratic?
Yeah, well, I think it's very good to hear it from you that you're saying, well, it's
easy, quote unquote, to bash terms like subsidy or incentive in some parts of the world,
but you don't think that this is the case with democracy.
We've actually been discussing this and I've been thinking a lot about this when I developed
the idea of energy democracy magazine, how what connotations does this phrase have and
are they only positive?
And well, I think it's not only about voting with your pockets, so to speak, which is
also an element.
But it's really, I mean, democracy in a political sense means that once you have taken
a certain path and a majority is voting for that, so to speak, then you have a development
rolling and you cannot have one person or one organization really stopping the entire
thing because, well, if the majority or the democratic system has decided that is the
path we take.
On the other hand, if you are having power, literally, in the hands of big companies, then
they might, from one day to the other, decide to change their business model or decide to
change their strategy, which is, I mean, totally okay, if it's in their ownership.
And that's what we are seeing today and that might also be the risk with a leasing model
that you're describing in your blog post, that as long as you don't really have the ownership,
you're still vulnerable to other people's decisions.
And I think that's the strength of a development where ownership is the key aspect, like we have
it here in Germany.
So there's more than one million solar owners in Germany.
Clearly, this is now a political force.
So changing incentives sparks a huge debate and is prevalent in media is something that
politicians care about is a topic for the elections coming up, actually the number one
or two topic along with the Euro crisis here in Germany.
So democratizing energy means that by having ownership in one way or another on your
rule for in a cooperative manner makes it difficult for overnight changes in policy
or overnight, you know, taking it away.
We saw it in referring back to the addition of Tweet that we did with Chelsea Sexton
who was in the film, who killed the electric car.
That was a leasing model involved back then in electric car ownership.
And all of a sudden, the car producers decided to remove them from the market and legally
they were able to because they are their owners.
So I think that's also a democratic element that with ownership, you're not vulnerable to
other people's decisions and are able to continue on a path once you've gained the momentum.
Okay, great.
Bob, did you have anything else for that?
That was great.
I might just say, well, I love the analogy of the EV1 and how the GM pulled the plug on
the technology and how, you know, exactly what Kristen was referring to.
The only thing I might add to it is how these terms can get conflated between Europe and
especially the non-Anglophone nations, you know, getting it translated over to the
Anglophone, the English-speaking nations and how the terms subsidy and Democrat and democratic
can get conflated with political aspects here in the United States.
If you say subsidy, that's strictly referring to taxpayers and a taxpayer subsidization of
whatever technology.
But in Europe, it's more loosely defined as just help of whatever form that the government
stepped in.
They set up a feed-in-tariff program.
So this is a subsidy, but it doesn't translate well into English.
I've seen often.
And then, of course, the term here in the United States, if you say democratic or democracy
that gets conflated with the political party, sadly, and that, of course, makes people choose
sides.
Just on the subsidy thing, actually, it was a big debate whether a feed-in-tariff is
a subsidy or not, and it was quite important to the sector to say it's incentive and not
a subsidy also from a legal European legal perspective, but that's another story.
So then subsidy in German then does refer once again to taxpayer subsidizing the system
or the program?
Yes.
So state funded and whereas the feed-in-tariff is funded by electricity bill, it might
be that that's the difference.
There was one thing I wanted to comment on, Roger, because you described or you mentioned
the consolidation in the solar energy sector that's taking place right now.
And definitely, that's something that's really hurting here in Germany because three
effects come at one time.
There are cuts in the scheme, the feed-in-tariff scheme.
Well, tanguously, there's overcapacity in global markets and competition from ages is
coming in and making a downward price push on panels, solar panels.
And then, as you're describing, we're kind of reaching a time, a typical time in any
technology producing process where the consolidation is happening no matter what industry you see.
That's usually what happens after a certain time.
So however, I think it's important to say that democratization of energy, at least the
way I use the term, is not about necessarily a decentralization of the production technology.
So certainly, when solar emerged, it was to speak a decentralized production of the technology
because they were small producers and they were all over the place.
And now there's a consolidation taking place and it's the big manufacturers who are surviving
this consolidation phase or they're becoming big in order to survive the consolidation phase.
So again, I think it's important to say that it's the ownership that is decentralized
and democratized.
But the production of the technology behaves probably like any other technology and goes
through the phases of many small producers to larger producers that are internationally
competitive as we see it right now.
Okay.
And that was great.
I had a post of other questions, but I think you've kind of answered a lot of them with
your long and detailed and very insightful descriptions.
I just have a couple more, though.
I'd like to ask whether energy democracy, if it starts getting, you know, it starts reaching
critical mass, at least in the US, will it breathe a new life into these culture wars?
I guess what I want to know is can energy democracy coexist with the principles of the brand
of capitalism that we have today or do we have to rethink and reshape the economic system
we live in for this to work?
Do you understand what I'm trying to get at here?
I think I do and I think it's actually quite interesting because, well, so reshape
being, yes, referring back to what I said about the electricity market, I definitely think
we need to do some reshaping there, which would require a crisis, electricity prices and
markets to be smaller in order to reflect local circumstances regarding the sun and wind
condition in every hour or even every minute or second if you start having real-time
prices, that's one thing, but the general system of capitalism, actually you're not really
getting closer to a textbook version of a market, economics first year, than with a renewable
energy system where ownership is held by many small owners, you know, the textbook says
something about having an almost infinite amount of almost identical producers producing
the same good.
Actually that never happens, but it's close to happening when you have, like in Germany,
one million solar panel owners who produce an identical good electricity, but they are
at each of them is so small that they cannot, you know, I mean, they don't have any power
on the pricing mechanism.
So actually we're getting really close to like a beautiful textbook version of capitalism,
which seems maybe ironic to some, especially those who are attacking renewables for being
only, you know, almost like a state aid project, but actually we're moving towards a market
that's much more in lines with, I mean, what does market competition actually mean?
Well it means that you have a lot of owners at producing, and what we have today is actually
not a market system.
You have very few owners who dominate the market and then can set prices.
That's like the monopoly or oligopoly model, and that's how electricity systems work
today.
There's not much, there's not much textbook market or liberal market over that.
All right.
Well, you two have painted a very clear and detailed picture of energy democracy.
One more thing, Bob, overall do you think this is more policy driven or is it technology
driven?
Well, it's clearly both.
We have the technology is on the ground now, so, you know, but it has obviously taken
many years to get to that point, and of course that's part of what Herman Scheer's whole
thesis was, was that if we could scale these technologies rapidly by allowing everybody
to participate equally, and then I usually caveat that by meaningfully, meaning they
get paid to do so, then we can bring down the cost of these technologies quickly.
Then, of course, policy comes in because that here in particular in the United States
policy is used often by the industry who has the power in the legislatures because they
have the years of the legislatures, your average fellow who goes to work every day, doesn't
have time to go down to the legislature and lobby for energy democracy.
So you have the energy companies in there, and they're captured regulatory bodies, our
public utility commissions, in there all advocating for pretty much the status quo.
So if policy doesn't move such that we can use the technology, then we're still having
trouble democratizing our energy grids, and of course this is the compare and contrast
between the United States and Germany in particular, is that you've got all the participation
there, and ownership there, and here you have very little participation, and the ownership
is still in the hands of the big monopolies and monopolies, as Kirsten was talking
about.
Okay, well I think that's kind of about to it for me, I think I've had everything that
I wanted to know answered, hopefully this will shed some light for some of your listeners
as well.
Thank you so much for having me, it's been great to be here, and I look forward to
consuming many more great episodes of Tweet.
Thank you very much Roger, happy to have you all.
Thank you.
Thank you so much Roger, it's great that you were willing to come on and do this, you're
an excellent moderator by the way, maybe you've got a job, you should get a job or apply
for a job when you come back to the States with green tech media or something and you can
do some collaboration.
Maybe I will, thank you so much for that.
And in any case, so yeah, this is going to be a short version of Tweet today, and we
just were hoping to keep it real succinct and get this explanation, a little more granular
explanation of what energy democracy is all about.
And thanks so much to Roger Wilhite for joining us on this special edition of this week
and energy.
You can find out more about Roger at his website, which is called Second Silicon, Get Absorbed
and Solar at SecondSilicon.com, that's all spelled out SecondSilicon.com.
I highly recommend the blog, it's an excellent site.
And of course, please let us know what you thought of today's show, you can leave us feedback
on each of the episodes of Tweet at our website at www.thisweekandenergy.tv, or you can email
me Bob at thisweekandenergy.tv, or you can email Kirsten at thisweekandenergy.tv.
And of course, we'd love to hear your suggestions for future show topics or guests as well.
And be sure to tweet us on Twitter at TweetPodcast, that's the at sign followed by TweetPodcast,
T-W-I-E-Podcast.
And of course, we have a Facebook page, just search first there.
Thank you so much for joining us, my name's Bob Tregellis, think energy democracy folks,
and goodbye, and I'll feed us in.
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