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Podcast 088: Greg Wetstone: How does this powerful Washington, DC renewable energy group connect the dots between local energy and the US transmission grid?

Listen in as host Bill Nussey talks with Greg Wetstone, the President and CEO of the Washington DC powerhouse, American Council on Renewable Energy, or as it is popularly known, ACORE. Together, Bill and Greg wade into the mind-boggling labyrinth of state and federal policies that are shaping, or in most cases, impeding our transition to renewable energy. If you want to understand how local energy, nuclear power, and giant transmission lines fit into ACOREs view of our renewable energy future, click play and hear what Bill and Greg have to say. 

Here are some of the highlights from their discussion…

“Our membership at ACORE spans the renewable energy economy, if you will, all sides of the transaction space, which is growing to the tune of $50 to $60 billion a year in investment.”


“What we need is an efficient system that is designed to take power from the really good renewable resource areas, which tend to be in the middle of the country and deliver it to the areas that have the biggest population and therefore the biggest electricity demand, which tend to be closer to the coast. Urban areas like Atlanta need to have access to that supply of inexpensive renewable power.”


“When you buy renewables, you are in essence hedging. You know how much you’re going to pay because it’s all capital costs. There’s no fuel cost. The big financial institutions get involved because it’s a very big investment. But over time, it more than pays for itself because you are not buying fuel.”

You can also listen to this podcast and others in our series on these platforms:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Google Podcasts

ACORE Website

DOE Article on Modernizing the National Grid

Department of Energy Report on Need for Improved Interconnections to the Transmission Grid

DOE Building a Better Grid Initiative

Full Transcript

Bill Nussey:

Well, hello and welcome to everybody in the Freeing Energy universe. Summer is upon us and grids are working extra hard to pump out all the air conditioning. We are going to take a hard look at just how the big grid’s working today with one of the leading voices and experts on how this whole amazing thing called the electric grid works and how we keep it working and how we get it cleaner.

Bill Nussey:

As always, want to start by thanking you for your time, for all of our listeners who share an hour or so with us to learn about the clean energy industry and what we call local energy. Thank you all ahead of time. I hope that you’ll find today’s conversation as exciting as I think it’s going to be.

Bill Nussey:

Our guest today is Greg Wetstone. He is the president and chief executive officer of the American Council on Renewable Energy, or as you’ve probably heard it ACORE. Now, this is a national nonprofit organization that sits squarely at the intersection of business, policy, and finance to accelerate the transition to renewable energy economy.

Bill Nussey:

To give you an idea of the incredible reach that ACORE has, their member companies hold more than $25 trillion of assets in the US. More than 90% of the utility scale, US renewable growth was financed, developed, owned, or contracted for by ACORE’s members. When you talk about clean energy transition, Greg and his team and his members are at the center of it.

Bill Nussey:

Greg’s got a really interesting background and he’s prepared him perfectly for the role that he’s in now. We’re going to talk a lot about it. But just as a quick intro, before he joined ACORE, he oversaw government affairs for as a vice president for Terra-Gen Power, which is a big renewable energy company.

Bill Nussey:

Before that, he was a senior director for government and public affairs at the American Wind Energy Association or WEA, and the director of programs at the National Resources Defense Council, which NRDC. He founded their legislative program. Earlier in that, in his career, Greg was senior council to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He has a JD from Duke University Law School and a BS from Florida state university.

Bill Nussey:

Wow. I am really thrilled and honored to have you with us. Welcome, Greg.

Greg Wetstone:

Thanks so much for having me, Bill. It’s a pleasure.

Bill Nussey:

All right. Well, we like to go a little back in time and get a little personal to open this up and make it a little more fun. I understand that you come from or have associations with a happy world of Decoupage and Mod Podge, which a lot of people don’t know is an Atlanta based company, which is where I, and our producer, Sam Easterby both live.

Bill Nussey:

Your mom was the creator of Mod Podge, which is probably one of the reasons Decoupage has been so popular in recent years, and it’s also one of the happiest brands in the world and it started right here. Tell us about that chapter of your life. Are you still involved with arts and crafts today?

Greg Wetstone:

Well, the truth is this is all my mom. I’m amused and amazed that you brought this up. My mother did invent this craft product. If you’re into crafts, you know what Mod Podge is. My mom is kind of a celebrity. If you’re not, you have no idea what the hell we’re talking about. It’s a product she developed when I was a kid. I helped her assemble Mod Podge kits at her antique store in Buckhead and have many memories of that.

Greg Wetstone:

She sold it to a local department store and she sold it to ultimately to a paint company and got royalties and they developed it. For 30 years she supported herself from that, which was phenomenal. Thanks for mentioning it. She’s passed now for more than a decade. But it’s nice to have her brought into a conversation like this. Thank you.

Bill Nussey:

Yeah. It’s not a lot of chances I get to talk about arts and crafts and changing the future of the energy world. This is a wonderful intersection and I owe it to my partner in crime, Sam Easterby, who’s a phenomenal storyteller and he loves to help us figure out how to open these conversations. He just spent some time on Google, Greg.

Bill Nussey:

He told me about this. I said, this is too coincident, couldn’t be the same person. We poked around and sure enough discovered it was you. That’s a great story. I love that you were in the kitchen table making a Mod Podge. The world thanks you and particularly your mother for that contribution.

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s very nice. I will say in something that’s a little more universal in a way is she was a pioneer as a woman businessman. She had to fight to get her own credit card, really to start this business. For that, I remember her fondly among many other things. But anyway, clean energy.

Bill Nussey:

Seriously. Wait a minute. You started out in biology educationally, and then you basically became a lawyer roaming the halls of congress. Tell us a little bit about how biology turns into a lawyer turns into advocate in the halls of congress. How does that work?

Greg Wetstone:

Clearly, I took a wrong turn somewhere. I was in the marine ecology and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed doing the field work and I got to even spend time at Panama, it was really cool. But I realized I was more about how do we protect these ecosystems than really about studying it and learning the life cycle of various important organisms.

Greg Wetstone:

I went to law school and ultimately into environmental law, which I’m pretty old at the time. That was a new field or even an unheard of field. My uncle who’s a very successful lawyer in Atlanta told me, “That’s not a field.”

Bill Nussey:

Let’s talk about when you served as a council for the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, which sounds a really cool role. You helped play a role in crafting a number of laws like the 1990 Clean Act Amendment. You’re used to these arm wrestling. What I’d imagine these arm wrestling, hard discussions, emotional intellectual graphs, handshakes.

Bill Nussey:

But that was 1990. How is it different today? What’s the job that you do then versus what you do today? What’s changed?

Greg Wetstone:

Well, let me just say back then, I work for a guy named Henry Waxman who was a Los Angeles congressman.

Bill Nussey:

Oh, yeah.

Greg Wetstone:

… subcommittee. You couldn’t have a better teacher. I am very fortunate in who my mentors have been and Henry Waxman certainly leads that list. Then I thought it’s so tough to get this stuff through. But these issues like Clean Air, this was about the Clean Air actors, so popular that all this is going to change and it won’t be so hard in the future. Now, we look back and those were the solid days.

Bill Nussey:

Oh, I was hoping you’d say differently.

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. We got 400 votes in the house for the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments out of 435 members. I mean, both parties were fully engaged and they both said what they needed to have included in order to be comfortable with it. Then we got something done and no one wanted to be against it. Really that changed. The genesis of that change, I’ll put it out there, it was [inaudible 00:09:15].

Greg Wetstone:

Who in 1994 really opposed everything and then ran against the opposition that, the majority, saying they couldn’t get anything done. Of course, sadly, that worked. That’s been a playbook that virtually both sides have adopted ever since. I would argue more one side than the other. But it’s a little bit there for both. Obviously, that’s very destructive to the national interest. It’s really hard to get something done.

Greg Wetstone:

It’s a much more polarized time now and issues that didn’t use to be associated with any kind of partisan interface very much are today and that makes it harder. In the end, it’s much better to the extent that you can make anything you do bipartisan to have both parties engaged, but that’s not always easy to do.

Bill Nussey:

Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we particularly like local energy, the small scale systems, because that tends to be a little less incendiary from a partisan point of view where the big scale stuff, which you and your colleagues so bravely go fight for and so important tends to really trigger the harder discussions from those of us watching from afar. But that’s a great insight.

Bill Nussey:

Let’s talk about how you guys go after changing the grid? Let’s start with the basics. What is ACORE? What do you guys do?

Greg Wetstone:

Sure. Well, ACORE, we’re a membership organization. We have companies that are members that really operate, not just across all the different renewable technologies, wind power, solar power, energy storage, geothermal, hydro power, but also across the renewable energy transactions. By that, I mean not just companies that generate the clean power, but also companies that finance that.

Greg Wetstone:

A lot of the larger financial institutions in the country are very much invested in the renewable energy sector and in the clean energy transition. We have a number of them engaged. There are a lot of large companies who have made a commitment to transition to renewables and they’re buying a lot of renewables and we have a number of them as members. That’s important because if you look at what’s happening in the world, there’s a ton of data moving around, people going online.

Greg Wetstone:

It means there are big data centers. They’re consuming power. The people running those data centers want to power them and mostly are moving toward fully doing that with renewables. Then some of the more progressive electric utilities that are fully vested in renewables are also members. We consider ourselves the renewable energy economy, if you will, all sides of the transaction, which is to the tune of $50 to $60 billion a year in investment.

Greg Wetstone:

We try to use all that in order to have the largest phalanx we can of allies and supporters, as we push for policy changes that we need, because this is an industry that needs to succeed and needs to succeed at a certain pace in order to do what we need to do to meet the climate imperative.

Bill Nussey:

Well, that’s really fascinating to me because I live in Atlanta, but it might as well be a million miles from Washington, DC. I see the window behind you and it looks like that might be the Washington, DC landscape back there. Yeah. You guys are in the White House center of it.

Bill Nussey:

You mentioned earlier that this has become partisan and I’d love to get your insights or what you’ve learned about how do you take a message that has become divisive in some places? How do you get that through so many differing opinions? How do you get a conversation going? How are you succeeding?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. Well, it’s only partisan in some places.

Bill Nussey:

Okay.

Greg Wetstone:

But it’s a reality that there’s a lot of growth across the country in red and blue states. In particular, renewable resources like really good sun in the Southwest and really good wind in the Great Plains. A lot of that’s happening in red states. There’s a lot of renewable development that does occur in red and blue states.

Greg Wetstone:

At the state level, we have bipartisan support. We have a lot of states that have set their own targets, many going to a hundred percent. Twenty-one states in this country have a hundred percent renewable targets. Thirty-one states have targets of one kind or another. A lot of the states are very much on board and it’s really in the political interface when we’re trying to get laws passed that it gets very difficult.

Bill Nussey:

I’m just curious. Can you give me some examples of the company names that are members that I might have heard of just to help me see the breadth of the ACORE’s reach?

Greg Wetstone:

Sure. I mean, we have. First of all, I’ll mention, some big renewable developers, like NextEra and Invenergy and RWE and EDF and EDPR, just a lot of those folks manufacturers, like GE and Vestas and then investors like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and BlackRock. Big pension funds. I mean, there are a lot of the investors.

Greg Wetstone:

In general, investment institutions are … see the value of renewable energy and they’re playing. Then a lot of really big companies that have big power demands who want to use renewable powers, Amazon and Facebook.

Bill Nussey:

They’re members, too.

Greg Wetstone:

They’re members. They’re active. I think almost every company I mentioned is on our board. They’re very active. They’re very engaged. They’re helping us promote these objectives. That makes it a little easier to have a bipartisan reach when you have so much to the American economy. But obviously, getting to the finish line can still be difficult.

Bill Nussey:

I think that’s a great way for me to get a visceral sense of how wide your reach is. It’s actually really impressive. You’re touching … You said it. But that drives home the notion that you’re covering every bit of the industry, top to bottom. I love it. Well, one of the things that I was learning about you guys, or I’d always heard of you and new of you, but I was getting ready for this conversation today is it doubled down on the renewable energy aspect of ACORE and your name.

Bill Nussey:

There’s a lot of debate going on around the difference between clean energy and renewable energy. I’m curious if how you guys look at things that are often called clean energy, like nuclear or fossil fuels with carbon capture and how those fit into your world relative to what I think more traditional renewable energies like geothermal, wind and solar.

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. Our membership is really what we define as the renewable energy economy. That’s going to be the technologies you mentioned, and hydro, and we will also … energy storage, grid enabling technologies, things that make the grid more efficient, undersea cabling for offshore, all that is very much included.

Greg Wetstone:

We do not get into nuclear power or, say, using gas with a mechanism to store the carbon emissions, which hopefully will be coming along someday. I’m a little skeptical, whether it’s really here, but maybe, some say it is.

Bill Nussey:

Would be better if we had it and it worked?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. I mean, where we are is we’re happy to compete with anyone who can produce carbon-free energy. We think that’s what all the energy should be. If it’s more nuclear, great, we’ll compete with nuclear straight up, no issues. I think we’re going to be more cost-effective. I think we can build quicker. In the end, I think we’re going to be more secure.

Greg Wetstone:

But that’s fine. We are not opposed to those other sources of carbon-free electricity. Clearly, we’re going to need it all. It’s a race to get enough done quickly enough.

Bill Nussey:

I appreciate that perspective. I think the cool thing about this industry and is that it’s all towards a mission of getting to a carbon-free grid, carbon-free industry, carbon-free planet, at least in that neutral. I like that perspective. Let’s talk a little bit about one of the big initiatives you guys have, which is the macro grid initiative. What is this program and why is it important to you guys?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. It’s important. I’ll start with that because much of the grid in this country is antiquated. We have a system where different parts of the country have different, what they call balancing areas, which means where they have to have enough power to meet their consumers and borders and it can be within a state or it can be combined for region. But in lots of the country, you have these small grid areas that exist on their own, and they’re not pooled with other areas. They’re not interconnected and it’s highly inefficient. It’s also old.

Greg Wetstone:

We have really inefficient wiring, if you will, that connects where the power comes from to where people live and where it’s consumed. What we need is an efficient system that is designed to take power from the really good renewable resource areas, which tend to be in the middle of the country and deliver it to the areas that have the biggest population and therefore the biggest electricity demand, which tends to be more along the coast and Atlanta being a good example, that your urban areas need to have access to that supply.

Greg Wetstone:

You also make the grid much more reliable if you better interconnected. We need to have efficient connections between renewable resource areas and where the electricity demand is. We don’t really have that now. Our grid has a legacy that was initially to connect the big old hydroelectric projects to electrify areas. That was the ’30s and ’40s.

Greg Wetstone:

Then from the areas that have the big coal resources, sort of in the ’50s and that’s the grid we have. We’re all living on our grandparents’ grid. We need that investment. Anyway, we have problems like they had in Texas, winter storm Uri in February, where it got really cold, the valves froze on the gas pipes and they couldn’t distribute natural gas. There was all kinds of problems really across the board. Some of the wind turbines had like sleet build up.

Greg Wetstone:

I mean, it can be really difficult. Meanwhile, there’s a ton of power at the neighboring grid. But in Texas, that grid it’s called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is not really connected much to the adjacent grids. They couldn’t buy that power. It was terrible. Power was off for a long time. It was really cold. People died and that’s unnecessary. In a developed country like ours, we need to invest in that infrastructure. We need a 21st century grid. That’s what the macro grid initiative is all about.

Speaker 1:

As our guest today describes it. We are living on our grandparents’ grid. More than 70% of the nation’s grid transmission lines and power transformers are over 25 years old with many parts of it well beyond their designed lifetime. Not only do we need to update what we have, we also need to expand our national grid, too.

Speaker 1:

Independent estimates indicate that we need to expand electricity transmission systems by 60% by the year 2030. With the transition to electric home heating, electric stoves, electric-powered industrial processes, and of course, electric vehicles of every type, some experts believe we may need to triple the size of the grid by 2050.

Speaker 1:

But as some of our longtime listeners may ask, given the accelerating growth of local energy, why do we need big national grids at all? In his book, Freeing Energy, author Bill Nussey reminds us big grids remain the best solution for delivering electricity to dense urban cities and many large factories and industrial organizations.

Speaker 1:

He says investing in cross-country transmission power lines, balances out the country’s diverse weather patterns and eases the challenge of intermittent renewables. When launching their macro grid initiative, ACORE noted that the 15 states between the Rockies and the Mississippi River account for 88% of the nation’s win technical potential and 56% of solar technical potential.

Speaker 1:

However, this region is home to only 30% of expected, 2050 electricity demand. Through a transmission macro grid, ACORE and its partners argue that we can connect centers of high renewable resources with centers of high electric demand, enhanced grid resiliency, and dramatically reduce carbon emissions. That makes sense to us at the Freeing Energy Project and the bill funding the effort has passed.

Speaker 1:

What is the issue? Funding the work is just one part of the equation. Clearing away the thick overgrown underbrush of rules and regulations to achieve these goals is the other part of this massive effort. Another large challenge is NIMBY-ism or not in my backyard. As Russell Gold chronicles in his book, Superpower, many communities, even ones that embrace renewable energy, do not want large utility scale wind, solar, and transmission projects build near them.

Speaker 1:

While local energy can reduce the need for large infrastructure projects, it cannot eliminate them. The challenge for building transmission may be even bigger than you think. More than 930 gigawatts of solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and nuclear capacity are currently sitting in interconnection queues, seeking transmission access along with over 420 gigawatts of energy storage.

Speaker 1:

To put this in perspective, in 2021, the US total capacity of all types of power plants, including coal and gas, were just 1,144 gigawatts. Wait times are also on the rise. For four independent system operators, the typical duration from interconnection request to commercial operations for all project types increased from approximately 2.1 years for projects built back in 2000 to 2010 to 3.7 years for those built in 2011 to 2021. That’s according to DOE data.

Speaker 1:

We have the technology. We have the financing. We have support at the federal level. But we don’t yet have the policies in place to accelerate the changes needed. That’s where ACORE and its teams come into play, helping to sort through the challenges and find common ground on the policies and procedures needed.

Speaker 1:

If you want to learn more about ACORE and its programs or about the DOE and its programs for modernizing the grid, we’ve included some helpful links over on the show notes for this episode on freeingenergy.com. Want to hear even more about this topic or learn how you could help, let us hear from you. Don’t forget to like and share this episode of the Freeing Energy podcast. Now let’s get back to Bill and Greg to learn even more.

Bill Nussey:

I’m a big fan of domestic manufacturing to the extent we can get it going again in the United States, because as many people know we started, we were the early manufacturer of solar panels and sales here. I went to research my book. I actually sat down in China with the founder of Jinko and executives of JA and people … members of the Chinese government and tried to understand how it is that they’ve been so successful beyond just the easy answers that they finance it and labor’s cheap and try to get underneath it.

Bill Nussey:

It was fascinating. I talk a lot about that and help inform my thinking on how we can get a jumpstart to the United States, which is, I think, good from most Americans’ point of view. A friend just sent me an article before we started recording this that the largest buyers, presumably ACORE’s members have just committed to buy $6 billion worth of American made panels this morning.

Bill Nussey:

I wish that was coming from the government with some incentives. But boy, if that happens, watching members of ACORE get together to help jumpstart it from a pure business point of view, that’s exciting, gives me some hope. Fingers crossed.

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. That’s great. That’s what we need. We need clarity that the market’s going to be there. I think a lot of the large companies see it. They’re doing the right thing for climate. But they’re also doing the right thing from their bottom line. Because when you buy renewable power, you don’t have the lack of predictability that you have.

Greg Wetstone:

If you’re relying on say natural gas where the price fluctuates according to a global marketplace and where you’re really at the mercy, in some cases of autocrats who … They do not have our best interest at heart. We see that with what Russia is doing with natural gas supplies to Europe, and that impacts demand for us and global prices on gas.

Greg Wetstone:

When you buy renewables, you are in essence hedging. You know how much you’re going to pay because it’s all capital costs. There’s no fuel cost. That’s why the big financial institutions get involved, because it’s very big investment. You need to get going. But over time, it more than pays for itself because you are not buying fuel.

Bill Nussey:

Yeah. We have a big saying in the Freeing Energy world, which is solar and batteries or technology is not fuels. This is a fundamental economic difference that even people with decades in industry don’t often see it immediately. But I tell people that solar and battery systems are more like your iPhone. They have more in common with your iPhone than they do with anything traditionally in the power industry.

Bill Nussey:

It’s exciting to see all the dynamics going on. Talking about that, let’s transition just briefly into local energy. That’s the term we use to describe small scale systems, rooftop solar, community solar. But basically the idea is where the generation is owned and located near the people that are using it. I know this isn’t your primary mission, but I would love to get your perspective on how that fits into the overall goals that you guys are building at ACORE.

Greg Wetstone:

Well, we need it all. I mean, it’s critical. There are parts of the country where you can really make that work. You can put your solar on your roof and buy a battery. You got to have resources. Not everyone can do that. You got to have space. That’s fine in big parts of the country. But in the most populated areas where you have the most electricity demand, unfortunately, you’re not going to get there.

Greg Wetstone:

I mean, if you have a 70-story building in New York City, where you’re going to put all that solar? In concentrated metropolitan areas, it’s just very hard to get where we need. Not to mention the additional power that we know we’re going to need. I mean, the model is that we electrify everything and then we make all the electricity with no carbon.

Greg Wetstone:

Everybody’s got an electric car. You got electric heat, as well as your AC, you’re cooking with electricity. That means you’re going to have substantial demand and we need a grid that’s able to support that. Part of being able to get there is having as much going on locally as we can, because that will moderate the demands on that grid, but we still need that grid.

Greg Wetstone:

As we discussed earlier, it’s got to be one that uses technology that’s available today that can really efficiently move those electrons, store them, and make them available when we need them, and also generate that clean power through wind or solar, marine hydrokinetics, or whatever’s available, geothermal.

Bill Nussey:

This has been a fascinating perspective on how you push forward a clean energy agenda, a renewable energy agenda, and some of the most difficult places, but the most important places to change opinions and open minds, it’s been really interesting and how local energy fits into that from your perspective, which I think is very important to know.

Bill Nussey:

As we wrap it up, as we do with all of our esteemed guests, we like to ask you four lightning round questions. You are not graded on this. But just know that succinctness and humor and blinding brilliance are really the high watermarks you’re up against. Are you ready?

Greg Wetstone:

That makes sense. That’s a pretty high bar. But I will be succinct. Let me just say that. That’s where I’m going to go.

Bill Nussey:

Well, that would put you in the top quartile of my esteem guests. There’s very few of us that have the quality of succinctness, and I am not among them. What excites you most about being in the clean energy business?

Greg Wetstone:

Change. I mean, it’s happening. We’re growing, hand over fist. It’s question, “Can we get enough done quickly enough?” There’s really key policies in play that we’re engaged in. If we can get those over the finish line, that’ll be plenty of excitement.

Bill Nussey:

All right. Second one. I’m actually quite interested and you’re allowed to go along on this one. If you could wave a magic wand and change just one thing, what would it be?

Greg Wetstone:

Democracy? We have the support and we know what the policies are. If we had a democracy that better reflected what people want, we’d get the policies we need to get this done. I really believe that.

Bill Nussey:

Greg, that is fantastic. Democracy, single answer. I love it because it is … I mean, the data that I’m seeing, I’m sure you live with, it’s most Americans want this stuff, right?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. Actually, we’re able to reduce. The amazing thing is we have modeling that shows that all this big investment, the grid we’re talking about pays for itself and then some, because you’re accessing cheaper power. Even though for everybody’s prices are going up, but they’re not going up as fast as the price of fossil fuels, which are the alternatives and we give you security because you don’t have other countries controlling supply. We’re creating jobs. I mean it all can and should work.

Bill Nussey:

Democracy. I love it. Question number three. What do you think will be the single most important change in how we generate store and distribute electricity in the next five years?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. I know you asked for one, I’m going to give you two. Energy storage is just increased. It’s going to be growing hand over fist. Particularly, if we get these policies that provide incentives as they should for freestanding energy storage, we’re going to be able to have a grid that is much more reliant on renewables and much more reliable and resilient. Energy storage is huge.

Greg Wetstone:

The other one I mentioned just because it’s exciting and people get really amped about it. We’re going to see a lot more offshore wind in the United States and that’s going to be cool.

Bill Nussey:

Awesome. Final question, what do you say to folks who are not in the industry when they ask you, what can I do to help make the transition to renewable energy happen faster?

Greg Wetstone:

Yeah. To that I would say rely on clean energy to the extent you can. Sometimes you have options. You can opt to have your power come from renewable sources. Sometimes they charge more for that. That’s irritating, because it’s often cheaper, but that’s the world we’re living in right now. We hope to change that. Then urge companies you rely on to rely on renewable power.

Greg Wetstone:

Private companies making a huge difference here by creating a big market. Virtually half of the renewable power sold last year in this country was sold to private companies so that we want to encourage that trend and be engaged politically, because we’re making some really key decisions that are going to have a big impact on the climate that our kids live with.

Greg Wetstone:

That’s the other thing is make sure that your elected representatives know and understand how important these issues are to you.

Bill Nussey:

Well, there you go. Greg, I really, really appreciate your time. You are an incredibly busy guy. Can’t imagine all the work you folks have in front of you. It’s absolutely critical that you succeed and we are all cheering you on in the biggest way.

Greg Wetstone:

Well, thanks a lot, Bill. This was really fun. I appreciate the interest and engagement from you. I’ll look forward to next time and all my best to all my friends in Atlanta.

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