As the energy density of batteries continues to increase even as costs keep declining, the stationary energy storage market is booming, with investment growing by over 7x over the last few years – from $5 billion in 2020 to over $35 billion in 2023 – and with battery installations tripling just last year alone. While an influx of storage is certainly needed to integrate the vast amount of renewables we need to fully decarbonize the grid, the storage we are adding to the grid is not always or even usually reducing overall carbon emissions. In fact, too often new batteries are resulting in positive net new emissions – an outcome almost no one wants. In this episode, Chad Reed chats with Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet of Tierra Climate and Adam Reeve of REsurety to learn more about the efforts of the Energy Storage Solutions Consortium (ESSC), which seeks to align the economic incentives of the storage market with truly accelerating grid decarbonization.
As the energy density of batteries continues to increase even as costs keep declining, the stationary energy storage market is booming, with investment growing by over 7x over the last few years – from $5 billion in 2020 to over $35 billion in 2023 – and with battery installations tripling just last year alone.
While an influx of storage is certainly needed to integrate the vast amount of renewables we need to fully decarbonize the grid, the storage we are adding to the grid is not always or even usually reducing overall carbon emissions. In fact, too often new batteries are resulting in positive net new emissions – an outcome almost no one wants.
In this episode, Chad Reed chats with Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet of Tierra Climate and Adam Reeve of REsurety to learn more about the efforts of the Energy Storage Solutions Consortium (ESSC), which seeks to align the economic incentives of the storage market with truly accelerating grid decarbonization.
Links:
Energy Storage Solutions Consortium (ESSC)
Charging Towards Zero: Harnessing Batteries and Carbon Contracts to Accelerate Grid Decarbonization
Decarbonization: Stocks and flows, abundance and scarcity, net zero
Episode recorded February 14, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Jacob Mansfield: When we went into doing this study, we had the operating assumption that batteries would pretty naturally reduce emissions, and we were pretty surprised to see that the vast majority of batteries actually inadvertently increase emissions.
Chad: As the energy density of batteries continues to increase even as costs keep declining, the stationary energy storage market is booming, with investment growing by over 7x over the last few years – from $5 billion in 2020 to over $35 billion in 2023 – and with battery installations tripling just last year alone.
While an influx of storage is certainly needed to integrate the vast amount of renewables we need to fully decarbonize the grid, the storage we are adding to the grid is not always or even usually reducing overall carbon emissions. In fact, too often new batteries are resulting in positive net new emissions – an outcome almost no one wants.
In this episode, I chat with Jacob Mansfield and Emma Konet of Tierra Climate and Adam Reeve of REsurety to learn more about the efforts of the Energy Storage Solutions Consortium (ESSC), which seeks to align the economic incentives of the storage market with truly accelerating grid decarbonization.
Chad: Jacob, Emma, Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a real pleasure to have you.
Adam Reeve: Pleasure to be here.
Jacob: Thanks for having us.
Emma Konet: Thank you for having us, Chad.
Chad: First, I want to start with a question that I like to ask all of our guests, and that is, how did you find your way to the climate space? Was there a formative experience that compelled you to devote your career to protecting our planet? Adam, why don't you start us off?
Adam: Sure. Yes. I think it's mostly growing up. I grew up in the northeast. Fortunate to spend a lot of my childhood outdoors hiking in the White Mountains. I think that and my parents really prioritized sustainability. My first job was on an organic farm in high school. I feel like it's just been part of me for a while rather than one individual experience.
Chad: Jacob, how about you?
Jacob: I'd say that I grew into it. I started off my career on a commodities trading floor focused on power. I think at the time, I didn't fully appreciate the decarbonization aspect of it. Growing up in the Gulf Coast and then when Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, it definitely opened my eyes to how climate change was not just some sort of abstract risk to society but actually had tangible consequences. For me, that definitely gave my work on the commodities trading floor, and then later in my career, a different lens of importance and purpose to what I was doing.
Chad: Emma, how about you?
Emma: Yes, similar to Adam, I got interested in climate at a young age. I did my seventh-grade science project on the greenhouse effect and just got super fascinated by climate change. That translated into my career where I, similar to Jacob, we actually worked at the same place right out of college, commodities trading floor. I was on the power side, got super interested in the power grid, and the transition we were going through, and then that naturally led to energy storage. Then that naturally led into this question of how we get the grid to net zero and what role energy storage could play in that. I think every step I've made in my career has led me to this ultimate apex of energy and climate and power and sustainability.
Chad: Great. It all began in seventh-grade science class. That's awesome. You come from a few different organizations, but in late 2022, your organizations, which include REsurety and Tierra Climate and a few others, Meta, Broad Reach Power, and even our company, HASI, came together to form the Energy Storage Solutions Consortium, or ESSC, as we'll refer to in the discussion. The mission of the group is to maximize the carbon abatement potential of electricity storage technologies. Before we jump into what specifically ESSC does, Adam, can you talk us through the primary challenge that y'all are trying to address?
Adam: Yes, absolutely. It might be worth before digging into the specifics of the ESSC, which I recognize is a bit of a mouthful. Jacob and Emma are experts on storage and can pine on the technical details there, but backing up at the broader role and motivations, we all know that storage plays a critical role in the energy transition. The wind is not always blowing, the sun is not always shining, and we need to be able to store that excess renewable energy when we have it, bottle it up, and use it when the grid does not have those renewables generating.
Storage today, and that's battery storage, pumped hydro, whatever sort of storage we're talking about, doesn't really have economic incentives to actually do that. The price of power today is not very well correlated with the emissions rate of the grid effectively. Storage being owned and operated by for-profit entities, as are basically all power plants out there, is incentivized to charge when electricity is cheap and then discharge when it's more expensive. That doesn't necessarily mean actually avoiding emissions from the grid. It doesn't mean charging when energy is clean and discharging when it's dirty.
We recognized that there was this misalignment of incentives. Together with Meta, who's a large corporate buyer, and Broad Reach Power, who's a developer of batteries, we realized that there's an opportunity to create a structure where those incentives could be changed and basically pilot that new process. That was the problem we were trying to solve. Basically, there's this incredible technology that could drive decarbonization, but incentives weren't there. We set out basically to create that incentive structure. We can talk a lot more about that, but that was the overall problem that we're trying to solve.
Chad: Let's dive into storage itself and we have our storage experts here. Emma, what services do batteries provide the grid specifically, and why are they useful?
Emma: I think Adam touched on this classic example of what we think a battery would do, any energy storage system would do on the grid, which is what we refer to as energy arbitrage. That's buying wind power when it's cheap, selling when it's expensive. I think naturally what people tend to think is like, okay, that should basically mean firming up renewables. Essentially buying when renewables are overproducing and that power is not needed, and then shifting that power to other times of day when we would otherwise have to rely on fossil fuels. That's actually just one way that batteries make money. Like Adam mentioned, it's actually not the primary way.
In fact, most batteries today are not making the bulk of their revenue through that energy arbitrage activity. They actually sell other services to the grid, and these services are called ancillary services. They're necessary for the grid to operate and batteries are really good at selling them because they're extremely flexible, almost digital assets that can respond extremely quickly. The reason why that's valuable is because these services require to keep the frequency of the grid around a narrow band where the grid can operate, and all the demand can pull power at the right frequency and all the supply can push power at the right frequency and it keeps everything in check.
Batteries are really good at keeping that in check. That's called frequency regulation. There are other reserve products that batteries can sell that help when the grid is stressed and there is more demand than there is supply and we need to release reserves to the market, batteries can also provide that role. Then the third category outside of-- We talked about energy arbitrage, we talked about ancillary services. The third category where batteries make money is in what we call capacity markets. Every market does not have a capacity market. In fact, Texas is actually the one market that doesn't have one, but most of the deregulated markets in the US do.
Effectively what that is, is saying, hey, we need to plan for the long-term horizon. We're talking one to three to five years out, and we need to make sure we have enough physical power plant capacity to serve our expected demand. You can't build a power plant overnight. You have to send some sort of price signal to ensure that your expected load growth is going to be met with supply. That's also a product that batteries could sell because they're firm, dispatchable resources. While duration limited, they can provide capacity to the grid when it needs it.
Chad: Whether it's arbitrage or ancillary services or capacity, the services the batteries are providing, and the revenue streams that they're also generating as a result of those services, one thing that hasn't historically been the case is unlike just generating power and selling that into a market, we developed this concept of RECs, renewable energy credits.
We can differentiate between the power that is renewably generated and that which is not. Through the development of those RECs unbundled in some cases, which some folks have understandable concerns about.
We've been able to really accelerate the development of renewable power assets because you have a lot of customers, whether they're large companies or just individual consumers who say, hey, I want my power to be renewable. These RECs create a marketplace whereby you're separating the physical power you're delivering to the grid from the environmental attributes of that power and allowing folks who may not be directly contracting for that power basically to drive demand for it being built going forward. That's, again, through this concept of RECs, and sometimes they're unbundled RECs.
We don't have a similar mechanism yet in storage markets to differentiate the kind of good or clean storage revenues from the less good or less clean storage revenues. How do we create that, Emma?
Emma: RECs have been absolutely tremendously helpful in accelerating renewable energy deployments in the US. It's not only a tool for buyers to parse out clean energy from other power on the grid, but it supports the cash flows of these renewable assets. It helps them get financing. It can in some cases plug the hole on a revenue model depending on where those RECs are priced. There's a lot of benefits to monetizing that environmental attribute, and as you mentioned, separating it out from the other benefits that wind or a solar resource can provide to the grid. Storage needs the same product. That product just doesn't exist for storage. Storage is not as straightforward of an asset as even wind or solar is.
Wind or solar is going to produce when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. They produce electrons and they give them to the grid. Energy storage are a net load on the system because they actually have a round-trip energy efficiency that's less than 100%. Through the process of buying and selling, they are consuming power. They can still have a tremendous decarbonization effect even despite that round-trip energy efficiency loss, but if you just view the asset purely as a generator, it doesn't really make sense. You can't just say, oh, let's denominate a megawatt-hour product and somehow tie it to this asset that's like buying and selling energy at different periods of the day.
When we get down to what, from an environmental perspective, a battery is really capable of doing, is it's capable of taking clean electrons and then displacing dirty electrons with that clean energy. That extends well beyond just moving a renewable electron to a fossil period. They can also purchase electrons from like, say, a cleaner burning fossil fuel gas to displace coal or fuel oil, which is a valuable behavior to the grid because net net we’re reducing the tons of carbon that are being emitted to the atmosphere. The way we’re going about creating this signal, and as Adam mentioned earlier, it solves a lot of problems. It can solve a financing problem, it can solve a cash flow problem.
It can solve a market signal problem if there’s deficiency in the market whereby this carbon signal is not being sent to batteries to dictate how they operate. All these things can be solved with this mechanism that we’re trying to create through the ESSC. That mechanism is a carbon offset that is registered through a carbon registry. We’re setting up a methodology with Verra, and we basically measure the carbon content of the power when the battery’s charging versus the carbon content of the power it’s displacing when it’s discharging. That is a Carbon Delta. I’ve actually heard referred to as a carbitrage, if you will. That’s the instrument.
Ultimately, we’re transacting in the currency that people care about. We care about decarbonizing. We care about getting emissions to zero. We’re transacting in that currency denominated in CO2 tons and attributing that value to the energy storage.
Chad: Before we jump into the carbon avoidance offsets specifically, I want to dig into and loop Jacob into the discussion here. How do we determine whether a battery is actually resulting in lower net emissions through its operations? Your firm, Jacob, I believe, published a white paper looking at this challenge with regard to batteries in Texas and the ERCOT market. Could you walk us through this rather complicated and difficult subject, especially in relation to the study that you all did?
Jacob: When we went into doing this study, we had the operating assumption that batteries would pretty naturally reduce emissions, and we were pretty surprised to see that the vast majority of batteries actually inadvertently increase emissions. Digging into a little bit more of the research, it's not a totally novel insight, but what is novel is that this is happening in 2022 when we ran the study versus prior studies that happened in 2017 or 2016 with substantially lower renewable penetration. Digging into it a little bit more, what we found in ERCOT specifically, we ran the study for account year 2022 in partnership with REsurety.
We examined 24 operating assets, which we chose that sample size based off of just the availability of projects and ones that were online for the entire year. We found that close to 80% of those assets had a net emissive impact on the grid. Part of that is for reasons that Emma mentioned, such as batteries being a net load on the system. For every megawatt you put in, you may only get 850 kilowatts out. There's already an element in which batteries are consuming electricity, and then it puts a lot more focus on what is actually going into that asset and what is it displacing on the other end when it's being discharged.
For instance, if you're putting an emissive resource into the battery and the battery is losing energy in the form of heat or resistance, it's a net load on the system that happens to be also emissive. What's happening right now is specifically in ERCOT, despite tremendous renewable penetration. A lot of batteries are largely compensated through ancillary services, and certain services, for instance, like Responsive Reserve Services, pretty much have batteries sitting around idly and not cycling as often as they could, which means that batteries aren't abating as much carbon.
Really what our study drove home towards was really the in conclusion that if you could layer on this carbitrage or this carbon arbitrage opportunity and value stack that, you start to actually change the behavior of the battery to doing things that otherwise wouldn't have done, like cycling more often and moving clean energy to dirty times of day or charging more judiciously or participating less in ancillary services, which is already a relatively shallow market that certainly can't support all of the batteries that will be required to decarbonize the grid.
Chad: You touched on the round-trip efficiency losses. Emma, could you just maybe provide a few other specific primary factors that help us determine whether the deployed batteries are actually reducing emissions?
Emma: Adam touched on it earlier, the correlation between emissions and price is not nearly as high as you would necessarily expect. Even if we isolate out this kind of ancillary market participation issue, let's say, all batteries saturate ancillary markets and then they move into this energy arbitrage mode of operating. If you only have 20 or 30 or 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 correlation on emissions to price, there's not a guarantee that just by falling price signals you'll actually lower emissions. That's the long-term problem that will exist beyond these issues that Jacob mentioned in ancillary markets.
Then the other thing that we found is that not every battery is created equal. A lot of the reason why we see low-carbon charging opportunities is because of transmission constraints. Meaning that we have a lot of renewable energy in a certain place on the grid, but we can't get it to the load because we don't have an infinite amount of transmission capacity. When that power can't flow, then renewable energy might be satisfying what we call the marginal megawatt of demand in a certain location. We have to just turn on a fossil fuel unit in another location just because we just can't transport the power.
Batteries can help with that. That's when we start to think of batteries more as an aid to the transmission system where they can soak up some of that excess renewable when the transmission constraint is binding. Then when that constraint is relieved because renewables aren't producing as much, they can deliver that renewable power that would've otherwise just been curtailed. When we say curtailment in power markets, we literally mean turned off wasted. It is power that could be produced, but it's not being used. I think location really matters.
Then the last thing is carbon price. Batteries cannot infinitely abate carbon. There's an asymptote to how much they can actually abate based on their physical constraints. Higher carbon price will move a battery further on that curve closer to its asymptote versus a lower carbon price may not have as much of an effect. What really drives that is the relative value of energy and ancillary services, which the battery may have to incur opportunity costs by not providing those in order to pursue this opportunity. The larger the carbon value, the more pursuit of carbon abatement you basically see from these assets.
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Chad: Adam, absent our ability to mandate a carbon price across the world, we have to come up with other mechanisms and have to rely on demand to drive solutions. Tell us a little bit more about the carbon avoidance offsets that ESSC and your organizations are trying to develop.
Adam: Happy to. I think you're right that a carbon price is the simple and elegant solution. Where if there is a natural price on the impact of carbon for charging or discharging or for power generation, that gets baked into decision-making. Unfortunately, we're not in that world and don't anticipate being there in the near future at least in the US. This is basically a structure that we're working on that does effectively the exact same thing, where battery operators can work to include a carbon price. That's the price that someone is willing to pay for avoiding emissions through a carbon contract structure.
The structure that we're working on as you said, it's a carbon offset. We've applied for an offset through Verra. Verra is the world's largest group that certifies carbon offsets as being highly rigorous and high quality. About three-quarters of global offsets go through them and through their approval process. What we have been working on for the past 18 months is documenting how that process would work. How do you calculate that offset? How do you measure it? How do you certify that it's being accurately tracked? That it's not double-counted? How would you implement it in real life? What markets and geographic restrictions do there need to be in case there are any conflicting local rules or regulations?
That's the process that we've been working through. The end goal is to have this methodology certified in place. Basically, the vision is that an organization that wants to avoid emissions can show up and ask a storage operator to reduce emissions and pay them for every ton of avoided carbon. Basically, pay them for every offset that is generated. That way the storage operator has an incentive to do that. They remain financially whole for that activity because, as Emma said, they'll be giving up other revenue opportunities in that process, but they'll be incentivized to avoid emissions through this sort of structure. The group who's paying them for it ultimately is trying to achieve their carbon goals and has a mechanism to do that as well.
Chad: Jacob, who would be these buyers of the carbon avoidance offsets that Adam just detailed?
Jacob: Ideally they would be large C&I customers, commercial and industrial customers. They could run the gamut of a number of different sectors. They could be big tech giants. They could be consumer product goods companies. They could be large industrials. They're most likely publicly traded companies that have stated sustainability goals where they're looking to offset their carbon footprint, or whatever their greenhouse gas emissions inventories are.
Chad: I guess, are there any other examples of these sorts of markets out there? I know compliance markets across the US are maybe some that you've learned from. Could you talk about those?
Jacob: Yes. I think it's worth noting that the reason why we're going through this route is because we think voluntary markets have a lot of promise and potential. As Emma mentioned at the outset, especially with the PPA market and with the REC market, corporates are a really large driving force for the adoption of renewables. I think tapping into that, there's a high willingness to pay from corporates from a sustainability standpoint to decarbonize the grid and support batteries. That being said, there are a couple of efforts across at least the US from a compliance standpoint with state-level policies and regulations to support energy storage.
Examples of this include, probably the earliest one was SGIP in California, which was attempting to similarly compensate energy storage for reduced emissions, which has since expired or sunsetted. There's also the Clean Peak Standard in Massachusetts, which tries to compensate storage for charging during some hours and discharging during other hours. There's also the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities performance-based incentive, which is very similar to our mechanism where they would pay energy storage assets for proven avoided emissions based off of LMEs, which are Locational Marginal Emissions, published by PJM.
It's a gamut of different types of market structures or mechanisms from a compliance standpoint, where at a state level, people recognize the need for energy storage and they're playing with different ways to compensate energy storage. Again, I think this product is something that taps into other markets where there may not be that type of state-level support for decarbonization and deployment of energy storage, areas where there are the greatest need, such as the middle part of the United States where tones of renewables are being built and there's not the commensurate amount of energy storage yet deployed.
Chad: Adam, ESSC has been at this for about a year and a half now. You've probably been at it even longer personally. How many and what kind of organizations have you recruited to this effort?
Adam: Yes, we have been at it for 18 months, publicly. Some work before that on the not public side, but yes, that's about right. We started again just as three organizations with this vision of creating a structure for storage to operate in a way that decarbonized the grid faster. I'm happy to say that we've seen a lot of other people who align with that vision and have joined on in an advisory capacity. We're open trying to create a big tent approach where folks from a number of different backgrounds and focus areas are welcome to join and contribute their thoughts, ideas, to basically make this be as robust and high quality as standard as possible. We're not excluding anyone.
About 75 groups have come together now. These span for-profit corporations and non-profits, some of the world's largest banks, biggest C&I buyers of power, biggest developers of storage and renewables, as well as some non-profits and startups. It's a pretty diverse group with some real thought leaders in there. It's been pretty exciting to see the traction that we've gotten across these different areas.
Chad: What have you achieved to date, and what's your timeline going forward?
Adam: I'll say it's been a little bit slower moving than we hoped. It turns out that bringing all those groups together does take time and it is a very complex process. The level of rigor we're holding ourselves to is really high. We want to make sure that we come out the other side of this with a really high-quality credit that everyone believes in and values. We're taking our time and doing it right. Where we are right now is we're going through this Verra methodology development process. We hope to wrap that up around the end of this year.
I'd say we're the majority of the way through that. We're working through a number of the detailed items that have come up in questions from Verra. We're in a dialogue with them regularly. Then there are periods of public comments, third parties come in for independent review and we anticipate getting through that by the end of the year. We're most of the way through that at this point, and hopefully, we stay on that timeline.
Chad: Hopefully in early 2025, carbon avoidance offsets can be generated and purchased by those interested in doing so. Jacob, if folks want to learn more about ESSC and otherwise support your efforts, what should they do?
Jacob: They should reach out to us. We'd be happy to loop them into the efforts. It's definitely an open door and a pretty wide tent, as Adam mentioned, with a number of different organizations involved. It's constantly growing. I think over the last probably 4 or 5 months, we've probably had another 15-plus organizations join. It's a constantly growing roster. Feel free to email me at jacob@tierraclimate.com. Happy to loop you into those monthly meetings and help us join in supporting this initiative, which we think is really important.
Chad: We're almost done, but first we have the hot seat. The first is one thing I changed my mind on. Emma, let's go to you.
Emma: One thing I changed my mind on, I guess it came out of this white paper that we put together in 2022, where I wanted to join an energy storage developer because I was really passionate about decarbonizing the grid. Through my work at that company, I started getting a suspicion that maybe batteries were not as inherently grid cleaning. I mean, certainly capable of grid cleaning, but to maximize revenue, it was not clear to me that was entirely the case. Then I started researching this further and then through my work at Tierra Climate, I think that was what was really motivating me to start this company and to join the ESSC.
I don't know if it's necessarily changed my mind on the potential for energy storage, but it's certainly changed my mind on how we approach the problem of operating energy storage and thinking about how we build optimization engines that can account for these externalities like carbon emissions that we don't currently have markets to value. I'm a scientist. I am a mathematician. I like to draw conclusions based on data. It's a very nascent market. The more information we get about energy storage, about grid emissionality, like the great work that REsurety is doing and Adam is doing at REsurety is really informing those types of conclusions.
Chad: Adam, ESSC is only one of the things that you lead at REsurety. Your question is, the key ingredient to my productivity is?
Adam: A tough problem to solve, I guess is the short answer. Of which there's no shortage, I feel like, in this industry and with our company trying to bring data-driven solutions to clean energy space. Good problem to solve. Personally, a good morning workout gets me going for the day. Between those two, those would be the keys.
Chad: I am definitely a morning workout person as well. Jacob, the book that has influenced me the most is?
Jacob: I'll still keep it in the power vein, and I'll say that I'm a big fan of Saul Griffith and his book Electrify. It outlines our pathway to decarbonization. Given that I'm already a power nerd, I think what he outlines is pretty sensible, which is that we need to electrify everything and decarbonize the grid at the same way. It's not super lofty, impractical roadmap. It's something that can actually make a lot of sense both economically and socially. Definitely, there's a large lift to it on a lot of levels, but it's something that at least has a level of optimism and pragmatism associated with it. That's a good read for my end and I definitely recommend it to others as well.
Chad: Now for each of you, to me, climate positive means?
Emma: I guess I can kick things off. My brother just had a baby, so I'm a newly minted aunt. My brother works also for a climate tech startup. He works for a sustainable aviation fuel company. I started a cleantech startup. I think one thing that we've really aligned ourselves in, like just my generation and my friends and the people in my life, is creating a better world for our children. I think that is really much more concrete now that there is a baby in my life that I can tangibly see, okay, he's going to graduate from high school in 2047 or something.
It's just things like that when you think about, what is the world going to look like when these people with the next generation is coming of age and it's our responsibility to make sure it's a livable place and not steal from, take out a loan on future generations for them to pay back at a very high-interest rate. Being climate-positive, I think means to me doing work today that preserves the quality of life and the opportunity for future generations.
Chad: Great answer. Adam, how about you?
Adam: Emma definitely stole mine. I'm also a newly uncle, and so I was thinking along similar veins as you asked this question about future generations. I think maybe I'll augment with a twist, which is taking urgent action and practical action now. Given the state of things, I think that there is a tendency to sometimes think academically about the future and about how we're going to get to a certain place inevitably based upon cost curves and incentives. I think the reality needs to be think about where we are today. Not necessarily academically on paper where we're going to get to, but how are we going to get there, and how do we make sense of things right now? I feel like that's what we're doing as this group is basically given the state of the world today, how do we start decarbonizing now?
Chad: Jacob, to you, climate positive means?
Jacob: I think two things that come to mind is, to paraphrase Google's motto, doing no evil. I think it's minimizing the harm that we have on society and on the climate specifically. Secondly, is taking into account this negative externality that is fuzzy and abstract. Like I was mentioning before when we actually experience natural disasters, it actually becomes a lot realer to us because it actually impacts our everyday life. Yes, it's in our day-to-day, I would say making those slight trade-offs on the margin that are incrementally beneficial for society, but then also in a more macro what underpins all society, how do we restructure those incentives and make sure we're operating in such a way that on an aggregate scale, we are really overhauling society and reducing emissions.
Chad: Thank you all very much. It's been a lot of fun. Best of luck to ESSC and your efforts to develop this new instrument to ensure that the storage we put on the grid is as climate-positive as it can be. Thank you very much.
Emma: Thanks, Chad.
Adam: Thanks, Chad.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com
I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.