Jon Powers (00:02):

Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. I’m the co-founder of Clean Capital and serves as President Obama’s chief sustainability officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, John Powers. Today we have a fascinating conversation with Alison Clements, who’s the former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Allison’s perspective on the electricity affordability crisis is fascinating and some of the challenges she wrestled with at the federal level, as well as what’s happening at the state level, and how we can find ways to address affordability as it’s becoming a major issue. At the end of March, there was a front page article on Fox News around electricity, affordability in the midterms. This is on top of everyone’s mind.

(01:01):

There’s going to be solutions proposed, and how do we get in the front end of those conversations to propose solutions that work for our industry? I hope you enjoy the conversation, and as always, you can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. Allison, thanks for joining us at Experts Only. It’s

Allison Clements (01:14):

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, John.

Jon Powers (01:16):

It’s a really interesting time for the issues that we care about in the energy space, and you’re at the forefront of a lot of the conversations, but before getting into that conversation, I’m going to look back at your background and how you even ended up in this space. As we said earlier, you were born in Canada, you ended up moving to Ohio. What first triggered your interests? You were a lawyer, right? By training?

Allison Clements (01:37):

I’m a lawyer. That’s right.

Jon Powers (01:39):

Was it law first, energy second? Was it a blend?

Allison Clements (01:43):

We moved to Ohio because my dad was a GM guy, and he was at GM plants at manufacturing facilities in Ontario, and then we moved to the states. And I always thought, “What’s it going to do when everybody has a car? When there’s enough cars.” And so I just always had this mindset related to, I think, environmental issues. And so I think it was environmental issues first in college. And then I had wanted to go to law school. And my first summer of law school, I was at a firm and I was representing utilities on federal regulatory law, which is the rules for the energy grid effectively. And it just clicked for me. I was like, wow, this is a language. It’s a bunch of technical, wonky words that sound like English, but I’m not sure what they mean. But if I can figure it out, the energy system is the basis for the whole US economy.

(02:32):

So isn’t that kind of a thrilling thing to understand? And that got me hooked and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Jon Powers (02:37):

Yeah. Now more than ever, is that important? So you end up going to private practice. Were you living in New York doing

Allison Clements (02:44):

That? I did it both DC and New York. I went to GW Law School, so I was in DC, started with a firm there, and I was an impatient young whippersnapper who wanted to do renewable energy. And at the time, there wasn’t a lot of work on the federal regulatory side to do

Jon Powers (03:00):

Renewables

Allison Clements (03:01):

As opposed to say energy involving thermal gas plants. And

Jon Powers (03:06):

What time would you- This

Allison Clements (03:07):

Was 2003, 2004, 2005. And so the place where you could get your hands on some renewable action was at the project finance firms where they were actually financing early solar and wind in the new version in the post California only version. And so I went and joined Chadbourn & Park, which is a great transactional law firm, which is now called Norton Rose Fulbright. And I hated contracts. I thought they were terrible. I thought, I don’t care if this is for renewables or for lumps of coal or whatever, I can’t do it. So I did that for just about two years to justify that I hadn’t made a mistake. And then I jumped off that train and went to a nonprofit in New York where I spent the next 10 years.

Jon Powers (03:52):

Amazing. Actually, almost everyone in our executive team, except for two of us, are attorneys, and it came from the project finance side. So I feel the same way you do, but they have. And some have Chadbourn experience, by the way. My co-founder, Tom Byrne, is alumni there. It’s a

Allison Clements (04:08):

Great firm.

Jon Powers (04:09):

Yeah. So as you worked in the nonprofit space, what were you focused on?

Allison Clements (04:14):

So I joined the Natural Resources Defense Council, and because of that short period of time or I had been doing transactional work, they hired me as their corporate counsel. So I was doing basically institutional risk management for a large, quickly growing nonprofit filled with lawyers. So when you have a bunch of lawyers, as you know, on your board, they don’t necessarily think they need a bunch more legal risk management influence, but all organizations do. And so I spent three years thinking about that and helping support the program advocacy. And then a few years in, a role opened up, which kind of brought me back to my roots, and that was leading national environmental nonprofits on clean energy advocacy at what’s called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is the federal agency that’s responsible for the rules of the grid.

Jon Powers (05:04):

Right. Interesting. And so when you were working, again, what timeline is this?

Allison Clements (05:12):

So this is, let’s say six to 2015.

Jon Powers (05:20):

Right. So a lot changing of that time, right? You’ve got the American Recovery Act coming in, you’ve got obviously projects coming online for the first time, a lot of investment in grid. What did you learn over that period of time that helped you later on when you ended up at FERC?

Allison Clements (05:36):

So it’s interesting, if you care about the source of where your electricity comes from, which most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about,

(05:46):

You have to care about the rules of the grid. But FERC, the commission is not an environmental regulator, it’s an economic regulator. The Federal Power Act, which is the law that FERC is there to implement, is a consumer protection statute by its nature. And so you learn very quickly that if you want to influence policy on energy policy, on electricity policy, you can’t make environmental arguments. They don’t work. They don’t fit. You have to think about what way do we need to make sure that the rules are fair for all types of resources? And so when I first started doing this, towards in that period of time, you couldn’t argue that renewables were the cheapest because they weren’t the cheapest, right? When it came to the cost of producing electricity, you could only argue that it wasn’t fair that the rules didn’t let them try to compete.

(06:40):

And so we were limited to those types of perspectives. And fast forward another 10 years and wow, you’re looking at the level of cost of energy across resources. And even without subsidies, which is where we’re headed on the large utility scale, solar wind fronts at least, you still need them as part of your diverse affordable portfolio.

Jon Powers (07:04):

Yeah. I’m going to come back because that’s an incredibly important part of this conversation. For doing that though, obviously I can’t miss the fact that you ended up as a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory. Can you just talk for a second about what that experience even leading up to that Senate confirmation looked like? And was that something you had really wanted to do or was this something you recruited to do? My

Allison Clements (07:24):

Gosh, do you serve beers on this podcast?

Jon Powers (07:26):

Yeah, I should. It’s

Allison Clements (07:27):

Quite a story. Honestly, when I chose to go work at Natural Resources Defense Council, I thought that I was opening some cool doors, but that I was closing others. It never crossed my mind that I could have a clean energy advocacy background and still be able to be considered for the role that I ultimately was. And so I didn’t make the decisions hoping that that would be the case, but the world changed. And I think the reality is, and we can talk about what the experience was like in a second, the reality is people with a lot of expertise about how you make the grid run more efficiently and more affordably are invaluable today. All of our colleagues and friends have so much work to do because we understand how you can actually fix the system that it became a possibility. And so this is a commission of five members and there can only be three members from the President’s Party.

(08:22):

So this was during the first Trump administration. They needed more people and they had to be Democratic appointees. So Senator Schumer was responsible for picking that person. There was lots of reasons, but there wasn’t a huge pool of folks around the country who knew the

Jon Powers (08:39):

Wonky

Allison Clements (08:39):

Part of federal energy policy in the way that I did. And so Senator Schumer recommended me to the Trump White House, and then it was a wild ride of 22 months before they finally said, “Fine, she can be a commissioner.” And so February 2019 to December 2020, I waited and then I was ultimately confirmed along with a Republican appointee, Mark Christie.

Jon Powers (09:03):

Yeah. And then all of a sudden we had a swing in presidential who was in the White House not long after that, right? Yeah,

Allison Clements (09:09):

That’s right. And I mean, then Trump left, Biden came in and this might be rose colored glasses. And our commission, it was a really partisan time and it’s gotten better actually since we left, but- The

Jon Powers (09:21):

Commission was partisan or-

Allison Clements (09:23):

The commission was partisan. The world’s matters.

(09:25):

The commission was catching up with the rest of the world. Because energy is so important, it’s hard to insulate the politics of the world from the federal commission, which at that time was understood to be independent. And so I really believe that once you got in, you were there to solve problems. You were there to be a regulator and all aspects, reliability, affordability, fairness, competition, all the things. But I think the kind of surrounding political noise made it a tough environment throughout the time. But I think we were still able to accomplish a lot. We moved forward, but we certainly learned … I certainly learned that it takes a minute to get things done in the slow moving regulatory process.

Jon Powers (10:10):

So when I was at the White House, I did a lot of work along with FERC, but actually had a couple of HEC employees who came over and worked on my team. For folks that don’t understand how the White House is not all staffed, a lot of folks come from different agencies and we were able to get folks from FERC who would come over and spend six months with us as we were working on what was happening at a national level. So going back to your comment about there was a lot of challenges at FERC, not politically, there was also a tremendous amount going on obviously around the issues we care about as the energy transition was well underway. I think in that first … I like to refer to the 2010 to 2020 as the laying the foundation of the scale up of the renewable space, and now that momentum is continuing.

(10:54):

Obviously the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill helped accelerate some of that. And of course, the legislation passed last summer, the big, beautiful bill pulled some of those things back. But regardless, the demand for electrons is booming. The demand for clean electrons is booming. How did you, at the commission, you sort of wrestle with those challenges?

Allison Clements (11:24):

It’s interesting. The challenges that the grid has been facing haven’t changed in the last decade. They’ve been exacerbated by an order of magnitude because we’ve had this rush of new demand of new data centers and other manufacturing facilities and just general electrification in the world. Think of how many things you plug in every day. Absolutely. All of that has been coming. It’s just been coming really slowly. We’ve been looking at this movie into the future, and now here we are, we’re in it. And so we were trying to do big things at the commission, fix grid planning at a federal level, make it easy to interconnect new resources to the grid at a federal level, make market rules fair and represent the actual resource mix that can provide services today. In 2005 or 10, when the market rules in the grid regions around the country were getting developed, there weren’t batteries on homes with solar panels and there weren’t smart thermostats.

(12:29):

And all of these things that today, they actually can make a difference. You just weren’t having to think about rules that allowed them to try. And so that’s the difference. And here we are today, and it’s happening right now, and we need every kind of resource on the table to try and meet this new demands of our US economy.

(12:48):

And I find that an opportunity as much as this challenge because, okay, put down your political stripes, just put every resource that works on the table, it’s cost and it’s operating characteristics next to it, and then let’s make the mix that happens the most quickly, that moves to the fastest, that maintains affordability and reliability while facilitating all of this new demand.

Jon Powers (13:08):

Yeah. Not only was the mix not right in 2005, the technology wasn’t there to start doing some of that stuff and it’s happening today. So I want to get into affordability, but so people understand the limitations of FERC. So you can talk about interconnects at a federal level. A lot of that still has to happen at the state level though, right? How does that interplay work between FERC and some of the state commissions?

Allison Clements (13:33):

Yeah. The drafters of the Federal Power Act wanted us as federal and state policymakers to just have lots to do and lots to think about over time. The laws for electricity are set up as a partnership between the states and the federal government. And the easiest way to think about it is that the federal government has jurisdiction over the big wires you see when you’re driving down the highway and the big, big power plants, and then the states have jurisdiction over the wires at poles and wires in your neighborhood that come and serve you in your home or your apartment building. And there’s just a ton of overlap. And as technology has come on board to create all of this opportunity in what has been a really slow, moving, heavily regulated, small C conservative industry, you’re kind of seeing a lot of clashes between who’s responsible for what.

(14:24):

So if this thing has traditionally been part of the state’s role, but now it makes sense for it to be part of the federal government’s role or vice versa, we’re kind of in the growing pains moment of how policy plays out. There’s a whole bunch

Jon Powers (14:36):

Of

Allison Clements (14:36):

Opportunity at the state level and states can move more quickly oftentimes in the federal government.

Jon Powers (14:42):

Yeah. And policy obviously ties very closely to finance. So the more we can create repeatability with some of these strategies, the better the financing we’re going to be able to get on these projects and candidly, the cheaper power we can get from folks on the backend. So if you look back at your time at FERC, is there anything you’re incredibly proud of having achieved?

Allison Clements (15:08):

Making it through my term. Give yourself a victory list. Yeah. No, I’m proud of lots of stuff we did. We put out a lot of good work. I think the thing that I’m most proud of is we put out a big role in transmission grid planning on regional planning, which is to say, “Hey, you and your neighboring utilities should all get together and you should look 20 years forward and try and anticipate some of these massive shifts and changes in prices and changing technology mix and then optimize around that. ” So that was good, but the piece to me is that on the interconnection front, so if you’re a gas plant or you are a storage battery facility or you’re a solar plant, solar farm and you want to hook up to the grid, you can’t just plug in. You have to go through this application process.

(15:56):

And what happened over the 2000s is the number of resources wanting to plug in exploded.

Jon Powers (16:02):

And

Allison Clements (16:03):

Again, the system was outdated and not designed for all of those plugins. And so we created a new rule called Order 2023, and it kind of raised the baseline across the country for all utilities and said, “Here’s best practices that you’re going to have to implement to try and get through this log jam of thousands and thousands and thousands of megawatts of resources that want to hook up to the grid.” Now we only took a first step. There’s still a lot more to do, but I wrote a concurrence with my team in that docket that to me still is very relevant that shows the roadmap. Here’s where we need to go on this issue. And I think it’s still relevant today as we consider next steps on that front.

Jon Powers (16:43):

Yeah. As someone who’s trying to plug in projects on a regular basis, it’s incredibly relevant in getting this sped up. So I think as we looked at some of those challenges, you were there 2000 to 2024, right?

Allison Clements (16:56):

Yeah, 2020, 2024.

Jon Powers (16:58):

Yep. Yeah. We just began the emergence of, even if the utilities had been planning 20 years ago and looking out even five years ago, I don’t think anyone would’ve anticipated the growth of demand of AI and data centers. And so as obviously we’re seeing this debate happen at a political level now locally where you have areas that are bringing data centers in, they are competing against, in some case, residential customers for power, driving up costs across the country. But there’s a whole plethora of things that are affecting affordability right now. If you could just for a second, dissect where we are on affordability, what do you think some of the root causes of what’s driving this into people’s pocketbooks?

Allison Clements (17:40):

Yeah, and here’s where the conversation gets interesting. So as I said earlier, the grid is old. A lot of the poles and wires are 50 plus, 80 years old, which is kind of wild to think they’re responsible for maintaining reliability on the system. And it’s hard to change when you are a grid operator responsible for ensuring that the lights come on tomorrow, introducing new technologies into your system is pretty intimidating because if things go wrong, you get called up, you get that your boss gets called up and somebody’s suddenly sitting in front of Congress.

(18:14):

So it’s very slow moving and there’s all this technology available now that simply hasn’t been incorporated into the system. So we run the system very efficiently, inefficiently, excuse me. It’s very old. So we needed to update it well before data centers came on the scene. The resource mix has changed a ton and that changes the way you need to operate your grid and extreme weather is colder and longer or hotter and longer or windier than it has been. So all of those things create this kind of inflection point and need to invest in the grid. And when you think about grid affordability, the premise, the starting point for all of it is that it’s not the government general treasury that pays for new investment on the grid. It’s ultimately regular people like me and you via our utility bills every month. And so if you want to make a big investment in an area to support reliability, to support economic development, buy a new data center, anything in some way, shape or form, not directly, that those costs are going to trickle down to businesses and families.

(19:21):

And so each time there’s a smart investment to be made, you got to think about, well, is it really smart and who benefits and who should pay for it? And so those things have been brewing for a long time. So income, the data centers, and I don’t think they’re the hero or the enemy, although

Jon Powers (19:38):

Politically

Allison Clements (19:38):

They’ve become both. And you just speed up the need for the solutions to all of the challenges I just described because we’ve left a time where electricity demand hasn’t really increased appreciably,

Jon Powers (19:52):

But

Allison Clements (19:53):

All of a sudden the train has left the station, it’s going very fast and there’s this real need to create more efficient use of the existing system, as well as to add new power and expand the grid.

Jon Powers (20:06):

Yeah. And so take yourself out of FERC for a second and getting to the state level PUCs. Many of them candidly aren’t resourced to strategically think out the way that we need to solve this. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you … I know you’ve worked with some of the governors that are in New Jersey and Virginia and others that are helping to put solutions forward. What kind of playbook would you give a governor to start to address some of this so we can start planning further enough ahead that we can bring the efficiencies we need across the market?

Allison Clements (20:40):

Yeah. And I think this is where there’s pretty exciting opportunity and you have to think about it in a timeline. Electricity system is heavy infrastructure. I mean, your company and others show that you can do it in other … You use software, hardware, and smaller resources to jump, leapfrog the process, but generally there’s things move slowly and it takes a long time to build things.

Jon Powers (21:03):

Totally. And

Allison Clements (21:04):

People don’t like new infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if it’s what kind of infrastructure it is. People in the neighborhood over next to it, they don’t want to solar pharma, wind, pharma, gas plant, a data center, any of it, or a transmission line. Or an

Jon Powers (21:17):

Amazon warehouse.

Allison Clements (21:18):

Or an Amazon warehouse. Exactly. So you got to think about, as I was helping the New Jersey transition effort, as well as thinking this through where the opportunity is for other states, I think of it in a timeline. What can you do really fast and really cheaply relative?

Jon Powers (21:33):

And

Allison Clements (21:33):

So those are the things that don’t involve the heavy infrastructure build. Those are the things that require using advanced transmission technologies to get more juice out of our existing system, using AI enabled software to sort through the complexity of the data. There’s so much data in the models around our grid that could again contribute to using our system more efficiently. And then you say, what are the power resources that can come on most quickly, let’s say the next two years? Because if you initiate policies, you don’t just win when the policy gets passed. That’s the starting line for any

Jon Powers (22:08):

Policy.

Allison Clements (22:09):

You have to then go implement it, and it takes months, if not years, for those savings to trickle down to the customer bills. So you have to start with the really fast things, and that is largely technology. And then you go to distributed energy resources and batteries, community batteries, individual residential and business batteries, commercial batteries, rooftop solar, balcony solar, smart thermostats and smart appliances, and the electric vehicles and the opportunities to contribute some of that to the grid. All of this stuff is relatively, that’s key, cheaper and faster than building a new gas plant or a lot of other things. And so while you’re thinking about down the line, we’re going to need large new 365K or 765 KV lines, excuse me, to transport power across regions at the big national level. We got to do these near term quick things right now while we’re figuring that other stuff out.

Jon Powers (23:09):

Yeah, absolutely. So I’m going to go from policy to politics for a second. And actually affordability this year is a top tier issue. As we were talking offline, I’m part of the environmental defense fund and we saw recent polling that electricity prices were number two on people’s target. I would probably think that’d be a little bit different now that the war in Iran has kicked off, but still energy prices are going to be a top tier issue this cycle. And to get the policies we need forwarded, we need smart politics and advocacy. And I’d say the industry groups, for instance, aren’t prepared to be in an offensive position to put good solutions forward for a new governor or PUC or whoever’s coming or even the legislative body. What advice would you give out to … I say the industry as a whole, it’s a broad audience, but really the folks working in industry and advocacy right now to be prepared so that when elections are over in November, we’re able to have policies that aren’t just about defending every type of incentive we have to build our projects, but really forward leaning in terms of driving efficiency across the

Allison Clements (24:21):

Market. Yeah. I mean, one thing I know politically is that I should not put myself in the position of commenting on whether or not industry is ready to get proactive. And certainly the war is impacting energy prices, obviously more directly at the pump, but certainly indirectly as natural gas is an international commodity, and when you have disruption in the world, you have upward pressure on cost. And again, that ultimately trickles through somewhere to customer bills. I think the time to start working is now. Each state is its own special flower,

Jon Powers (24:59):

And

Allison Clements (25:00):

There’s no one answer. And so the HCs you mentioned are these mini state firks. Each state has their own body that regulates the grid rules. And the situation in each state is all a product of its own geography, technology choice, policy choices, circumstances, personalities, and politics. And so you can’t just cookie cutter and land down the same solution for each state, but there’s a set of principles certainly and a menu of policy options that are near term, quick and cheaper, medium term, and then the harder, longer term stuff that all have to be running on parallel tracks. And if you take those kind of sets of principles, you bring them down to each state, you can then stir in the pot of all the things I said, the politics, the technology, geography and the opportunity and the state kind of economic priorities, and you can come up with a plan.

(26:01):

But now is the time to start for elections happening in November. I mean, yesterday was probably the time to start.

Jon Powers (26:07):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thinking about those core principles for a second, is there anyone in the nonprofit landscape, for instance, that you’re seeing really spell out those principles in a clear way? And I think I ask that because there’s the think tank side of the world, which is able to really think through this and lay principles, and then there’s the advocacy side of the world, which has to take those principles to try to get them implemented. Putting advocacy aside, is there anyone in the thought leadership level that’s laying out those principles clearly? And then for me, it’s how do you take that then and create a center of excellence that starts pushing those ideas out to the different states?

Allison Clements (26:44):

Sure. I mean, there’s a ton of us. There are so many people who have good perspectives to bring to the table on how you can start bringing down costs on electricity bills. And I think you got to bring the combination of people from those think tanks who have really, really deep expertise with boots on the ground, the people who understand the legislative process, who understand the power players across the house, the state legislatures and the agencies and the key companies, et cetera. And it’s the mixture of the two that’s going to get you there. But I’m not going to … I don’t want to call it any in particular as there’s just so many, but I appreciate

Jon Powers (27:32):

The

Allison Clements (27:33):

Point that-

Jon Powers (27:34):

Well, let me ask it a different way. So if I was an advocacy group, I want to be able to take some of these leaders and bring them … I see you do a lot on LinkedIn, which I really appreciate, thought leadership, and I see others that I know and respect in the industry. But then how do we capture those voices on a more public level to make sure that in Albany, or obviously you were very involved with the governor’s race in New Jersey or Virginia so that those state advocates know how to pull in that brain power to advocate for the thing. You do such a great job explaining this situation. And I say this knowing I spent a lot of time in DC last year because I understand finance, not that well, but better than most policymakers. So I spent a ton of time explaining how a tax credit worked to folks around the bill and that type of communication is so critical at this moment to make sure we end up with the right solutions.

Allison Clements (28:29):

Absolutely. I spend a lot of my time now, both investor facing as equity facing largely, as well as data center development facing, just

Jon Powers (28:39):

Translating.

Allison Clements (28:40):

I mean, I think translation breaks down a lot of barriers, but I’m here for it. Let’s go. Let’s get the right formula to get it from the states. I have a lot of faith in both the policy developers as well as policy advocates. And I think the thing though is that affordability is not a non-political issue. I mean, it’s hyperpolitical, but the people who care about it, it’s not a partisan issue.

Jon Powers (29:11):

Totally.

Allison Clements (29:11):

Everybody cares about affordability. And so I don’t want to pretend that the only right people to talk about this are think tanks and NGOs. Absolutely. Across the spectrum of folks, people … That’s what I think is great about this moment, is that people are willing to sit down and roll up their sleeves and looking for the help, and hopefully that’s where the opportunity to make progress lies.

Jon Powers (29:34):

Yeah. Speaking of rolling camera sleeves, you’re doing it. And so talk for a second as much as you’re willing to, what you’re currently doing and where you see this fitting in the next couple of years.

Allison Clements (29:45):

Sure. So I like to solve problems, and I think our affordability needs are a problem to be solved.

(29:52):

I look at the data center industry and I think of a kid’s book, you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you got to go through it. And so trying to figure out how to facilitate good data center development, at least from the power perspective, feels really important to me. And that’s what I spend, I don’t know, half my time doing through an advisory firm in which I’m a partner called ASG. That’s at the transactional level, player by player, developer by developer. And then the rest of my time I spend as my own policy advisory on 804 advisory, and that is kind of this strategic policy question. And it’s solving this problem that we’re talking about. It’s how do we cut through all the noise? There is so much news around data center development every day it’s dizzying, right? It’s really hard for you and I as people who’ve been at this for a long time to keep up with the flow of information and then to translate it into real life.

(30:45):

And the piece where I think I’m trying to make progress is an understanding of the financial community that the energy regulatory community works at a pace that is the tortoise to the hair. There’s such a lack of understanding on both parts by very sophisticated people to think they can finance their way through the regulatory process or to think that if they have the best technology, then why can’t we get it online tomorrow? And so I think that’s a piece of the problem that we all have to work on as well.

Jon Powers (31:20):

Yeah. I mean, we face this every day right now as an IPP and we’re constantly talking to our sister companies around how to educate folks right now, how to think not just … For a long time on the solar side, policy is driven by developers. So it’s very quick returning capital versus what’s the long-term infrastructure play. And our hope is in this transactional time, we can start to get some of that long-term positioning in place so that we’re not retroactively changing things like revenue because we represent life insurance capital money. They don’t want that type of risk. The more we enter that risk into the market, the higher the cost of power come on the backside of these projects going to be for everyone. It doesn’t help the affordability crisis. So stepping just forward for a second, if you had a magic wand and you got things implementing the way you want over the next … I use 2030 often as a flagpost.

(32:13):

What does the world look like now that data centers have really picked up? We are working on solving the affordability crisis. What are some of the big changes that you’d love to see happen to lead us to a place that we have efficiency then?

Allison Clements (32:27):

Yeah, I guess it’s like the big end, well, the small and the big. On the small, in 2030, I’d like to see a world where the market rules and utility mechanisms allow for small stuff, community power, solar, batteries, homes, all of the things to be harnessed in a real way. I mean, we’ve talked about this for decade, two decades at least, and this is the actual chance to recognize that demand doesn’t have to be static, that electricity demand can be smart and can be monetized. And so to me, that’s the little thing. And then the big thing that we have our act together related to transmission system planning at the national level.

Jon Powers (33:10):

Yeah. Interesting. Well, I could talk to you for hours and I would love to continue this down the road, but I always … And on sort of a final question, if you can go back to yourself coming out of finishing up GW when you could sit down and have a beer, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Allison Clements (33:29):

I think I would tell myself that your first decision isn’t … Your early career decisions are not your final career decisions. And so don’t sweat that decision so much. And then once you’re in whatever version of the choice you make, be in that, enjoy it, learn as much as you can, and don’t worry that you didn’t make another choice. I mean, if I look back at my career, I kind of marvel that it went this way and this way, and then it came back to where it started. And that’s great, but you can’t plot that out on a GAN chart. So yeah, don’t sweat the initial decisions because it’s going to change anyway.

Jon Powers (34:09):

Yeah. Listen, I was an elementary education major.

Allison Clements (34:12):

Wow,

Jon Powers (34:12):

No

Allison Clements (34:12):

Kidding.

Jon Powers (34:15):

It’s been quite all right. I’m not sure I could be in front of a classroom again and succeed, but that’s a different story. Allison, thank you so much for being on Experts Only and your leadership for so many different things, and look forward to really working closely with you to drive some of these changes.

Allison Clements (34:29):

That sounds great. I appreciate being here. Thanks.

Jon Powers (34:31):

Absolutely. And as always, we just wanted to thank Colleen Young, our producer for helping to put this on. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. Hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thanks.